<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>amoorthy</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an engineer turned bus-dev&amp;#x2F;sales person. I found the transition very difficult and was recommended to sign up for sales coaching. It was excellent advice and I learned a lot about my inherent weaknesses when it comes to selling and how to compensate for them. I wrote a few of my lessons on my blog. A bit dated but perhaps of value to others:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curiousjuice.com&amp;#x2F;blog-0&amp;#x2F;bid&amp;#x2F;134157&amp;#x2F;Sales-training-for-an-engineer-lessons-from-a-master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curiousjuice.com&amp;#x2F;blog-0&amp;#x2F;bid&amp;#x2F;134157&amp;#x2F;Sales-trainin...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curiousjuice.com&amp;#x2F;blog-0&amp;#x2F;bid&amp;#x2F;135376&amp;#x2F;Secret-to-sales-success-ask-better-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curiousjuice.com&amp;#x2F;blog-0&amp;#x2F;bid&amp;#x2F;135376&amp;#x2F;Secret-to-sal...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)</title><url>https://micael.substack.com/p/10-tips-for-founders-doing-sales</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>gumby</author><text>&amp;gt; Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem.&lt;p&gt;The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good.&lt;p&gt;First the bad:&lt;p&gt;1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too.&lt;p&gt;2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by believing that your potential customer thinks the same way you do.  If your prospects are quite different from you (say you’re a programmer writing a tool for doctors) you’ll work harder to understand their real &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; perceived needs.&lt;p&gt;But sometimes this is good advice:&lt;p&gt;1 - Even if you are different from your customer (say you’re writing something broadly applicable like a web site design tool for small business), “eating your own dog food” will find bugs and infelicities faster.&lt;p&gt;2 - if your customer has the same needs as you perhaps you already know how to meet said customer easily, such as trade groups you’re already in.&lt;p&gt;In general the advice in this post was pretty basic and generic but I didn’t want to let the issue above pass I commented.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)</title><url>https://micael.substack.com/p/10-tips-for-founders-doing-sales</url></story>