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Comment by catboybotnet | Hacker News Reader

When all you have done is make daily meetings to justify your job so that your boss doesn't up and fire you: yes, you have a very pointless job.

I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling. Talk to an engineer, they'll tell you a paperclip holds paper. Talk to sales, you'll be on the line for an hour while he explains the majesty of the holy invention of paperclips, and why Paperclip Co.'s are the best. People who need paperclips will just buy them, bypassing the time sink.

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Tell me you’ve never been part of an RFP process without telling me you’ve never been part of an RFP process.

Sure, in some cases what you say is true, when you have an undifferentiated product in perfect competition with other products where potential customers have perfect information, a smoother spokesperson can make the difference.

But in complex sales, the sales staff’s job is to understand the client’s needs and opportunities well enough, then coordinate experts on their team to present promising solutions. A sales person who is a value add is going out and finding people with problems that can be solved with the company’s product, thus pulling a customer into increased productivity.

The role does not need to be a waste, even though many are wasteful.

Companies tend to really overestimate how differentiated their product is. Often these "value add" features are half baked or so situational that they can't be relied upon. I take them with a grain of salt and still frequently I'm disappointed.

I refuse to believe sales reps have a job that is needed after talking to hundreds of them in my line of work trying to procure things.

None of them have a brain. Not one.

There is a good reason companies generally don't want engineers dealing with customers until a project is underway at least. And even then they will always try to limit and control meeting time.

This is only half true.

Go to 1800 and a person that needs to get somewhere may have told you they needed a faster horse. The idea that fast personal mechanical transport would exist and would be widely available was still an idea to be sold. Even moreso, that you may not even have to 'go', the idea you could pick up a wire and communicate nearly instantly was still near magic.

I'm so tired of the "faster horse" meme.

To the end user, a car is a faster horse.

Once reasonably reliable automobiles were being built, the value add was plainly obvious.

This has been repeated so many times and debunked that I'm wondering if you're being sarcastic :)

> I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling.

This is true to the same degree that "engineering are there to take something that works and reinvent it in a shitty flavour-of-the-month framework that guarantees them extra work by breaking every day"

Sure, some of them make their entire living from doing that, some of them aren't above doing that when it'll work for them, but most of them do other things.

Also companies employ salespeople because (i) not everybody in the world knows every product they could ever want to buy exists and (ii) most people outside HN don't assume that nobody could ever answer their "does the product do this" questions (never mind make a useful suggestion of something they hadn't considered) or want to figure it out from first principles by reading the tech specs.

When I'm working on large purchases-- complex software systems usually-- I often have questions. Engineers want to do engineer-ish things, they usually don't want to talk to people who have questions like this.

"sell me this pen"

Arggh, can't believe I forgot this wonderful line. :)

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