Welcome to Decoding Sales, a podcast for an engineer and a sales talk about the art and science of sales. In this episode we're going to take a different tack.

We are going to talk about a topic that I know absolutely nothing about have never been

involved in and frankly seems a little bit like a boondoggle from the engineer's

perspective. Like it's the sales dinner. What the hell are a bunch of people hobnobbing about,

drinking fancy wine, eating steaks, doing, and how does that help a deal?

So we're going to tell some stories.

I think it's going to be a little bit more fun.

This episode is to learn and demystify this process. It from the outside seems completely

crazy and the kind of thing that leads to overblown expense accounts and Series A startups failing

because they ran out of money.

All right, Peter, let's talk about these sales dinners.

I hear that they're a boondoggle.

You go out to a fancy place, you spend absurd amounts of money,

if I'm the CEO of the company.

I'm like, what are these line items?

What am I getting for them?

So what am I getting for my sales dinner?

And these charges that you're putting on my account.

What's going on?

I actually think what the CEO should be asking is not,

why is the cost this much?

It should be, how is where you took that person that prospect how is that related to you

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