Danilo 0:00

So we wanna start here by making the case for why it's a good idea to understand sales. Even, or maybe especially if that isn't your main job.

Landon 0:17

Yeah, I think there might be a misunderstanding that I. Sales is something that just salespeople do and engineers don't need to do it. Support people don't need to do it. Unless your title is sales, and unless you get that fat commission check every month, you don't need to worry about sales. And I think nothing could be further from the truth. Danilo.

Danilo 0:37

Everyone is selling everyone. All the time that, that, that's my like, kind of deranged, extremist perspective on this. Do, do you think that makes sense?

Landon 0:48

I think it does, uh, especially in a company or business context. I think the, the unfortunate baggage that a lot of non-sales folks have around sales are. Bad previous sales experiences or maybe kind of an outdated view that like, here's a sales team. They are firewalled from the engineering team. There's no discussion, there's no cross pollination. They're in two different camps. They kind of don't like each other either, and so each side's just gonna kind of toss stuff over the wall to each other, and I just don't think it has to work that way.

Danilo 1:21

And if we take it one level up. We are at all times trying to convince people to try things our way. We're trying to convince people to adopt a perspective that we have or even just watch a show that we think is really important. And so to me there's something to be learned about selling that will serve you in every kind of conversation you will have until the end of time. So we want to talk a little bit about that today. What I have learned in previous roles that had selling in them, what it taught me was that conversation's a full contact sport. Does that resonate with you?

Landon 2:07

Absolutely. And I think your ability to find common ground to talk about is going to be the foundation upon which you do your sale, build your relationship, build that trust, the classic, like horrific example is you're sitting there making small talk with someone talking about something you don't really care about or not really interested in. Like, we don't want to do that.

Danilo 2:28

Everybody wants to die in that

Landon 2:30

But if you can find something about that person that's interesting or about that topic that's interesting or about that circumstance that's interesting, it allows you to dig in, show some like true engagement with that person and actually maybe learn something along the way that you didn't know, like on a topic that you might not have thought was going to be interesting to begin with.

Danilo 2:50

Getting what you want is about getting people to like and trust you. For me as a person who wanted to get paid for making software, sales skills were the difference between a kind of stillborn dream and me actually living my dream. Being able to get in front of a person, shake their hand, understand what they wanted, and then connect the dots between their ambition and mine was the difference between me having this career and not. And so when we think about sales skills, they're ultimately about getting everyone to win together, right?

Landon 3:30

I'm so glad you said that because I think sometimes there's this feeling of, I'm an engineer and I'm not talking to customers, I don't need to worry about this. And I, I'd say first of all, like we at Postdoc have some pretty strong feelings about engineers and customers talking to each other and, and being engaged, I think. But I think the other thing is that when it comes to exactly what you just said, working together towards a, a common end, you're selling when you're trying to get your team to figure out what. What you're gonna work on, that sprint you're selling when you're trying to figure out the prioritization of your roadmap items you're selling, when you're trying to figure out how you're going to give direct feedback to someone that's not going to crush them, but also gets the point across like those are all sales activities and they may actually even be sales adjacent to selling your product. And so I think I'm so glad you brought up that point of teams and coming to a common end because. At the end of the day, what sets apart a really great engineering team from a kind of mediocre engineering team isn't just their skillset, it's their ability to communicate and work together and produce greater things than they would've on their own.

Danilo 4:35

One of the core talents that anyone with sales skills has to have is handling objections. You're gonna be talking to somebody and they're going to have an objection and. The thing about an objection is that you have to treat it as a, an inevitable part of life, and b, not the end of the world. And I think if you can handle objections smoothly instead of treating them as, uh, an emergency break that ends the conversation, that again, alters your ability to get what you want, to get, what your, uh, counterpart wants. Learning how to deal with that smoothly is a skill, but it's a learnable skill.

Landon 5:19

In my experience, I think there are two big things that go into that. I think the first one is being confident in yourself and in your skillset, in your ability to answer those questions. If you're unsure of yourself, that's going to come across as, um, trying to protect and, and not engage those. I think the other thing is. Your ability to set your ego aside and take sometimes difficult objections or difficult feedback and say. Setting, setting aside how I feel about this, is this objectively true, is going to help a ton with then being able to step back, kind of cool off that emotional response and go, okay, how do I respond to this as if it's real? Because I think the most frustrating thing I've experienced, and I think we've all had these experiences, is when you bring up an objection or a concern and, and the person you're talking to goes. Oh, well that's not a real issue. Or why would you have this issue? Or why would you even think to do this this way? To have this issue? Like, and those are all the wrong ways to answer those

Danilo 6:17

destroying response.

Landon 6:20

Yes,

Danilo 6:21

So let, let's talk about that in a little bit more depth, because if we want to talk about a scale, a, if we want to talk about a sales skill that everybody needs, handling objections, I think is, is the core one. What do you do as a professional sales individual, Landon, when somebody comes to you with an objection, like, man, I don't wanna do it. What happens at that point in the conversation?

Landon 6:42

I think first things first. Hopefully you have done your homework and you know where that objection is coming from, or you've heard that objection before, right? In a sales context, it might be a common one, you're too expensive, you're too hard to implement, uh, you're, you don't have the right features. Like hopefully you know those and you know how to respond to those. Like, if this is the first time you're hearing that objection. It's gonna be tougher, right? It's not that you can't handle it, but it's going to be tougher to handle an objection. You, you, you aren't ready for. So I think doing your homework is gonna be huge. Um, the second thing is actually listen to what the person is saying. And I know that that sounds, I. Maybe condescending or or weird. But oftentimes we will start to hear an objection and we will immediately start to jump ahead and formulate in our mind what our response is going to be. And we don't listen to the entire objection. And if we actually sit down, listen to the entire objection, we will find that there may be key pieces of information we can use to answer this objection. And I think that the place that I see us the most is I'll oftentimes read an email or a slack message, have a knee-jerk response. Start to write something up and go, you know what, no, I need to stop. I need to come back to this. And in coming back to this, realize I missed key information that would've helped me if I had just paused. And thankfully, I've gotten to the point where I actually do pause and don't just hit enter before I send that off. So I think those are two starter skills that are really useful for understanding like as you, as you like, engage this process. How do you. Ensure that you're setting yourself up for success when answering those objections.

Danilo 8:17

I, I think that's really key and one of the difficulties that in objection. Creates in the flow of not just the conversation, but the relationship itself is like, oh, we're, we're on on opposing sides. And I think one of the really helpful things I learned selling was that you can validate an objection. By relating to it directly. And this kind of pivot brings you back into the fold together. Now you're back on the same side. You know what, I really understand that. 'cause I felt that way too when I first came into this situation. But here's a little bit of information that I discovered that kind of changed my perspective on this. And you might find that. Also persuasive. What do you think with this additional information in the mix now? I think it's really important that you actually have to have had that same kind of perspective, right? You don't want to use this in a manipulative, uh, form, but getting back on the same side as part of the job.

Landon 9:28

And sometimes that means saying, you know what? This is a legitimate objection. Maybe we aren't the right fit. Maybe this isn't the thing that you wanted. Like, and I know we're not talking about walking away from sales right now. That's gonna be a, a separate, uh, podcast. Listen in for that one. But sometimes you hear an objection that is so big and is, is so, um, kind of core to what you're doing. You go, you know what? Actually, this isn't gonna work for you. Like let's, let's have this conversation now and call this what it is. Instead of waiting two or three months when we've sunk a lot of time and effort and we are more emotionally invested to then turn around and go, oh, actually this isn't gonna work. Like, let's pull that bandaid off early.

Danilo 10:12

And so it all comes down to, and I think this is a theme we're gonna come back to over and over again. It comes back to playing the long game and not playing the short term con artist game. And

Landon 10:25

Yep.

Danilo 10:26

I think, again, that is a perspective that is relevant to every sort of negotiation and interaction that you ever have. In your professional career, learning how to say, look, we are at an impasse here that probably isn't resolvable, and I don't think our relationship will benefit from me representing that impasse, if that is truly where we're at.

Landon 10:50

Absolutely, and I think every time I have seen people try to do this in my professional career, when I've seen someone go, you know what? I see that this is not going to work, and I'm just gonna put my head down and try and do it anyway. It never ends up being worth it. I've never seen a single instance where it ends up working out well.

Danilo 11:09

So one of the takeaways here is that being a bulldozer is, at best, a short-term strategy if that.

Landon 11:20

Yeah, I would say not only is it a short term strategy, uh, the only circumstance where you want to use the bulldozer, and I, I would consider this the kind of like I. Nuclear option, right? Like you're, you're pulling the red handle is there is some situation or something that you can't budge on, right? So for example, you might do that in a situation where someone comes and asks for terms and conditions that you know you can't agree to or asks for pricing that you know you can't match or asks for a feature, you know, you're not going to build at that point. You kinda have to be the bulldozer and go, sorry guys. This isn't the right fit. This isn't for us. Pull the red handle and just call it. But other than that, if you are actually in a situation where there is some give and take and there's a possibility of give and take that that bulldozer mentality just ends up screwing both sides over. And who wants that?

Danilo 12:10

And it's tough because. You can have a really clear picture of what's possible, and you can get really attached to that possibility. And I think that is where the reflex for really, really trying to ply your way forward, even in the face of objections, can come from how do you, how do you get yourself disconnected from that kind of dark urge to get it done?

Landon 12:41

So I'm glad you mentioned this. 'cause I think first of all, I, I personally tend towards that problem of seeing the best possible scenario, right? It's all gonna work out and, and I think the really talented engineers I've worked with have the ability to visualize a future state that doesn't yet exist. And that's what makes them such good engineers. And so I think some of the people who. Are going to be best at this, are also the ones that are going to suffer from this problem the most. And I think one of the things that has helped me personally deal with this is the ability to step back. And think back to situations where I went, I thought this was going to work out like X, I was convinced that things were going to work out like X. If you had told me two weeks ago that X wasn't going to be the case, I would've just shut you down. And then I find out that it's actually Y In those circumstances, your ability to learn from those and kind of pull back, get like take those battle scars, learn from those battle scars and go, you know what? Next time I need to be a little bit more circumspect and actually think through this before I just headlong jump into this. That, for me, has been the most useful thing. Take the step back, take a breath. Think about other times that this hasn't worked out and, and even for some people, it's running through all the objections. Okay? Run through all the things that could go wrong here in order to figure out like where getting you back on a more realistic scale, if that makes sense.

Danilo 14:08

And at the end of the day, I think we believe really strongly. You and and me as, as individuals and the culture that we come out of here at Post Hog, we really believe strongly that we have to all win together. And so at the end of the day, just because there is a bright possible future there, if you are the only one enjoying that future, we haven't won together and that's not good enough, right?

Landon 14:35

Yeah, I agree. And it's the same thing whether you're on a small engineering team or you're talking about your home life, or you're talking about a sports team, right? You win together or you lose together.