Engineer turned B2B founder here. I've sold to a lot of large $100M+/year businesses at this point, so feel decently qualified to answer this question. The top three things that helped me:
1. Listen to yourself pitch. Ask people you talk to if it's OK to record the pitch and then listen to it repeatedly and take notes. It will be painful, and you'll notice so many things you hate, but you will get better. This is the number one thing that helped me get better.
2. Understand your customer. Really understand them. What are their hopes with buying your product? What are their fears if they make the wrong choice, or no choice at all? The stuff that's really at the core of these questions-- it's deep, personal, often embarrassing stuff people won't just tell you. Getting at this sort of thing is a skill. If you do it well, you'll not only sell better, you'll have a better sales process, and probably a better product.
3. Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence) by Robert Cialdini. If you're a former engineer, you'll especially love this book. It helps you understand how people tick, including yourself, and some of the techniques your competition are probably using.
Finally, don't be an asshole. It's so easy when you get good at sales to view the sale itself as the goal. It shouldn't be. The goal should be solving the customer's problem. Getting the sale is the first step, but make sure you only get it if you can genuinely help the customer-- if the customer will be thrilled they bought from you a month from now. The world has too many assholes willing to sell people the wrong thing for them. Don't be another one.
I don't know why more people don't say this. I agree 1000%. This should absolutely be the case. Why should anyone have a lower probability of winning a lawsuit just because they're poor?
Because no one has yet come up with a better system that works.
If there exists differences in skill, then there exists arbitrage opportunity. How one can prevent that arbitrage opportunity from being used in order to keep things “fair”, I do not know and have not heard of any compelling ideas.
Save money. Get a job that pays as much as possible, even if it has shitty clauses around side projects, and just save as much money as you can. When you have 1-2 years of nest egg saved up (might be eating ramen, etc), then quit and go work on your company.
> but, he asked, why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena
Because they have a history of getting impressive shit done. Not complained about, but actually done. And they have the will to get it done, and a bunch of capital to put behind that will, even if they were taxed at whatever ridiculously high rate Giridharadas wants them taxed at.
Giridharadas is welcome to disagree with successful people, but they've at this point proven their opinions do tend to matter when it comes to shaping the country whether we want to pay attention or not.
I'm sure everyone would be all ears if Zuckerberg were asked for advice on how to best violate people's privacy, or Bezos were asked how to abuse warehouse workers, but there's no reason why the opinions of those two regarding e.g. medicine would be worth more than those of actual specialists and experts.
Just because someone's successful it doesn't mean they're wise. Looking at Zuckerberg fumble from scandal to scandal certainly doesn't give one that impression. He's just another ruthless rich businessman.
Snarky comments aside, Zuckerberg built a massive ads business from scratch, not previously knowing anything about ads. He built a massive social network from scratch, not knowing anything previously about social.
Bezos built the biggest e-commerce business in the world, never having worked in e-commerce or retail before. And seems to be doing some impressive stuff at Blue Origin, not knowing anything about space travel.
That's all not to mention Musk, who goes from new industry to new industry, building successful businesses that fundamentally change those industries, without previously knowing anything about those industries.
These are incredibly impressive accomplishments. They've proven their bonafides for solving general problems in fields they weren't previously familiar with, probably more than just about anyone else in the world.
The fact that they have built those businesses doesn't mean that they can draw informed conclusions on whatever they want. I doubt that Bezos has his think-tank of domain experts giving him background on every question he gets asked during interviews. Sure, if Bezos shifted his attention to healthcare, a month after the announcement I would give his opinions weight, because he's proven adept at analyzing situations quickly, given motivation. What's the motivation to learn about X problem in the world at any given time?
The thing to bear in mind with this is they're all constantly looking at a bunch of other initiatives before jumping in, so if one of these people had a comment to a reporter on just about anything it's probably not the first time they're thinking about that subject.
What is there to know about ads? Is this some good mine of insights about humanity now, or what?
Zuckerberg accidentally invented surveillance capitalism by gathering more and more data to show ads to more and more people. Then he was completely surprised when it backfired and yet tries to continue down the same path, because that's all that Facebook knows.
Bezos can at least be credited with having some insights about online platforms, but a lot of his success can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time. The same man starting today would probably get bought out by one of Google, Fb, Apple or Amazon or succeed on a small/medium scale.
Not to mention that Amazon apparently has a culture of making people cry and warehouse worker abuse.
What's most bothersome about your assertions is this CEO worshipping that's ignoring the real people doing the work. And I'm not talking about the janitors cleaning Tesla's tent-factory, but rather the engineers and experts which actually built the rockets, batteries and scalable platforms these companies stand on.
Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg haven't solved any problems, except how to be a CEO. The people they hired did the solving.
This is a really fair question. Amazon doesn't do it well, but just about no one currently does it better. It's like looking at Yahoo or AltaVista before Google came out and saying they're plenty successful without having incredible search.
Of course, it's not the same, and retailers need to do a hundred other things correctly as well, but there is a lot of data to show that people go where the good search is.
Founder here. It's a probabilistic problem from the perspective of solving personalization. If you tend to want something different after trying the same thing a bunch of times, the algorithm should learn that as well-- that's also personalization.
There's also been a ton of research done that most consumers do want personalized experiences, will pay more for them, and will be more likely to churn if they don't have them. There's a pretty good list at https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/18/hyper-personalization-mar....
Some examples from that article:
>>> Forrester uncovered the fact that 77 percent of consumers have chosen, recommended, or even paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
Accenture found that 75 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when you show you recognize them as an individual and provide recommendations based on their unique wants and needs.
The author focuses on the generalists who did great things, but ignores the specialists who do important work, and speaks nothing of the many jack-of-all-trades who can’t find a job because their knowledge isn’t deep enough in any valuable area. If anything, most of the people I’ve seen not hired and let go has been due to not enough specialized knowledge, and this preventing them from being effective.
The software engineer unemployment rate in the US is something like 1.6%. Engineers who specialize in self-driving cars get paid absurd amounts because there aren’t enough of them. We need more specialists, not generalists. If they’re specialists in more than one thing, that’s even better, but it’s not the main problem.
1. Listen to yourself pitch. Ask people you talk to if it's OK to record the pitch and then listen to it repeatedly and take notes. It will be painful, and you'll notice so many things you hate, but you will get better. This is the number one thing that helped me get better.
2. Understand your customer. Really understand them. What are their hopes with buying your product? What are their fears if they make the wrong choice, or no choice at all? The stuff that's really at the core of these questions-- it's deep, personal, often embarrassing stuff people won't just tell you. Getting at this sort of thing is a skill. If you do it well, you'll not only sell better, you'll have a better sales process, and probably a better product.
3. Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence) by Robert Cialdini. If you're a former engineer, you'll especially love this book. It helps you understand how people tick, including yourself, and some of the techniques your competition are probably using.
Finally, don't be an asshole. It's so easy when you get good at sales to view the sale itself as the goal. It shouldn't be. The goal should be solving the customer's problem. Getting the sale is the first step, but make sure you only get it if you can genuinely help the customer-- if the customer will be thrilled they bought from you a month from now. The world has too many assholes willing to sell people the wrong thing for them. Don't be another one.