Former Slack and Twitter executive Kris Cordle discusses managing culture clash and building empathy between engineers and salespeople.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 35.3s
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“Another thing that we did at Slack is sending engineers on sales calls.
And once people understand the value, like, I don't want to go into a, you know, a huge client meeting that's in necessarily in a industry necessarily I don't know much about and just
Just really convince these people, and show them the value, and the value is there, but the, there's this communication barrier that you have to overcome, and it takes a certain personality type.
Once you realize that, like, wow, these people are so great.
I can never do that work.
I don't know how they do it.
And this mutual appreciation can develop.”
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