Why Everyone is in Sales
jasonshen.com
jasonshen.com
A friend of mind helped me rework my resume recently, and the fundamental point she finally got through my skull after a few hours was that the point of the resume is to demonstrate my potential value to the prospective employer. Which is part of what patio11 is saying on here all the time (in addition to: find the place where you can provide the most value).
It's something I've always sucked at, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's something a lot of nerds hold in common.
Partly it's modesty. I don't like to self-promote (to use the term in a neutral way, including a simple demonstration of potential value), because I just don't like to talk about myself.
Partly it's humility. The more I learn, the more I learn how much I don't know. The more people I meet, the more I realize how awesome people are. Self-promotion in this context feels false.
Partly it's some weird version of misplaced pride. I don't feel like I should have to self-promote. My actions, ideas, and accomplishments should speak for themselves. Similarly, I feel like I shouldn't have to find a place where I can provide value; it should find me. These are both wrong and stupid sentiments, of course.
I think this is really hard for some of us. These feelings make us allergic to sales, in both directions. But it seems like people like patio11 have found a sort of middle path between unrewarded toil and shameless blow-hardiness. This post feels a bit to me like someone on the other side of the divide trying to reach out to me, and while I appreciate the effort, I still feel instinctively suspicious. I think what I need is more from people who started on my side of the divide and found a good place in the middle about how they got there.
Best way to get started is to watch "Real Deal" on the History Channel and then try selling your old junk on craigslist.
I hope to write more about this in my next post in the series (Why Smart People Suck at Selling) but basically I was a nice, energetic and shy child to the point of being bullied. Part of my shift in thinking was learning to stand up for myself and realizing that I was responsible for getting what I wanted out of life -- and that the best way to do that was to help other people get what THEY want.
Anyways, more on that later. Thanks for your thoughts.
Would be interesting to see how you back this up. My experience has invariably been that no good deed goes unpunished.
I grew up with a serious aversion to bullshit in all of its forms. Especially when it verged on outright lying. All too often, I'd seen hucksterish, self-promoting coworkers tell bald-faced lies about their work, their accomplishments, their positions, etc., and get massively rewarded for doing so. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Consciously, I knew that bullshitting about myself -- even just a tiny bit -- was a successful career ascension tactic. And I knew that not doing so was, perhaps, actively slowing me down. But damn it, it just felt so fake and slimy and wrong.
Eventually -- and it's taken me more years to learn this fact than I feel comfortable admitting -- I realized that bullshit is not binary. There isn't some black-or-white dichotomy between "lying" and "telling the truth." In between lies an entire spectrum, and some of that spectrum is safe to play in. Even encouraged.
It's possible to sell yourself with only a drop of bullshit. Sort of like a fine layer of rhetorical polish. It's not about fabricating accomplishments out of whole cloth, but rather, about talking your real accomplishments up, and describing them in just the right way. For a lot of people, finding that level of just-the-right-amount-of-bullshit comes very naturally. For others, like myself, it's a skill that needs to be learned.
And I totally agree with you that it often seems like bullshitting talent and skills get people a lot farther in any field than actual value. Which is infuriatingly unfair.
I think the struggle is to figure out how to hit the same pschological targets that bullshitters do, without bullshitting. And the answer I'm sort of converging on is, again, to demonstrate your true value.
Even this, I think, is something that comes naturally to some and not others. I keep bringing up patio11 because he in no way sets of my bullshit detectors, but manages to demonstrate his value. The feeling I get is that it's something he has a talent for.
There is no way to be totally "pure". If you make the world's greatest device and no one knows about it, no one will benefit. The moment you tell anyone about it, you are "selling" and how you choose to portray the device, it's features/benefits, how often and forcefully you endorse the device is all part of sales.
Salesmanship IS demonstration of value. Patio11 would be able to sell hackers/developers on something better than a used car salesman, but the verse is true regarding the sale of used cars to regular people.
But your inability to distinguish between bullshit and demonstration of value is abhorrent to me. If you make an amazing product and never tell anyone about it, you're keeping it a secret. If you honestly demonstrate its value to a demographic who can truly benefit from it, that's good marketing and communication. If you lie or exaggerate to people about what your product can do, that's bullshit. These are on a spectrum.
I'm going to be blunt here. Pretty much everything on your site, from the branding, to the copy, to the actual blog post itself, which I find mostly insubstantial, sets off alarms. Your basic premise -- that transactions should be mutually beneficial and sales is communication of that mutual benefit -- is not particularly insightful or well-represented. The ratio of self-promotion to content is disconcerting. The presented 'attitude' is off-putting and seems forced.
The fact that you can't distinguish between what patio11 does and what an archetypal used car salesman just makes me think you're a bullshitter.
But maybe I'm not your target demographic. That's fine. Don't let me stop you. If it works, it works. But know that that's the kind of stuff that makes me allergic to self-promotion in the first place. I don't want to present myself this way, I don't want to be this way, even if that's what it takes to succeed. And the fact that it works hurts my soul.
Again, I'm not attacking you, and I'm not trying to be negative. I'm trying to be honest about how I perceive your site. (If you don't think I'm your target demographic, please safely ignore me.) I'm also trying, in my own way, to come to terms with a form of salesmanship that doesn't make me hate myself.
The point of the post was actually to just underline the importance of sales in our lives - and that everyone needs to sell in order to succeed. Many others have made this point before, which is fine. I believe that "honestly demonstrating its value to a demographic" is a form of selling and that improving the ability to sell will help achieve goals.
I appreciate your feedback. I know that some find my style distasteful and acknowledge that not everyone sees things this way. I will say that U have targeted this series toward people who are closer to the patio11 than used car salesman and this thread will help me adjust my future posts to get my message across better.
If you'd like any specific help, like notes on how your site and writing looks from my side of things, please don't hesitate to let me know. And I'm always open to feedback on my own site and writing (though you might not be my target audience, but, then again, I don't really know who is). Maybe we can even come to a mutually beneficial transaction.
I don't this is always a clear-cut choice. Sure, one can decice to say "fuck 'em" and just lie like the rest to game a corrupt system.
But, one almost inevitably one becomes cynic and bitter and hardened.
I think this is fundamental a choice one needs to make in life. If one wants to feel full feeling, then this goes for both pain and pleasure. And that just may not be conducive to being effective in a corporate environment.
My ideal as a developer is to project the same attitude to clients and bosses that I would like to have. It's not exactly my current attitude, but it would go something like this:
If I know how to do something "Yes, I can do that, I've done that before and I'm familiar with the steps."
If I don't "Yes, I can do that, I just need enough time to figure out how."
Abstracted to general product marketing "Yes, we can meet your needs with our current product or figure out a way to do so at a cost of x to you"
Any time that last statement turns out to be false in retrospect beyond some threshold (lets say 10% of the time), that's a sign of overselling. I guess the threshold is where some subjective fuzz comes into play. Likewise, the cost accuracy is important too (time also matters, but I'm rolling that into cost).
Integrity is about avoiding such statements when impossible or when needs are extremely high. They can still be said with large costs (I can build you Google maps, but it would take over ten years). A lot of this derives from Patio11's comment collection.
jasonshen: if you read this, thank you for the post. I really enjoyed it and admire the rejection therapy you've done in the past
In the abstract sense, everything is always tied to a narrative. Rhetorics is the art of juxtaposing different narratives and getting others to join yours. Sales would be a subset of that.
Heh, as long as you think this, you paradoxically should give yourself carte blance to go for what you want with confidence. Why? Because there isn't some perfect confidence level waiting beyond where you are at now; acceptance that one doesn't know everything is actually the highest possible position, confidence-wise, because at that point you have seen the truth of things and decided to become self-correcting.
People who feel that they are confident to do/know anything are actually one rung lower than true humility (although it's easy for a humble person to think those people have found some truth that we have yet to find, and give the cocksure more credit than they deserve).
It's when one loses true humility that one should watch out (Dunning-Kruger effect and all that).
Life is a balancing act between being too certain and being not enough certain. The holy grail of confidence is to become so without also becoming delusional and leaving oneself open to mistake.
I hope I made my point clear enough :) I spend a lot of time thinking about confidence vs delusion, and how to attain true confidence, but it's not always easy to unpack my thoughts for someone else's benefit.
"Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted."