D·Talk 8: Customer Hacking: What Engineers Need to Unlearn to Sell
Channel: dlabschannel
Date: 2014-05-23

In the last 50 years, engineers have created numerous breakthroughs that have changes economics and even life as we know it. However, a great technical solution is a "necessary but not sufficient" condition to change the world. Slovenia is swimming in great technical solutions, but few will ever reach the larger world.  

As a "recovering engineer" myself, i plan to explain why the same skills that make engineers great at solving technical problems, make it difficult to even understand what barriers are stopping them. Engineers make some of the best business developers IF they can make the transition; however, there are few jobs that prove more difficult for an engineer to learn. Now the worst news: you can't outsource sales for any new technology you create. What you must do is unlearn some habits that have made you a great engineer but stop your product from getting in the hands of users and buyers.

Are you fast at understanding where is the bottleneck in a complex system? Are you one of the first to find a solution? Great skills if you are an engineer, destructive skills if you want people to buy and use your solutions. If you are now thinking that this does not apply to your product and that once people see the solution...  then you probably have a more severe case. 

In our talk, we use as much science as possible to describe and explain sales and customer decision processes. I hope we can show that customers are somewhat predictable and behave mostly reasonable even if  they appear illogical to the engineer. 

The talk was presented by Matt Mayfield. Matt is an engineer turned into a sales and market expansion juggernaut. Godfather of Slovenian IT-globalization efforts. Former VP of Sales for Hermes Softlab. Lecturer for entrepreneurs. Great guy.