From Programmer to Chief Business Officer at Ability Team
We all dream of making a difference in the world, solving relevant problems and, in a way, adding value in the lives of those around us, and I’m certainly no exception to this rule
Yeah, that’s me, Paulo Enoque Safrão, a 26-years-old Mozambican youth with a degree in computer engineering and telecommunications. My passion for developing applications started when I was still in college, when I realized how much it could impact people’s life with just a few lines of code (sometimes a lot of them hahaha), I remember trying to develop applications for everything i encountered, I made several applications and participated in several hackathons (and won some).
One day, my best friend and I had an idea, he said to me, “Paulo, why don’t we create a project management and application development company?”, That was the best invitation I received, I accepted without hesitation and our adventure has begun. Since that day we started to recruit the best human resources we could for our adventure, and we thought about the name of our company, we would call it the Ability Team.
At that time, I still played the role of a programmer, we developed several applications and several social impact projects, but a sad reality appeared to us, there is no point in having the best product if you can’t take it to those who need it. We needed to make an important decision, we needed someone to be the company’s commercial, like any startup at the time, we didn’t have enough money to hire a good commercial. As I am also passionate about sales psychology, I offered to be the person who would play that role.
But what now? How to learn the art of selling in such a short time? Since that day, I looked for several books that taught about the art of selling, the titles like the $100 startup, blue ocean strategy, blue ocean shift, how to sell your way through life, among others (but this is a topic for another article 😊). I learned a lot from these great titles, they always touched on the same points:
· Never discuss prices with your customers, discuss the value instead. If you discuss price, your product or service will always be expensive and unaffordable. If you discuss value, they will pay what you want;
· Value = Benefits of the product or service, Price = Features;
Great, I already knew how to sell my products and services, I applied the knowledge learned during my study journey and started to have incredible results. Anyway, one thing was still missing, even knowing how to sell, if I don’t know where to find my audience, the results won’t be the same, I needed to learn about marketing. I started looking for online platforms that could give me the training taking into account my lack of time, that’s when I came across an article from Udacity explaining that they were give free nanodegree month, that’s right, free. I went through their website and came across Digital Marketing Nanodegree, a course that teaches everything i needed to know about digital marketing, even though i knew little or nothing about it. I joined the Udacity family and had a lot of help of the platform’s mentors in my marketing journey.
I tried, in a short way, to explain how my journey was until I became the CBO that I am today, I know how precious your time is and thanks for giving me I little of it. I will write some specific articles to show in practice what were the teachings I learned during this journey. See you soon.