Giving a name to my sales anxiety
I think a lot of sales anxiety among geeky folks is driven by the stereotype &quot;alpha male smooth talking sales guy&quot;. I sure did, but then I learned that that&#x27;s actually a very bad salesperson in many cases.<p>If you sell technology, then the last thing you want is to convince people to buy something they don&#x27;t actually need. You shouldn&#x27;t really want to convince people of anything at all - you should want to learn what they need and, if they&#x27;re sufficiently interested in what you have to answer that need, answer their questions about it.<p>I run a service (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com</a>) that makes it easy for developers to build a chat feature into their apps&#x2F;sites. We do a lot of sales. Nearly all sales we do is &quot;warm&quot; - people find us, show interest (eg by signing up for a free trial) and then the process starts. I found that this sales is <i>a lot of fun!</i>, because:<p><pre><code>    * I get to talk about code with other engineers
    * They have a problem our product very well may solve
    * There&#x27;s no convincing. Just clarifying, exploring
</code></pre>
I did, sometimes, make the mistake of going down the &quot;smooth talker sales guy&quot; road. It&#x27;s an easy trap to fall for because it&#x27;s so deeply culturally ingrained that that&#x27;s what salespeople do. I got excited and started overselling, or bragging, or both. None of the companies I did that with became customers. My guess is that by doing the smooth talk and not the nerdy engineering talk, they lost trust in us as a technology provider. And fairly so.