[rchaud]

> Unfortunately, I doubt many of us with CompSci degrees and years/decades of experience have those sales and marketing skills.

The history of enterprise tech is strewn with stories about that first big deal happening before the tech was even ready. Bill Gates and Paul Allen's meeting with IBM is probably the best known one. Hell, even Steve Jobs, with all of Apple's power, publicly pitched a ghetto-rigged iPhone because a fully working version wasn't ready at the time.

The 'best' sales people I've met always, always exaggerate the benefits of something. In tech, the "Comp Sci" people are the ones building the product, so they are especially mindful about not overstating what their product can do. Psychologically, they are forever in a problem-solving mode, meaning that when they talk about the product, they are primed to talk about current bugs, or how far away it is from being 'feature complete'. Not the people you want extolling your virtues in a sales meeting.

Salespeople aren't as closely embedded within the product development process, which gives them the mental bandwidth to straight up lie about what the product can do. I've seen it numerous times; sales exec closes a big deal, then goes to the dev team and says "I need X, Y and Z to be added to this sprint because customer H wants to launch in a month."

[blunte]

I think you've nailed it regarding problem-solving mentality and not overstating capabilities. And yes, I've sat right next to a salesperson and had to swallow my tongue while they told a customer that we could deliver something that we absolutely could not.

Fortunately, some of the side projects I've seen that have become successful don't appear to be overselling themselves based on their websites. So there must be room for success just by learning a process of how to get noticed by the right potential customers, and then plainly speaking what the product is.