Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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It's not about HN's technical focus. It's that for many of us here - myself strongly included - sales and marketing can be seen as a large-scale defection in the game of free market.

In the ideal world, when you want to buy a product or a service, you would consider the value it brings to you based on hard facts, consider other circumstances impacting the costs - like e.g. product A is a bit better, but product B has support people in your country, speaking your language, etc.

Suddenly, comes product C. It's very much inferior compared to A and B, but the producers of C spent most of their budget on sales and marketing. Your boss knows all about C from on-line ads. A C salesman comes to you, promising you features they know they won't deliver, but also know they'll be able to weasel their way out of along the way. Oh, and he brings some nice "off-the books" benefits for you personally, as part of "building customer loyalty".

Sales and marketing as applied in practice distort the market. What a salesman says can be - and often is - completely disconnected from reality, so in presence of salesmen, products are no longer chosen based on objective value they provide. The incentive structure this creates makes everyone else have to lie too, or go out of business.

That's why many people don't like those skills and practices.

I don’t mean to be glib, but nothing is perfect. What some of the other posters are alluring to is that the ability to organize deals and market a product is an essential skill in running a business. If product A is technically superior, but there is not sufficient business talent to sustain a business on it, then the quality is moot.

What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.

Again, the sales and marketing are integral to the product. I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers. This is not an easy problem. For the example, simpleminded approaches like forcing government to accept the lowest cost bid on complicated products has tremendous downside.

FWIW, managing people, organizations, setting up deals, marketing...these are “hard” skills. What makes them hard is that the parameters of the “problem space” are almost infinitely complex, the work product is ambiguous, and often the involves the focused cooperation of people, who are notoriously unpredictable.

Managed systems comprises of “soft components” is a very hard challenge.

What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison

No. It does happen, not "maybe", every day and for every kind of decision, complex and simple. If something is "apples to apples", the sales work is to mud the waters.

> If something is "apples to apples", the sales work is to mud the waters.

... obviously unless you happen to work for the company with the good (or least bad) apples, in which case your jib is to spread the word that good apples exist.

The problem is, the market isn't static, but dynamic. You play an iterative game. It turns out that spending more money on spreading the word about your apples has better ROI than spending that money on ensuring you actually have the best apples... And even if you achieve best apples and best marketing, think of just how much money you had to spend on the marketing part. How much better still would your apples be if you didn't have to play the zero-sum game of advertising? How much better everyone's products would be?

Everything you are saying in this thread is exactly right, in my opinion. And I'm a sales guy! Haha.

Inventing something is a value-added game. If I make us a knife that lets us cut a cactus in the desert for water, and we both survive the day because of that knife, I've added value.

If another guy makes the same knife, and now we have to compete for your attention, distort deal terms and product features to "seem" better than the other knife, etc, then this is not adding value. This is destroying time and money.

Sales is a zero sum game. One company wins, the other company loses. That's ok, but the winner should succeed thanks to price + features (e.g. who makes the better knife), not who "promises" you their knife is "better".

In an ideal world, we all just have a spreadsheet of all the knives available out there, their price, what they're actually built to do, and you just hit buy.

I know this thread is probably dead, but just feel like responding: the factor you’re leaving out is that having multiple people competing to develop the best knife leads to better knifes.

This is old school Econ 101, but I think it’s relevant. Know we have multiple options for knifes. How do we decide the best one? We let people decide for themselves, and price is the signaling mechanism as to where resources should be focused.

So we have a “market mechanism” for discovering quality, thereby making “market” an integral part of the system.

It could be done otherways, and markets have known weaknesses, especially for certain categories of goods.

But for many categories of goods it’s a very powerful system to spur and support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. So to call an essential part of a market bases system valueless does not make sense.

And I'm not trying to make them sound simple, or to paint the world black and white. I was just trying to point out reasons for distaste other than "meh, it's not math, so it's boring".

Personally, I simultaneously appreciate just how hard those skills are (I like tech partly because it's much easier than dealing with humans at scale), despise the way those skills are most commonly used, and understand how some dabbling in dark arts is necessary to even have a fighting chance on the marketplace.

> What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.

> I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers.

Well, outright fraud is illegal, and therefore happens less often. But between that and being fair and straightforward there's a whole spectrum, and from my experience almost all companies lean far towards the dishonest side. Just listen to any discussion of marketing people about their strategies. Would you apply similar methods on your friends and family? Would you skinner-box your niece for extra change? Would you price-anchor your mother with a birthday gift?

I simply believe that, as a society, we have way too low standard for business interactions. We allow ourselves to be manipulated at every way without question, and even praise the master manipulators who are skilled at what they do. I'd love for that to change, but I have no idea how to help - so for now, I just resort to expressing and explaining my distaste for manipulative practices.

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