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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

> I think this article misses the biggest reason Sales exists as a profession: because customers need help understanding what they're buying!

This is another common and overlapping problem, companies that can't explain what they're selling. No one should need to talk to a salesman to understand what they're buying, if they do then the marketing has failed. I wonder if this is caused be sales teams being in charge of the website and not wanting to make themselves obsolete.

It seems to be infecting OSS too, just last night I was considering installing fedora but the website manages to tell me absolutely nothing (https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/).

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> No one should need to talk to a salesman to understand what they're buying, if they do then the marketing has failed.

I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that an entirely one-way communication can solve all problems well.

Where did I suggest that? No one is saying you can't have information and salesmen.

information doesn't upsell itself

For complex software, it's not always practical to list everything it does and expect customers to search for all the things they want to do with it, or even know what they want. It can be more efficient if the customer explains what they want to use it for then you (as the salesman) can use your deeper knowledge of the product to decide if it's suitable for their needs before they invest time learning about it. There could be subtle issues that become showstoppers, like maybe it's not compatible with some other software they already use or it doesn't work well at the scale they need, etc.

That might still be a marketing failure. Perhaps there's a better way to capture that salesman knowledge and apply it to the customer automatically, or perhaps it's a failure of the product design that it's so complicated in the first place.

You don't have to list everything it can possibly do, but you can tell me what it's main functions are, list the incompatibilities, list the integrations offered etc. You can have online documentation "how to do x with $product" articles. You can tell me who it isn't suited for, etc.

I never said not to have salesmen, just don't make it the only way to get this basic information.

> This is another common and overlapping problem, companies that can't explain what they're selling.

There is logic behind hiring some people to build the product, and different people to explain the product.

Yes, but just like the quality of the builders differs so does the quality of the explainers.

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