More than half of these postings ask for genuine product understanding. For anyone moving from engineering, support or consulting into a commercial role, that is the differentiating asset — and it is worth being specific about what it buys.

• Credibility with the technical evaluator, who is frequently the person who can kill the deal and is rarely the one being sold to.
• You can qualify out faster. Understanding that the product genuinely does not fit saves months, and reps who cannot assess that carry dead pipeline.
• You can carry a conversation without a solutions engineer in early meetings, which is a scheduling advantage and a trust advantage.
• You can name a real weakness, which is the fastest route to being believed on the strengths.

Selling an AI product has a specific difficulty: the buyer cannot verify the claim from a demo, because a demo shows the good case and the product is probabilistic. What the postings and the market reward here is honesty about the quality bar — being able to say what accuracy looks like on their data, what happens when it is wrong, and what the human-review path is. That is the same argument the AI books here make from the engineering side, arriving at the same place: the question is not how accurate it is but what happens when it is wrong.

Selling something technical to technical buyers inverts a lot of standard sales advice, and the reason is simple: your buyer can evaluate your claims, and will. Enthusiasm is discounted, precision is rewarded, and a single overstatement costs the credibility of everything else you said.

• The buyer is rarely one person. A technical champion who wants it, an economic buyer who signs, a security reviewer who can veto, a procurement function with its own timeline, and often an incumbent vendor's advocate. Technical enthusiasm does not survive a security review nobody prepared for.
• The competitor is usually ‘do nothing’. Most deals are lost to inertia rather than to a rival, which means the question that matters is what happens to them if they do not change — not why you are better than the alternative.
• Say what you do not do, early. They will find out. Naming a limitation yourself is the strongest credibility move available and it costs almost nothing, because sophisticated buyers do not expect a product to do everything.
• Never oversell the roadmap. A future capability described confidently is heard as a commitment, and when it slips you have lost the account rather than the feature.
• Total cost is where technical deals actually turn. Migration effort, integration work, training, and what it costs to leave. A buyer who has been through a bad migration cares more about the exit than the entry, and answering that honestly wins deals that a feature comparison would lose.