Comments on: Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Weighs in on Career Change

By: Sales Engineer

Sales Engineer — Fri, 01 May 2009 07:05:14 +0000

If a candidate can _prove_ the numbers he/she is quoting, you’ve got a good chance that this is someone to take a close look at. Realize that appearance, empathy and buzzwords are the stock-in-trade of any salesperson (or conman) and come with no guarantee of good performance in the job.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:27:41 +0000

What if you bullshit the numbers? Not like anyone can really diligence them. Kind of like MBA’s in the ’90′s – no one really checked to see if you really got one. “Hell yeah I’m Harvard ’93 – Go Cardinal!”

By: Paco

Paco — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:58:41 +0000

BillG – Your skepticism sounds like it’ll lead to an interview just so you can ask the candidate for more details. If that’s the case, then the #’s did their job.

I violently agree with the CSE on this one. (I’m just waiting for the chance to be violently neutral on something.) Besides deal sizes, I’ve found it effective to name-drop big customers. And when I worked for a big internet advertising platform, I made sure I kept track of numbers so I can say things like “the XYZ module I delivered handled 1.2M unique visitors in 2006″.

BTW – For those of you who are still employed, consider whether you’ve sufficiently instrumented your software/services. E.g. can you tell how many people are using them and how often? Could you? For shrink-wrap commercial software, this isn’t practical for privacy reasons. But for internal systems (like a project to implement ERP suites or custom apps) and for hosted services, you sure as hell had better have some instrumentation, and you’d better be collecting those numbers on a regular basis. Don’t wait until after you’re kicked out the door – it’s too late to find out then :D

BTW – Collecting stats on individual users, even for internal corporate software, can violate laws. Generally not a big deal in the US, but I know Germany has laws that explicitly prohibit monitoring individual employee productivity in certain ways.

By: John Koetsier

John Koetsier — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:24:05 +0000

Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Weighs in on Career Change: The Cranky Sales Engineer has been reading Pac.. http://tinyurl.com/ckdqmv

By: Cranky Product Mgr

Cranky Product Mgr — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:08:16 +0000

New blog post: Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Weighs in on Career Change http://tinyurl.com/ctfxg4

By: David Locke

David Locke — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:01:38 +0000

Good rules. With numerical claims, never say responsibility limited to $XX M. No. With inflation, there must always be an upside. Say managed $XX M. Don’t tell me that another dollar would have you in the mental ward, limited?

By: BillG

BillG — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:39:34 +0000

For me, as a hiring manager, I would be skeptical of any numerical claims. Exactly how much influence did they have? How is the revenue attributable to their contribution? How did they measure customer satisfaction? What was the contribution? Seems to me this adds more questions than answers. Are you really going to ignore good candidates because they didn’t quote bogus numbers?

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:12:18 +0000

“Show me the money!!!” That’s all that counts in this economy. But even with stellar performance numbers, getting past the morass of hiring freezes is near impossible. I’ve gotten to the offer stage with three major software vendors and been blocked by Mr. Freeze.