👩‍💻 Coding is a superpower. Can you sell it?

Juan Montaner
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Geeks can be great developers, genius or nerds ready to disrupt Google or Facebook, but first, you need to sell their project to someone, either a venture capital (VC) shark or new employee.

The purpose of this blog is to outline tips and experiences which I had in my career, from selling an idea to define a sales machine ready to scale.

The Internet is overbooked of marketing stuff and grows technics. However, there is no much about to become a sales professional that can sell ideas and attract funds, talent, and customers.

In my track record, I won and lost many deals. That´s life. But always I follow my five golden rules when I see an opportunity.

Rule #1 Purchase means trust. Sell trust

Either you buy a drink or you invest in a startup, every selling process will have a happy ending if there is trust between both parties. But how an can effective sales professional create trust? In my experience, trust is a chain of small things that all add together creates a compelling sales machine.

Rule #2 Understand how people can purchase your concept

Can you sell a product to a person with no money? To define a modern sales professional, the sooner you discover customers make decisions to buy, the more effective you become. It is mandatory to get key information that will point us in a successful deal and avoid waste time. Money or budget questions are easy, but there are many other such as time, needs or corporate process

Rule #3 Train your personal branding and avoid being an asshole

I had a mentor you told me once: “the first product is the salesperson”. If you have a great prototype or patent, but people are not comfortable dealing with you, you better stop and rethink. For instance, you have to keep your digital footprint clean, avoiding polemic opinions. And above all, do not act like an asshole doing comments like religion or political statements. You don´t know if buyer person might be annoyed.

I like to say that a salesperson must be a frictionless professional in building relations.

Rule #4 Save time. Go with a sales-ready product. Forget MVPs.

Let´s imagine that a genius develops the next big thing, but that genius has met people with a Minimum Viable Product to make sure that they can invest in that big thing that will disrupt an entire industry. The time to convince people, make some marketing research, prepare presentations create contracts will be a waste of time if investors or buyers finally doesn´t purchase the idea. A sales-ready product (SRP) is a concept designed to be purchased and consumed for prospective customers and investors. This topic is what makes the difference between inventors and business people.

Rule #5 Sell the vision but get the PO

You can show fancy things about high tech products or code that make products fly, but you must focus on closing the deal and reaching milestones. This has to be perfectly clear in every interaction with a prospective buyer.

I just want to keep those rules short and simple, but you can understand my point deeper within the links above.

Of course, selling is about to plan, build, test, like coding a new product for a startup. The main difference is if you fail in sales, everything else like product development, marketing and hiring people doesn´t make sense.

Juan Montaner

Written by

Tech innovator and business builder | www.juanmontaner.com

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