| While I’m not interested in marketing, my focus over the next year will be to get better at sales. One of my best friends is in technical sales and he gave me a few books to read. I consider marketing, broad based brand awareness and “sales” to be more one on one. Of course I’m talking B2B. Context: I’m a “staff” cloud consultant at a 3rd party consulting firm and was previously a mid level cloud consultant (L5) working directly ar AWS (ProServe). I just got into consulting four years ago from hands on keyboard development + cloud architecture at smallish product companies. I’m really new to this. Currently, when I come into a project, I already know from a thousand foot view what the customer wants - the business problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity they are going after since sales has already spoken to them and I’ve spoken to sales. My job is to get them there (well now to lead a team) and to convince them that the solution I present to them is the right one. But my job is still just to convince the decision makers. Sales handles talking to the people who control the purse strings. My next goal is to convince clients they need something that they didn’t know they needed instead of convincing them that we are the people that can help them execute on an initiative they already know they want. Hopefully moving closer to the customer will provide some protection against software development getting commoditized to cheaper places (more likely) or AI (less likely) |