Geek-prenuers: got salesmanship?

OK, so you wanna be an entreprenuer. Cool. Can you sell? Your answer better be “Yes!” or “I’m gonna!”.

Simple truth: if you can’t sell, you won’t succeed. Plain and simple. Now, this really strikes most geeks really bad because any good engineer knows that sales is really the art of getting paid to spew bullshit, right? There’s nothing a geek quite hates as much as marketing people or sales people.

But at the end of the day, you, Mr/s Geek-prenuer, are going to have to sell. You’ll need to sell yourself, your product, your idea, and hopefully, finally, your company.

If you’re having a hard time swallowing that you’re going to need to be one of those bullshitters, let me give you something to think about: True salesmanship is an engineering exercise whereby the salesperson’s job is to fully understand the customer’s need and then engineer a solution using products and services supplied by the company. Once you understand that the very best sales are done as a full-on engineering exercise, it all becomes quite easy to do. But you’ll still have to shower.

Here’s a Forbes article, “Sales Lessons For Tongue-Tied Techies” that’s good food for thought.