Be where your business is
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
Be where your customers are: forums, slacks, discords, social media bubbles, etc.
Cultivate real relationships and build authentically from within a community. Live alongside your customers instead of selling into a community from the outside. Interact with the community regularly instead of relying on a handful of periodic outreach responses to gather customer feedback.
That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corporate authority (factory yours?), solving on-the-ground problems as a passionate management person (not because of the money but because you like it).
When salespeople link to their product whenever a related topic comes up. Or they start a war arguing with all criticism, that’s bad.
You aren’t living alongside your customers by popping in and answering questions about your product when you get an alert that someone mentioned it on HN.
It really comes down to the sales hiring manager recognizing this passion/emotional investment in applicants and weighting it properly. And also having a pool of people with this passion who want to work sales at this employer to begin with! How often would this actually happen in practice?
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TL;DR you're mostly right, but Salespeople are still a distasteful necessity rather than something to be celebrated (without undermining any of your other points that it is fine, good, and morally permissible for people to sell things they've made or are working on).
Lest you dismiss me out-of-hand as another engineer who doesn't "get it", who is too hung up on technological purity and doesn't recognize that businesses are in the business of business, that you need to sell something in order to start the flywheel that lets you sell more things to get more money to build more things - trust me, I _do_ get it. I know that selling the product of your labours is essential for a) survival and b) being able to carry out more labours (I wish it weren't, but I recognize that that's the situation that we live in).
But you set up a false equivalence by simultaneously saying:
* '"Salespeople" are just people'
* 'people can be an authentic community member even if they happen to have something to sell to the community[...]if you regularly comment, ...then occasional self-promotion is fine[...]People act like if someone could possibly make a dime off something, it’s somehow morally abhorrent and must be stopped at all cost[...]It’s ok to make stuff then sell it and still interact with other humans. Selling stuff does not mutate you into an alien who can no longer authentically connect with another human'
The difference is that the latter examples are all well-intentioned and mutually-beneficial - a pre-existing community member (or, a new community member who already has ideals that align with the community) offering something that they genuinely believe will be of value. A Salesperson is not this. A Salesperson's intention is to intrude, deceive, and exaggerate to extract as much profit from a community as they can. A Salesperson has no interest in the well-being or survival of the community beyond its continued ability to be a source of profit. If that were not the case, _they wouldn't be a Salesperson in the first place_ - they would be a community member who happens to have things to sell (or recommend) to their community. The very act of defining their role as "focused on selling" - rather than "fostering a community" - presupposes this. If your job description is "Salesperson", and you go to your boss and say that you took an action that did not (and will not ever) result in more sales, but resulted in the community being healthier or more positive, you will be taken to task rather than congratulated (please do not "well actually" with the fact that "a more-healthy community will result in more future sales" - that is covered under "and will not ever").
As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely. Someone who shares the values, ideals, and intentions of a community selling to them is mutually beneficial and a net-good. Someone entering a community with the _intention_ of selling to them - a Salesperson - is much less likely to be beneficial, and more likely to be an exploitative snake. Maybe a "Salesperson" might actually make a worthwhile recommendation in a related thread ("You can sell useful stuff people want and are happy you offered") - good! Great! But they could have done that without _being_ a "Salesperson". They are, in a sense, not fulfilling their role there - they are instead acting in their role as community member (we can contain multitudes). Even if they were not employed as a Salesperson - even if they were in any other role in their company - and happened to notice that selling-opportunity, they could have taken it. The behaviours that are unique to a Salesperson are the harmful and distasteful ones - over-promotion, advertizing, astro-turfing, deception, cold-calling, pressure, intrusion.
But I know - I _know_ - that Salespeople are necessary for the growth and success of a company. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work if your competitors are actively advertizing. Simply building the world's best FooWidget is insufficient if no-one knows how great it is. You _need_ to get the word out that your product is awesome and will solve problems and can be bought for the low low price of $X.99, otherwise you won't get any money and you won't be able to keep making FooWidgets. But just because Salespeople are necessary for a particular goal (which is, itself, only worthwhile because we have not yet achieved Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism) doesn't mean we should approve of them. My body needs to take a shit every day, but I'm not exactly delighted about that fact. They fulfill an unfortunately-necessary purpose, but they make everything worse (or, at least, not-better) by so-doing.
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> 99.99% of the time these same people will flock to high paying employers regardless of whether those employers follow these unwritten rules
This is not hypocrisy. Society is currently set up such that you need a certain degree of excess wealth to be able to give things away for free (see my pining above for FALGSC). Accumulation of (a little bit of) extra wealth to someone who's going to use that excess to build something of value, is more of a social good than that same extra wealth accruing to someone who's going to use it on a second Lambo.
- If we're nothing but functions here, then why don't they just send robots?
- They don't send robots, Bob, for the simple reason, they haven't invented one yet. The day comes when they can build a robot to do what we do and make it work, then that's exactly what they'll do, precisely.
- But until that day, they send us.
> As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely.
Yeah, this feels like the problem to me. The unlikeliness of it is why there is such a distaste societally for salespeople, causing the blindness to the least evil type of sales person.
I sorta figured this out in another comment too. Thinking about the corporate mechanisms, sales hiring managers would need to weed people out properly based on them recognizing this balance. And on top of that, you would need a pool of applicants who actually have the personal investment in the community in the first place, or the potential to become personally invested. Very unlikely! Or so it feels across most sales hiring interactions.
> FALGSC
Haha, aaahh, if only
My suggestion is to put your money where your mouth is, and try it. You will most likely figure out soon enough that - like any almost any service job where you have a lot of independence - sales is really hard, nuanced and requires a lot of strategy, tactics and logistics.
There's a huge difference between someone who's using a phone script to book an appointment for a utility provider, and someone who is selling high ticket services like the one that most likely pays your wages. The fact that you've had a few people of the first scenario on the phone can give you a hugely wrong impression about sales (pars pro toto).
Sales can be as complex or simple as software development: there is a huge difference between someone who uses an if statement in an excel formula and somebody who builds an extremely optimized HFT system with FPGA or whatever they might use...
In fact, I think there might be lots of parallels to software architecture: you need to figure out the proper model that helps you to actually sell something: not only making sure the buyer has BANT (budget / time / authority / need), but also making the buyer aware that you exist, that he trusts you, what his triggers are, when he gets triggered, how the buyer process works, who your champion might be, macro-economical factors that make your sale a no-brainer, how the sector you're active in works, what your competitor landscape looks like, how the politics in the organisation work ...
Why do I have the need and think I have the authority to say this? I've been doing both sales and development, and being an IT guy first, my arrogance of "I can do sales and marketing too, it's just some ads / SEO / phonecalls and follow ups" has cost me almost a decade of opportunity cost. It's been a humbling and eye-opening experience that finally made me realize that - even though there are some jobs where you don't need your brain - a lot of jobs are way more complex than you can imagine. Parallels to "I can build that in a weekend" are not far away from "I could switch to a high end sales job by just reading a few books over the weekend".
So maybe acting authentically in sales role is doing the best you can (authentic to yourself and the customer) to a point where there comes to exist a conflict of interest with your employer?
Though, it still feels like there are too many constraints on your own authenticity? At all the jobs I've worked at, there existed a gap between who I was and what the company saw as an "ideal" me in practice (how I acted versus how HR or company policy or how higher ups would like people to act or how I've seen in brand guidelines for tone and word choice for social media). I feel like the individuality/mindset I bring to the table is a large part of why I'm paid for what I do. But if I applied the employer's constraints wholly and sincerely to myself without individual thought, I would most likely be awful at my job in practice. I feel these constraints apply much more in sales, as an agent of the company, you must _act_ like the company.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, and only truly hellish employers would want this. But it still feels, averaged over all employers, the "employer ideal" salesperson could not authentically act as an individual while being an agent of their employer. Which usually inspires distrust, and empathy at their constraints.
The real issue is too often, sales is often seen as a short-term thing - wow them, grab the money and move on to the next one. Whereas this approach is about trust and long-term relationship building (something old-school travelling salesmen used to often talk about). You might not get a sale from the person you recommended the competitor product to - but you will probably get several referrals ("these are really good people to deal with, and honest to boot - you should talk to them").
I agree with Steve's advice here. If you don't want to be in New York/SF/Wherever... don't. But accept choices have pros and cons.
E.g. I spent 7ish years in Los Angeles. Now I live in Asia. I'm having a great time here, but it _does_ mean there are certain California opportunities I have to say no to, and that's fine!
In this example, if the founder _really_ doesn't want to be in New York, make the decision one way or the other now, and commit to it. Trying to do multiple things at once will never be as efficient as focusing on one thing. You'll always be beaten by the person/team who has laser focus. You can have anything you want in life, just not all at the same time.
A great example I see of people trying to have everything at the same time is buying a house. They'll want a house they love that's ALSO an excellent investment. Usually what they end up with is a house they kinda like that's a mediocre investment.
This is provably incorrect
I will add that my most recent client is remote-only and in their thirties. No competitor can beat me by going "on-site" because there is no site and never will be.
I’d wager it’s deeper than that. Economies of scale force proximity in subtle ways. Finance shouldn’t need to be concentrated, but for a host of reasons most of it is, and a start-up looking to sell to it benefits from proximity. Even crypto largely retread those old paths.
That said, there are business which do not benefit from this sort of scaling. They will be dispersed. If the supplier similarly doesn’t have scaling economies, something I’d argue most non-Fortune 500 consulting does not, then yes, remote-remote will win.
For what it’s worth, I work 90% remote. And I’m in a sales-type capacity. But the only people I work with almost entirely remotely are those who are themselves remote. And even then, in-person meetings usually add value.
I do buy into getting on a plane or having someone local. That generally speeds up and increases close rate + renewal. But if you nail distribution or PLG.. can run enterprise sales much more efficiently and without as big a hit, and reinvest that saved $ elsewhere. But that's a high bar. More reliable to take heavy VC $ and burn it on expensive field staff to paper over all the gaps and hope accounts don't churn too fast. Things change again as a market saturates, but for new categories, all this is pretty established in b2b..
Edit: why the downvotes?
You shouldn’t be receiving downvotes for stating something that people choose to do everyday which is move their families for better opportunities.
An equally valid position is: don’t cap the size of your addressable market to just people who live in the place you work.
An oil & gas start-up in San Francisco is going to have a tougher time than one in Houston. You don’t see those much. But you do see e.g. agtech in the Bay Area flying out weekly salespeople to Iowa. It’s trivial for a competitor to undercut them on credibility alone.
That said, I think this is more pertinent to sales than other fields. And for some businesses, proximity to capital trumps proximity to customers.
I guess you could argue those businesses should be in Sacramento instead of San Jose.
But example aside, I do agree with your overall point.
Just wanted to point out that even before accounting for industry size, there’s just more profit sloshing around California’s ag industry which makes it easier to square market fit with the returns VCs desire.
For example if you work with certain industries here in Europe (Luxury, Pharma, Automative) but your development team is - due to shortage of talents in europe - in the US. Where shall you be?
> Erin’s VP of sales had just bought a condo in Miami to be next to her aging parents […]
>
> Her VP of Sales might be wonderful, but with the all the travel the company is only getting her half-time. Erin needs a full-time head of sales in New York. Time to have a difficult conversation.
IMO there’s always a way to do both. If there really isn’t, choose family.
Not sure why fired versus put on different comp and maybe asked to vacate the VP of Sales role.
I'm not so sure. I mean, yes it's needlessly cruel, but that's the message that I get from a lot of people who subscribe to hustle culture. You are worth the value of your output plus nepotism minus your comp. People with families are ghosts, don't talk to them.
Usually there’s no free lunch. But focus on the important stuff in life, you’ll be happier and have fewer regrets.
It’s not motivational hustle crap though - that CEO must make a decision around allocating resources there.
How on earth do people do this? This is 3 hours of flight time each way 4 days a week...do they do something like fly 6am-9am, work 10am-5pm, fly 6pm-9pm, then do it all again the next day (this is also giving woefully small buffer times)? Or am I misunderstanding? Sounds awful.
In fact, that way of life might mean you work more hours if anything. If you live in Miami and work four days a week in NYC, you are likely working very long days. You are not near your friends or family or your chores… that could be four days devoted exclusively to work, say 12-14 hours a day, followed by a Friday working remotely. I can see why a salesperson might need to be in person 4 days a week. But I have a hard time imagining that five days is necessary. VP of Sales has plenty of administrative work to do, and many meetings can be over the phone anyway.
To call this employee “half time” is insane.
Huh, this choosing family is a kind of luxury not everyone can afford. Otherwise we would not have mass migration of working people across cities, states, countries and continents leaving families behind. Unless of course they are all stupid enough to not know the value of family.
There are loads of 20-50 person small businesses who raised money in many different ways ( from personal savings to bank loans to customer prepays ). Many of those likely started with a small number of people, growing over many decades one paying customer at a time.