Things dentists understand about product marketing.

My first career was dentistry. I held the drill. People assume the distance between that and product marketing is enormous, and the retraining was real, but the actual job turned out to be familiar.

Nobody buys dentistry. People buy the end of a specific pain, and they arrive already knowing what it is. My job in the chair was never to convince anyone they had a problem. It was to be the person they trusted with a problem they'd been quietly managing for months. Most enterprise buyers walk in the same way, with a pain they have already diagnosed and a fear about what fixing it will cost them. Marketing that manufactures urgency is drilling a healthy tooth.

The trust part had a mechanic to it. Before any procedure I would explain what I was about to do, in order, including the part that would hurt and roughly how long the hurt would last. Patients relax when you name the unpleasant part. They tense when you say "you won't feel a thing," because everyone has heard that before, in this exact chair.

The software translation is direct. Tell the buyer the implementation will take a quarter and which two weeks will be the bad ones. The vendor who says "seamless" is the dentist who says "you won't feel a thing," and gets believed exactly as much.

One more thing the clinic taught me: the follow-up call the next day, the one where nothing is sold, is worth more than the treatment plan brochure. Retention marketing, before I knew the term.