Danilo 0:00

We're gonna say, Hey, to our post hog friends, because we've got a strange idea about a podcast. Landon, what is our strange idea?

Landon 0:10

We get an AI to do all of our sales for us so that we don't need to work anymore.

Danilo 0:16

That optimization might not work out the way you were hoping.

Landon 0:20

I have a second idea then. What if we put together a podcast that was geared towards engineers and founders to help them get more comfortable with sales? Maybe they're not as comfortable with it. Maybe it's not something they've done before. Maybe it's something that intimidates them or scares them. And so this is just two guys talking about how they might be able to do sales, uh, a little bit better.

Danilo 0:39

I love the second idea a lot more for a couple of reasons. One. I do think it's going to let us keep our jobs. In addition to that, let me tell you, there are two skills. Which changed my life.

Landon 0:53

Hmm

Danilo 0:53

The first skill was understanding computing at a young age. Like without that, I don't have the life that I have today.

Landon 1:00

Yeah.

Danilo 1:01

The second skill is sales. I learned by accident how to sell electronics as a teenager, and that skill has served me at every stage of my career. But it has especially served me as somebody who wanted money for technology stuff.

Landon 1:22

That is a good skill to have if you want to trade money for technology. You and I have come to sales from very different backgrounds but I think we both have experiences that we hope others can learn from I think you and I both think that having sales skills is a useful kind of skill to have, even if you're not ever selling, even if you're just trying to convince your buddy to watch, watch the next show, or read the next book, like you need to kind of be able to. In the old days, there was a different word for this that they used to use that everyone had to be trained on. Do you know what that word was?

Danilo 1:51

What was the word?

Landon 1:53

Rhetoric. Every single person who got any sort of education started with rhetoric as one of the big three things that they had to learn. And really what is rhetoric? It's about learning how to communicate with someone and convince them to think about things the way that you do. And that's really what sales. Is.

Danilo 2:10

And it's a toughie because learning how to persuade the computer to do a particular thing like that is a concrete skill that does not necessarily apply to human beings at all. And once you have mastered making the computer do what you hope it will do, then you gotta convince everybody else to follow your lead. And I'll tell you what, being able to freelance as a software engineer, being able to convince other people that they should hire you. Boy, that can have such a incredible effect on your earning power because if you get really good at freelancing and you take the next job, they have to meet the level of money you know, that you could get as a freelancer. So that's one angle of leverage. And then if you start a startup, if you build a product and you want to sell that to people. You've gotta have kind of a framework for understanding how that persuasion works. So wherever you are on that spectrum, I think having some sales and persuasion and rhetoric is a very great lever to have. I.

Landon 3:12

I completely agree and I hope that we can share some of our stories, uh, some of the things that we've seen and ultimately help people know that you can do sales without it being gross, without it feeling bad, without feeling bad about yourself. You could be a good person and do sales and that, uh, we think that post hog really encapsulates the right way to do that.

Danilo 3:32

You can be a good person and also sell. That really is the promise. We've recorded four episodes as a test to try this out. We'd love for you to have a listen to them and you tell us what you think.

Landon 3:45

Thanks.