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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again.

Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you're solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They're completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I've usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don't wreak unnecessary havoc on it.

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2...

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One hallmark of the truly great sales person is that they can sell the product they have rather than the one they wish you had.

Where are those employed? I have never seen it; from small companies to MS (and especially Oracle), from services to product companies. They don't right-out lie because they've actually been drinking the kool-aid so they do not really know that actually the stuff they sell is hard (impossible) to produce. I'm talking software here; no clue :) about other branches of business.

Sales guys are great fabulists for the most part, so in the absence of "blue sky" stuff for reveries w/potential customers, they will just start riffing on their own independently.

This is where a huge amount of the rub between sales-marketing and dev comes in. But this "imagine all the possibilities" type of stuff is pure crack in the sales-customer relationship.

So I try to fill the void for the sales guys so they won't be making stuff up on their own. That is, I take a lot of care/explaining to them what are some of the near term possibilities of our app that we haven't built out yet, but make sense, that sort of thing, how much it would cost, risk factors, etc.

Fill up their fantastical story buffer in advance w/stuff that is acceptable to me. This seems to work well with little friction because sales guys tend to be a lot less intransigent than devs/designers about features - basically, they care less about the substance of the story rather than simply how well it sells.

In short, I try to make my fantasies their fantasies as well.

I've worked with one or two of those (out of about something like a hundred, I'd guess). Both came from technology and had engineering degres but had figured out they preferred sales. I'm not sure that's the sole reason, but they really did grok how our solutions worked, what benefits they offered and how to map that to the customers desires and idiosyncrasies.

I come from technology, but when I have my sales-hat on, I become full-on sales and when clients ask me questions or when I ask them questions, I read their expressions and hold my own in any way to maximize sales. I find myself sometimes walking out of the clients' office thinking WTF did I just do?

How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf? And I am not sure that wolves stampede.

> How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf?

Simple example: there are a number of guns that can be converted from semi-automatic to full-automatic with very simple changes, removing a spring, filing something down, etc. If you've got a pack of wolves coming at you the rate of fire could certainly change the balance in your favor.

If you are equipped to hunt bear, I don't think you are using a semi-automatic.

It seems like we are getting into further trouble here. As this pack of wolves is stampeding (never heard of wolves stampeding, though) at you, removing the spring, filing something down might not be consistent with the very short period of time you have as this herd (?) of wolves is closing the gap on your, er, person.

If you are equipped to hunt bear, you are almost certainly not using an automatic. Any caliber high enough to drop a bear in one shot (which you want to do as to not ruin the bear) would break your arm into slivers were you to fire it at automatic speeds.

I'm no gun expert, never even fired one, but it seems there are many guns that would fit the bill. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOoUVeyaY_8&feature=plcp in particular, watch at about 5min point to see the (lack) of) recoil, put slugs in it and I would think you'd have no problem stopping a bear. This guy's You tube channel in general contains a lot of things that would not have a problem stopping a bear. That said many are not your average hunting equipment either, but I don't think anyone goes out with the plan of getting close enough to a bear to use a shotgun.

Yeah, I admit the metaphor was weak. I wanted to head to lunch. I was thinking a flock of wolves requires a different gun than a single bear unless you want to be flooded in wolves.

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