Great at serving your clients but maybe not so great at sales and marketing?

The Sales for Nerds Podcast brings you interviews with sales and marketing experts– including technical people who have figured out how to hack sales and marketing, so you can avoid the mistakes I made. 😉

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The back story:

I started out writing C++ code. No sales or marketing skills, and no desire to learn them. I considered that dirty, “used car salesman” stuff. (In some cases, it was.) When I started visiting customers, I realized the interesting, difficult problems involved helping people, and that the code, while important, and seemingly complex, was the simplest, easiest part of the puzzle.

So when I started my consulting company, I wanted to help with strategy, process, and technology. However, I still knew nothing about sales and marketing. (Excusable in some cases, but bad if you’re consulting with companies about sales and marketing.) Ironically, we could deliver great results for customers, and got great word-of-mouth, but I needed people to want to buy, and instruct me on how to sell them. It was painful. I made a lot of mistakes. I missed opportunities. And I slowly learned.

Talking to customers of my current business, I realized that this expertise, these hard-won lessons are valuable. I also realized I didn’t have all the answers, and how awesome would it be to help other people learn them the easy way, instead of with the struggles I had?

What if I could talk to people who had better expertise than me, and share that with whoever needed it?

But how could I get these busy people to devote their limited time? I thought, “what if I bring them a bottle of wine?” We can share the wine and do the interview, and everyone will have a great time.

When I emailed Jason Cohen, who is definitely a busy guy, but someone who has made the transition from C++ coder to serial entrepreneur, I tried to flatter him and talk about why I used his current company (WPEngine), and I mentioned the wine. He wrote back a few minutes later:

You had me at “wine”.

Who says business shouldn’t be fun? Enjoy…

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