Wednesday, December 26th, 2012 - 7:40pm

What Sales and Marketing is All About

It’s holiday time around here and I just spent a good two hours watching “The Pirates of Silicon Valley.” I watched it several years ago and remembered it to be decent, though I don’t necessarily know how historically accurate it is. I found the story itself to be kind of inspiring in that whole “start-up in a garage” kind of way.

Very early on in the movie, Anthony Michael-Hall who plays Bill Gates gets on a phone call with Ed Roberts (computer engineer, creator of the Altair), and just as he’s about to take the phone call, he turns to Steve Ballmer (Developers! Developers! Developers!) and Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and says about the call:

It’s our job to find out what this guy doesn’t know that he needs… but does need. And then make sure he knows that he does need it and that we’re the only ones to give him the answer.

If that doesn’t say enough about what marketing and sales is all about, I don’t know what does.