Someone posted a question I haven't been able to put down. Why can a con artist get a smart businessman to wire fifty thousand in a day, while an honest founder with a product that works can't close a three-thousand deal? Their answer: the con artist has nothing to deliver, so all of his attention goes on the buyer. The honest founder spends most of his head on fulfilment and edge cases, carries that head into the call, and hedges. To a buyer, hedging sounds like you don't believe in your own product.
I read that as a description of my last seven months.
I went into every sales call with what I thought was the rational position. I don't know everything. NIS 2 is a big law, every company is different, I'm an engineer and not an auditor, and I'd never sold this before. So I said "it depends" a lot. I explained the edge cases before anyone asked about them. When someone asked what it would cost, I gave a range, then the caveats on the range. One managing director asked what it would cost three times in one breath and got one hedged number back. In seven months I put exactly one priced quote in front of a buyer.
I called that honesty. Looking back, I was answering a question nobody in the room had asked, which was what could go wrong. The buyer was asking something else: does this person believe this will work for me? By the sound of me, the answer was "not sure."
The part that stings is that I wasn't unsure about most of it. I knew the 49 requirements cold. I had built the thing that walks a company through them. I was unsure about the edges, and I led with the edges, because that's where an engineer's attention lives. Debugging is the habit of looking for what's broken. At a desk it's the job. In a call it reads as doubt.
Where I part with the post is the fix. It says sell with the delusional certainty of a con artist, then deliver like an engineer once the money clears. I don't want the delusion. His certainty is cheap because he won't be around when it turns out false. Mine would be expensive, because I would be.
Two things he does are worth stealing anyway, and neither needs a lie. He is fast. Instant replies, no hesitation. And his attention is on the buyer the whole time, never on himself. I can do both honestly. The certainty I can offer is about the next step rather than the outcome: this is the price, this is what you have in four weeks, and if something doesn't fit, this is what we do. Every sentence there is true and none of them opens with "well, it depends." The doubts are still there. They move to after the signature, where they become the delivery plan, which is the only place they were ever useful.
So I'd keep the split brain and draw the line somewhere else. Same engineer, sorting by who's asking. The buyer gets what I'm sure of. The edge cases get me, at the desk, after they've said yes.
I haven't tested this yet, so it's a theory with a sample size of zero. The old way already has its result in: one quote in seven months, and every caveat accurate.
— Simon