The best sales people I've worked with were incredible strategic thinkers and not really sales people at all.
They built an intimate knowledge of their customer and their industry, built strong connections with the top brass of their client by delivering exceptional work that got those people promoted, and were really good at building autonomous teams that could get the (exceptional) work done with their guidance on the customer/industry/client. These folks would also often deliver very difficult messages to their clients, which often resulted in more business not less.
The sleazy sales people can build decent pipelines/sales numbers but they are not what I would ever label as 'elite'.
There is the guy at the car dealership who specializes in adding an extended service contract for your new car.
Then there's the guy who sells a software development project that lands a well qualified customer (joy to work with) and a good specification which was well estimated and price so you can complete the work profitably. Maybe you know nothing about formalwear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in.
Sales are maligned for good reason. I'd wager I've experienced the "you know nothing about formal wear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in" salesperson a handful of times. Now, the number of times I've had someone try to sell me something while clearly not listening to what I have to say and getting uncomfortably pushy about it, well... yikes.
Two types of sales philosophies:
1. It doesn't matter what you're selling, it's about the sales technique.
2. Develop deep domain and customer expertise.
The former is the scammy type, the latter is the type we love to work with.
But the same is true in any industry. Too many of us in technology are doing the technology equivalent of 1--becoming experts in C++ or React--instead of becoming deep domain and user experts.
In software I like the person knows C++ or React in and out and I like the person who understands the domain, UX and such. I want both on the team.
I despise the guy who sells extended service contracts at the car dealership. I sure as hell don't want that guy selling software work because I won't be able to complete the work profitably and I'll be dealing with angry customers who don't trust me.
Engineers are awful too. The number of times I have been subjected to needlessly bad product designs far exceeds my negative interactions with sales people. And then there are the products that fail at their one function.
Not to mention the type of telemarketing salespeople being ragged on here are the equivalent of "software engineers" in bottom bracket outsourcing companies whose principal skills are installing WordPress templates and making excuses...
To take an extreme example:
Selling a starving person a meal doesn't just extract the price value, but creates it too.
You might argue that there are better or more efficient was of creating that value, but the fact that it is created is inescapable.
If you want to make a utilitarian value argument against it, you need to compare it to a real world alternative subject to scrutiny that is just as harsh, not a perfect world one.
Engineers can create things that don't have value and salespeople can create value by matching problems with solutions, there are a lot of things we all very happily pay for after all. It's just not that simple.
Good salespeople are trying to connect customers with solutions that provide them value that they otherwise wouldn't have access to (generally because they weren't aware of it). Obviously, in practice, the line between that and the more negative experiences can be fuzzy and vary by one's perspective, but unless you have someone in-house who's dedicated to searching for new solutions... And then, they turn into a sort of salesperson themselves, with ambiguous allegiances. At least someone from the outside is someone you will always be skeptical about.
What a bad, reductive point of view. While it's true there are shitty bad salespeople (as there are engineers), try selling anything without doing any selling of the product. Once the company gets to a certain size, having someone work on sales full time instead of getting an engineer who doesn't whan to do that work, work on that part time.
Low-recurrence and low-value sales are almost entirely about exploiting information asymmetry. Most peoples’ sales experiences are almost entirely low value. (Low here meaning the client isn’t going to do independent diligence and doesn’t have the capacity and willingness to retaliate if screwed.)
The first type is vastly more common than the second. So I don't think it's unfair to malign sales in general. And if I'm buying a suit I need a skilled tailor to alter it to fit me, not someone to convince me to buy a suit - if I'm in the suit store I already know I want a suit and for what purpose.
> The first type is vastly more common than the second.
Depends- you might not even qualify non-type-1s as sales people. Especially the type that's trying to help you get what you need, and listen to you in the process.
How does someone become someone who sells the software development project? Is this an architect or sales engineer? I’m confused by how a sales engineer would gain the level of expertise needed to sell the project and specs/implementation.
While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better. It's also true that some sales people learn enough about coding to be dangerous and transition to sales engineering that way.
While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better.
Note that car dealerships are like that because the dealership cannot offer you the later. You go into the dealer having looked up their cost on Edmunds/kbb/... and are determined to give them zero profit from the sale. Worse you know (right or wrong) what you want to buy and so they can't even provide the service of listening to your needs and getting you in the right car.
In theory you should have better luck by walking in and saying I'll pay MSRP (thus giving them a reasonable profit) if you don't add all that other BS. In practice they won't know how to do that because nobody else does
Having just went through the process of buying a car, and the amount of work, research and effort needed on my part to ensure that I didn't pay through the nose on a car, this is, in my opinion, squarely in response to the car sales industry almost universally adopting predatory sales tactics.
If I could go into a dealership and trust that everyone in the building wasn't out to get me, and instead wanted to build a longterm relationship with me from sales to service, advertised the actual cost of the vehicle instead of a BS pre-fees, pre-additional markup price, then I wouldn't do that. Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole story, but as I understand it the dealerships changed their behavior first, and the customer _had_ to get more savvy as a result.
You put enough customer predatory sales practices everywhere, and you raise a generation who just doesn't trust sales staff. It doesn't have to be this way though.
I gotta be careful though, I'm dangerously close to getting on my soapbox about how difficult it is to be a sustainable lifestyle business in today's day, and how much I wish a return to that.
Okay, I've worked at a company that had that kind of sales. It is indeed very impressive to see. But I think that worked because there were only a small number of vendors who could potentially deliver for these (giant) customers in the first place. Otherwise the immense investment to attempt to land one of these customers would have too low a chance of paying off.
Although they have the same title I think it's a different job to when there are a lot of options for the customer.
> The sleazy sales people can build decent pipelines/sales numbers but they are not what I would ever label as 'elite'.
Absolutely. I have had the pleasure of working with a few elite sales people and none of them were sleazy. They were all extremely confident on the inside, but present as humble and even a little vulnerable on the outside. This is strategic as it builds trust, but I think it was also genuine for the most part -- they really wanted their customers to be happy and they wanted their customers to know that.
They dress nicely, but again in a humble way. They're not quite as polished looking as the "slick" sales people, and this too is part of their strategy. They can pull out a post it note or notebook and sketch a rudimentary diagram they've drawn a thousand times, and every time it looks like they just thought of this idea and are drawing it with wavy lines for the first time. I'm not sure if this one is intentional, but they all do it, and it always looks like they don't know how to draw straight lines.
I actually ran into someone like this at lens crafters recently. They were quite young, early to mid 20s I'd say, but after a few minutes of them telling me about the various lens options, I stopped and said, "You're the top salesperson here aren't you?" They gave me a funny look, and asked how I knew. "Just a guess" I said -- but in reality, I had seen all of their human dark-patterns before. Most people wouldn't even know they were being sold to, in fact, they would probably think the opposite... that the salesperson didn't care if they bought anything from them as long as they got the right solution from somebody in the end. Some of them will literally even say that. Of course, this only works when it is 100% believable and you don't identify it as part of their sales strategy.
How does a salesperson deliver exceptional work? In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.
> In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.
Have you ever worked at a place where the sales people promised features that didn't exist? A bad sales person can ensure you're in the trenches doing work that is urgent but not important. A good sales person anticipates requirements, identifies when they're not currently available, and proactively works with the right people to get the important features prioritized strategically.
The sales people talk to the customers, so from a certain perspective they're the ones in the trenches and talking to customers while you're in the back office plugging away at a keyboard.
This is software sales, which has long cycles, ongoing relationships and is a tiny sliver of the "hires salesmen" industry. For commoditized markets like phone plans, cable TV / ISPs, paper, or roof repairs after a hurricane, the ones who get the most sales are the ones without scruples.
> For commoditized markets like phone plans, cable TV / ISPs, paper, or roof repairs after a hurricane, the ones who get the most sales are the ones without scruples
You’re describing low value, low recurrence sales. Those are numbers, not relationship, games, with high churn at that.
I think low recurrence is the bigger factor for sleaziness: roof replacement aren't low value, same goes for the archetype for sleazy sales tactics: car salesman.
> roof replacement aren't low value, same goes for the archetype for sleazy sales tactics: car salesman
They’re low value, comparatively speaking. High-value sales starts where your client can afford to do their own diligence and retaliate if you screw them; that’s typically around the $10+ million level.
I've worked adjacent to technical consultants for a decade, and in tech sales leadership for the past few, and there's a lot of misleading information in this thread.
For one, there's a huge gulf between product sales and services sales. In product sales roles you'll almost never find people who are strategic advisors to their clients. Why would they be -- they'll selling products? On the other hand, in roles responsible for selling services (which may also include products, from a single or multiple vendors), you'll be far more likely to see strategic thinkers focused on business transformation or business outcomes.
That said, there are also very good reasons why even at big consulting shops (Deloitte, Accenture, BCG, EY, etc) the roles of Client Partner or Client Account Lead (the person on the hook for client revenue) is the one responsible for client relationships and client contracting, but is usually not the one providing strategy or technology advice. That comes cross-functionally.
In small tech product companies -- especially where the product isn't just plug & play -- my experience is that the sales rep is responsible for contracting and business relationships, but it's the technical pre-sales architects & the post-sales service delivery manager + architects who are providing the most value. It's exceptionally difficult to hire rockstars senior architects and always will be. It's one of the most in-demand roles in tech.
We had a sales guy that the rest of the office hated, but whom I absolutely loved. He'd sell the craziest shit. E.g. him and I attempted to replace a customers Kubernetes stack with Azure websites and CosmosDB, saving them two years of hosting the first month (We failed because the client didn't feel like we where being serious).
At one point he sold a project that would lead to his termination and it was the most brilliant sale I've ever seen. A customer wanted monitoring and a 24/7 "operation center", but one which didn't have access to any systems. We'd channel alerts from the customer into our on-call, which would then phone the customers staff and tell them that "YO! X is broken" and hang up. The price was insane, is was free money, but the customer was excited and felt like they got a great deal.
That was a major part of it. I never completely understood why, but for some reason the majority of the staff really hated that project. I though it was a brilliant move. The problem may have been that people attempted to over-engineer the project and handle scenarios that wasn't in scope, setting unrealistic goal resulting in a lot of pretty dumb and boring work.
Another part was that was yet another service which we technically didn't offer, which he sold. He was always very upfront about the fact that he knew that a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do. That pissed of a lot of people, but in hindsight, five years later: He sold the right things and we should embraced those sales/potential sale, because the local market has moved in the direction he was going.
> a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do
This may not be the situation but I’m willing to bet he created an insane amount of chaos for everyone else by doing this. Existing projects constantly getting delayed or cancelled because he sold something that wasn’t planned for.
At my last job, we had a department who delegated all of their quarterly goals to the development team. They made us responsible for accomplishing their goals on top of everything else we were doing.
They delayed critical projects for years for marginal gains.
I once worked for a company that sold industry cleaning supplies in the food processing vertical. The amount of industry knowledge that salespeople required to simply be able to offer one product over another was staggering. The best salespeople knew the industry, the end products, the supply chain, the internal processes, the potential improvements, and could present it in a way that was clear to operators, technical to supervisors, and commercially viable to decision makers.
My archetype of a good sales person is the successful realtor. Realtors tend to “eat what they can kill”, so you can see the skills power law clearly. They are selling themselves more than houses, but there’s a lot to learn from that.
Some people love their realtors, although they do very little for their outlandish commissions. They do however, guide you through the process and give you transactional advice. Like any sales person, they generally have an interest in the transaction closing but they are only trusted if they come off as acting in your interest. That trust can ultimately help the transaction close — this is the line that I think good sales people walk.
I think you value their work too little. I worked as a realtor for a time and admittedly not a good one.
A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services.
There is often an element of buffering communication between buyer and seller, but it's not just a trust problem. Due to their different interests and perspectives, they will tend to communicate in ways that could offend the other party inadvertantly. A good realtor is skilled in smoothing this over and being more objective.
As an aside, the term realtor is trademarked and is something on top of real estate agent, but for the American public the realtor association has been so successful that almost every agent joins.
At the time I did this work, the requirements for licensing were indeed too lax in my state and therefore a commensurate number of lower quality agents. Which of course feeds the impression that agents are useless, because it was more true.
My understanding is that licensing the has since tightened.
None of that detracts from the fact that a good agent does quite a bit of work to build up knowledge, and to assist through a huge transaction that most people will seldom make and therefore more likely mess up.
Unfortunately this work is also often spent doing things that never lead to a transaction, such as multiple showings to buyers prior to finding a fit, or preparing listings that ultimately fail to sell for whatever reason. These costs need to be accounted for somehow, so we end up thinking only of the services rendered in our dealings.
I realize I have even more to say but I gotta stop sometime...
>A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services.
Even if a "good" Realtor actually knows these things (and they don't, even though most think they do), you can't trust anything they say because they have misaligned incentives from you. So what service am I paying for, again?
And if only .001% of Realtors are "good", what does it even matter? You're not likely to be able to find a "good" one anyway. And if I do how do I verify they are "good?" You can't. And you straight up can't change your mind about who you are working with midway through the process, you sign a contract.
If I want home buying/selling services I should be able to pay a fixed fee (either per service or per hour) and get those services on the open market (and pay for them even if I don't close). Them demanding 6% of the value of my house is straight criminal. As is, the buyers agent works for the seller, because that's who is paying them.
>My understanding is that licensing the has since tightened
You're wrong. Even if they have tightened, any dingus can still get a real estate license.
Real estate agents are the house version of used car salesman.
Incentives should be aligned because you will use that agent again if they do a good job for you. Not all realize this, but repeat moves (every 5-10 years) and referrals are how good agents make their money and both mean that they need to be trustworthy.
> And you straight up can't change your mind about who you are working with midway through the process, you sign a contract.
You don't have to, those contracts are optional. They will threaten to not represent you, but if you are a well qualified buyer, this is something you can force without much risk.
The more well qualified buyers refuse, the more normalized working for clients without contracts will be
Realtors have for years committed antitrust violations to the detriment of home buyers and sellers and helped push home values up for no reason because they act in their own interest instead of their client’s. A realtor’s ultimate goal is to close the deal at any price, not get you a good deal. They are beholden to the sell side. They were a key reason for the housing crash of 2008. They offer very little value in 2025, and the value they do offer is sourced from their monopoly practices. They are strictly rent seekers (no pun intended).
As a seller, they can handle all the visits for you - no need to take calls from potential buyers, arrange times with them to show them the house, etc. This becomes almost indispensable if you live far away from the house you're selling.
As a buyer, they also provide convenience - sometimes I've seen 3 or 4 different apartments in two hours, which would almost certainly be impossible if I needed to contact and arrange time slots with 4 different sellers. They also filter properties with unrealistic prices - I have seen many owners who have massive bias, having grown in the house, etc., and will charge like 100K over reasonable prices. A good realtor would probably not even show you that home or warn you beforehand so you don't waste your time.
In my country, they also help with the bureaucracy associated with actually performing the purchase, which is far from trivial - although this can vary per country, I guess.
They exist because they've embedded themselves in the process and are hard to get rid of. If you want to buy a specific house it's already set up for you to find a realtor and the homeowner has already agreed to pay them a fat stack of cash. I needed a realtor to send an email, he dragged his feet then went on vacation, and I ended up overpaying to beat offers that showed up later. Rent seekers.
I'm sort of concerned that some people have "their realtor". I've sold a few houses, realtors are companies I contract to sell my house and they can be fired.
Precisely! Rather than sell a lot my nr 1 priority was to have enjoyable conversations. nr 2 is to explain the company.
I aced it but at the time it didn't seem like elite sales, not to anyone, not even to me. I just felt this is how it should be done.
Then I ran into a manager 3 years after I quit. He said, I don't know how you've done it but we still get clients from your work, a lot of them.
Apparently, when people [actually] need something they look at some business directory. If they then see a name they know and remember having an enjoyable conversation where they've learned all the ins and outs from someone who didn't even try to sell them anything... who do you think they are going to call?
I was able to do thousands of calls per day because I wasn't trying to force anything and the process was enjoyable.
If there is one trick to share here: Make people talk, listen to them, pay close attention to the speed at which they talk and the duration of their pauses then gradually try to match it. If someone is super energetic and talks really fast I unload the material on them slightly faster, make a joke and thank them for their time. If they talk slow feed them one sentence at a time and have them confirm they got it.
I'm pretty sure people were quite confused by my not trying to sell them anything. this is what we do, this is what we offer, thanks for listening, enjoy your day I already know they aren't buying. I could definitely add a 3 minute grind to the end but why? Waste energy annoying people? Better get to the next customer.
Yeah... "elite" tends to mean different things at different levels.
There are definitely "salesmen" with long term industry credibility, relationships and such. Probably reads as more of a "businessman" than salesman, regardless of how the bread is buttered.
That said, I think this is fundamentally different from a Salesman who can join, start or lead a sales team and start putting up sales numbers.
It's inglorious work, ultimately. Not a tone of respect for the salesman.
That said... in terms of performance... there are totally different levels here. For some businesses, this can be a key hire of the highest order. Equivalent to ceo, cto and such... potentially.
Also, worse salesmen in trashier sectors tend to be more visible. A lame pressure sales guy will just seem more salesman. They'll also work colder pipelines and leads, annoy more people.
> That said... in terms of performance... there are totally different levels here. For some businesses, this can be a key hire of the highest order. Equivalent to ceo, cto and such... potentially.
Absolutely. Used to do Sales Engineering, and the different Account Execs were light years apart, even when you looked at the top performers. Definite 80/20 rule here.
In the telecom industry/ISP infrastructure business, the very best sales people are much more like business intelligence/market research people. They know where everyone's infrastructure is in a given region, for fiber cable routes, right of way, POPs, and what carrier is riding on top of which one. Knowing who owns and operates the underlying dark fiber route, DWDM systems, regen huts and similar on a multi state region is what gives them the power to be so effective.
Being able to operate from a position of confidence and assurance on "who has what, where" is a very powerful tool. Then, when communicating with potential customers (particularly where it's one ISP entering into a relationship with another ISP), they can offer the correct product for what the customer is looking for. Or, if they can't, they can quickly say "sorry no we can't do that, we don't have any of our own stuff there, and we can't get there by an NNI".
No no no, endulging in fancy diners with industry, running around with gifts and selling from gorrila size vendor catalog is job well done, but not ELITE. Cold sales are KING.
The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual.
I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS
I was talking to a sales person at Research in Motion back when Blackberry and mobile enterprise email were hot; asked him how things are. He replied it was like selling oxygen, he would walk in and take an order for how many they wanted. Every RIM salesperson looked like an amazing sales person based on sales metrics.
Also the inverse is true. A great sales team can disguise a mediocre product team.
That's the difference between being a great salesman and having great sales. Any idiot can sell something that's in demand. It takes a genius to sell something that nobody wants. It's better to be the idiot.
I worked (in sales engineering) at such a company with a market-leading product. For a few years there, at the height of the market/mindshare dominance for their main product, I observed a recurring theme:
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.
That's fair. I should amend my comment. Even stuff that's highly in demand often has competitors with equivalent products, and often the products are complex and business relationships need to be maintained and there are a thousand and one complexities to understanding and executing the business. I apologize for the "any idiot" line.
But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
> But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
Definitely. Another big driver is recurring relationships, either with customers or a larger peer selling community[0]. Most people won't buy more than once from someone unreliable, and ethical people generally don't want to work alongside or be associated with unethical people. Sales people that have options will gravitate towards products/companies they think they can sell more of and most won't consider working for companies that make useless crap or companies that can't or won't support what they make.
0 - think multi-tier tech sales, where you might have an OEM that makes a product, a distributor that either holds stock on the product or handles receivables for the OEM, and a VAR who might directly sell the product to an end-user, all with sales reps that work together on most (or all) deals.
The non market leading company sometimes do very well if/where they have good sales. The easy mode is work for the market leading company while the others don't have great sales staff. But if the others have great sales staff your job as the market leader becomes much harder - your market leading position ensures you are invited to the table when something is bought, but it doesn't ensure you have the sale. (the non-market leaders sometimes are not even invited to the table even when their offering is clearly better)
I saw this when I worked for a SaaS that was incredibly dominant in some countries, and almost non-existent in others (where an incumbent player was dominant).
Every year or so top performing sales and marketing folks from the dominant countries would be tapped on the shoulder and tasked with growing the company in our less dominant markets. Everyone failed.
Even well-known product lead companies like Atlassian employ sales reps, especially at the enterprise and strategic levels, because demonstrating value to the end user is only a part of the sales process. There's lots of additional work that's closer to project management that's required to close a deal. It's identifying and aligning stakeholders, helping to justify budget by putting together a business case for leadership and finance teams who won't directly interface with the product and need to be sold on it's value. This is the sort of thing high level business to business sales reps spend a ton of time doing.
Huh? You absolutely still need sales people even with a market leading product. It sells itself, sure, but someone needs to work with the client and close the best possible deal.
What this guy is describing is called "grifting." A "grifter" is "a person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling."
I've done millions of dollars in sales, and have been sold to by elite salespeople (e.g. buying data centre capacity, software, etc). There are a few tricks to the game:
* An "elite salesperson" is essentially a "rolodex." They have relationships with potential buyers.
* It's usually a "2 person show." An "elite salesperson" who does all the smooth talking and a "technical sales assistant" who answers all the technical questions.
* It's a "consultative process." You figure out what the client needs, and then come up with a solution to sell.
* "Elite salespeople" choose what product or service they are willing to sell and can identify a possible market leading product before they agree to do the job.
It still works this way. If you're a seller and don't work this way or don't know the game, you'll probably find yourself looking for a new job every year.
You should separate between inbound and outbound sales. If you work at AWS you are receiving a lot of inbound inquiries which make sales much easier than doing outbound work. In the case of top companies such as AWS, their marketing team performed a big part of the work while in small companies marketing cannot move the needle with a minimal budget, so they should be smarter, lucky, etc.
> The better you are at selling, the more debased your life becomes, as everything is reduced to a transaction, a leveraging of the smallest edge
I think that's the essence of having a sales mindset if I had to explain it. It's really hard to convey what it means and I think only those that worked close with people with this talent would have a chance to know what this really means. Sales is an art on top of a very technical game, where you have an unlimited number of secret knobs to balance. It's like seeing chefs or f1 drivers performing at their best, and as such it's not just about grit, you also need talent on top.
Isn’t the point being made in that passage that the better you are at sales, the more you treat your loved ones as customers you can transactionally extract value from by leveraging your sales tactics, rather than just… loving them? I don’t see how this connects to your comment on chefs and F1 drivers needing both grit and talent.
‘“Doris, what if I throw in a $50 calling card?” mutates into “I’ll be charming at your office Christmas party if you do the dishes this month,” aimed at a befuddled partner who may or may not have yet realized that what they thought was a partnership is in fact closer to a mutual exploitation.’
So yes, it’s not at all about some preternatural gift for perception or intuition that the parent commenter shoehorned in. Less artful, more “gross”.
I see it with relatives in who are always thinking they should be working on closing the next deal rather than at the aquarium with their kids. The incentive structure feels almost corrosive.
> We were victims. Therefore, we had license to take whatever measures were necessary. Once this worldview sets in, it’s very difficult to break out of, not least because it often feels so perfectly just.
One of many nuggets of wisdom in this excellent text.
It’s weird to meet people who look for the short-term gain in every single situation.
Especially if they’re semi-talented but perennially “unlucky”. Usually trading on a curated public image or “likability” backed by nothing but positive sounding words and shifting excuses. Unable to build anything sustainable because they piss off every person with the ability to make them rich.
Walk away. Remember them as they were; and write them off.
Entertaining piece, the writing is very good. But the author was honest enough to tell us he had no problem lying at anytime when working as a salesman, so I take this article as a work of fiction (although I am sure that part, or perhaps most of it, is true).
> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States.
Oh neat, how?
> Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.
[…]
> I was one of the first to go, technically for not making my required disclosures—about cancellation fees, international rates, all that fine print nobody ever bothered to recite—on a sale.
So, he and his boss did crime together for a while and then eventually their scam stopped working and he got fired.
Articles like this are valued not based on how noble is the protagonist but based on how truthful is the account. The latter is of course not granted either but I would be even less inclined to believe a story of an airtight telemarketer.
In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how". From that perspective I enjoyed this read quite a bit.
> In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how".
“How could you” is a rhetorical question to which the asker already knows the answer they would be given, which is almost invariably “because I lack empathy”.
To reward positive stories that include crime, just because other people "might also be doing it" is ehhh. That's literally what criminals tell themselves, that everyone else does it.
For a liar and a cheater, it's basic modus operandi to tell you some of their lies to give themselves a veneer of honesty.
Agree with you in some sense, it is what it is, but why trust anything else they say to "rescue the story"? That's the game they play.
Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?
The little in the story that speaks about the author, is necessary as a vehicle to narrate the experience.
The crux of the story is sales, and how it worked. The core point was the dehumanization, as well as the people who are the most effective in this era.
Also, I can appreciate someones shoes, while acknowlding they are a terrible person. Style isnt the causative factor for criminality or bad decision making.
> Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?
I think that this is the way how most reasonable/average people will view it? Reading the article doesn't make me think: "Gee, I should swindle some people out of a lot of money for personal gain!" but rather feel happy that my own career doesn't put me in a spot where I'd need to do anything similar to that.
And even if someone does take that as a playbook, it's not like the article is advocating for that or that author would benefit from that (e.g. like the lifestyle gurus and self-proclaimed pros at anything, that are almost always selling courses, often coupled with a get rich scheme).
This is not... good sales. This is making the numbers. The customers acquired with this method are not good customers.
To future salespeople in here: please work on selecting customers carefully, and pitch only to great two-way fits. That way, both customer and your organisation will thrive.
I get that the salesperson is judged by volume closed, but this gives the rest of the organisation churn problems to deal with.
I can’t remember if it’s against HN rules to implore people to read the actual article.
The reason he became good at selling (according to the article) is because he changed his attitude despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment.
It’s an interesting and probably helpful lesson for the startup hustlers here on HN if they can make it through this admittedly long essay.
Yeah, but you are, at least seemingly, missing the point: the scripts he was referring to in context weren't the legal disclosures but the sales tricks that were handed to them to use. He is pointing out that the 'elite' saleswoman wasn't better at strategy or sales tricks, but was effective because she made them feel good.
The article was also written by someone who is not a reliable narrator.
The type of person who would skip the legally required stuff while working as a telemarketer is exactly the kind of person who'd tell you he got fired for a "technicality", while he was actually fired because he was breaking the law and lying to customers.
Especially considering that even the unreliable narrator himself admits he was one of the first ones to be fired - why would you fire the best employee first if it wasn’t for cause?
It is against the rules to imply that the person you are responding to hasn’t read the article, but I don’t think it is against the rules to implore the community to read it, generally.
Also just to be more explicit, people can (should) read the article and decide. It is not super long and it is engagingly written. I think the author is kind mythologizing his job… there’s clearly a fraud component to how he got better, and a skill improvement component. It isn’t obvious which contributed more from his telling, and given that his telling is probably inclined to put him in a good light, I lean toward the fraud.
I doubt there is such a thing as good sales from telemarketing. It's almost by definition a way to make a buck with no cares whatsoever if the person will ever return.
This whole thing feels like drawing blood from stone. If your company/industry is abusive and miserly, you can go above and beyond and still make a pittance. If you put in the effort, the years, whatever, what you could get is a token recogniton of your efforts like raising your wages from minimum wage to 30% above that.
Poverty, scarcity and desperation drives people to evil. If you work a stable job for a respectable wage for an industry that makes money, and is willing to share said money with you, all this stuff sounds strange to you.
All the machiavellian scheming and power games that take place in a call center on the shift manager level might only show up close to C-level in an IT company, as its only there that the opportunities grow scarce enough, and the people desperate enough that these darwinian environments arise.
US consumer protection law is actually fairly feeble compared to, say, the EU equivalents, generally (for a particularly dramatic example see treatment of EULAs and similar). The US does seem keen on making regulations terribly _complex_, but not particularly strong.
The occasional, feeble, rarely enforced speed bumps that we occasionally throw up around some largely performative ideal that working people shouldn’t just get constantly ripped off via structural advantage for self-styled job creators almost always lead to temporary increases in broad based prosperity as judged by honest and humane notions of the common good for Res Publica. A limited but meaningful subset of the population was seeing substantial increases in prosperity in the post war period of comparatively high taxation and comparatively high regulation. It sucks that we didn’t extend those benefits to minorities, that was a glaring flaw, but that was fixable without throwing the whole thing out and handing the reins over to Art Laffer and Milton Friedman and other goblins like that.
This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.
We’re now deep into a regression on this that has the typical person struggling via a combination of monopoly and monopsony pricing power enabled by blank check lobbyism that creates de facto indentured status for anyone with a kid who needs medication.
Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.
Alas, the straw man you argue against doesn't exist. (Though my adopted homeland of Singapore probably comes closer than the so called Land of the Free.)
Remember: even Bill Gates had to fight for a decade or so to get his favourite car imported. And that was when he was the richest guy on the planet. Bloomberg and Romney lost their bids for the presidency against much poorer opponents with less support from the rich. You guys still have minimum wage laws on the books, too. Rent control and price controls ('anti-price gouging laws') are ever popular. To name just a few examples.
> This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.
Please don't brand Milton Friedman as some kind of slavery advocate.
> Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.
I don't think they make much of a difference on way or another. But you are right, that thanks to relatively freer markets, more and more people can enjoy the ignorance of bliss of not knowing what hunger feels like. That's how progress looks like.
It is beyond dispute that liberalizing the markets in a society is an almost guaranteed way to lift a society out of a confused manufacturing sector and into a much better organized manufacturing sector: markets are a much better way to price cars and consumer electronics than planning committee guesses. No one disputes that other than Jensen Huang.
But using a log scale and a ruler to apologize for flagrant grift is nothing to do with capitalism, markets, democracy, common sense, or humanity.
Rent seeking is the original sin of capitalism: don’t take my word for it, re-read your Adam Smith and pay attention this time.
And if by “you guys” you mean advocates for the broader public?
Between Suchit and Felix in the last few months alone? Hard ass hackers with a conscience are dropping like flies but we learn fast, so bring a fucking platoon from Triple Canopy if you can convince Katis it’s the play.
tbf, this is to sales what "I developed a shell script that automatically appends extended comments and now I'm the highest line-of-code outputting developer in my cheap IT outsourcing company" is to software development....
It varies to be honest, the one in the article - telemarketing, or broader speaking, selling something they don't need to someone - is scummy. But when working in IT you have to make a decision on a solution, be it a library, a service, or something like that; the role of sales becomes more difficult then, and will involve presentations, live demos, POCs, etc.
It's less about sales being a difficult medium to respect.
There might be more about the people and the behaviour they are choosing. Like anything it has to be managed, because it's only a sale when the customer is satisfied to retain the sale, let alone renew.
Getting good at helping qualified leads can be just fine.
If inbound is garbage, it invites less than ideal behaviour.
My company is a division in a political minefield that is the greater organization. In particular, my company is filled with people who have spent their entire careers as rank and file workers with their heads down and never had to develop the political savvy to steer through the minefield.
I don't know how many times I've told, and to how many coworkers, if the enemy is going to hang himself, stop talking and give him more rope.
So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?
I'm getting the strangest feeling that maybe this guy isn't done peddling bullshit?
I thought it was a series of realizations - First he learned to stop sounding like he hated his job, and focus on making the other persons feelings. This got him to people saying "yes".
To close more, he started dropping the disclosures and sending people to the next department.
The point you are raising does make sense, I suppose the lesson for him was getting to yes, and then ensuring you dont blow the lead. Which I suppose is the core lesson to selling. You cant sell if people get out of the flow.
And he does allude to this, that the economy is small constant hustles that convince people to buy things, as opposed to the sterile idea of economic demand.
Eg even the US has no laws against insider trading in commodities. Similarly, French insider trading laws work on rather different principles than US ones. So it's hard to attach much moral significance to the legal accident of insider trading laws in one place and one time.
(And arguably, laws banning insider trading are bad for the general public, because to the extent they are respected and enforced, they keep information out of market prices.)
This is exactly what the laws around fiduciary duty "really" cover. I say "really" because the term is often invoked to justify/excuse scummy behavior from executives, arguing that they're legally obligated to behave that way because of fiduciary duty. In reality it just means you must act in the interests of the company, largely to prevent this exact sort of scenario (or an exec just being butthurt or whatever).
This reminds me of how the film Catch Me If You Can about a credit card / pilot con man was in itself a con and the whole story was made up. It's great, the author did not actually commit any of the crimes he "confessed" to, and at best there's a civil case of the claim of the story being true events not in fact being true. But I hope the filmmakers had a good laugh about the irony.
Wolf of Wall Street even opens by reminding the viewer that Belfort is a convicted fraudster, you are watching and listening to him tell his version of the story, and he's almost certainly lying to you.
The difference between a racounteur and a bullshitter is that one is entertaining.
> the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures
Honestly, when I’m on a call with customer service I could do without being reminded every microsecond that I’m actually on a phone call that might be recorded.
Appealing to be recorded in secret is a weird one to read in the morning. Another solution to your problem that respects the law is for them to not record you.
I worked in a professional services department that did not record calls, except at the request of the customer. We took copious notes on each call, shared things that showed up repeatedly over a few days to weeks in wikis, and shared things that showed up repeatedly over a single morning in Slack channels.
Where I live companies are required to get my explicit consent before recording me and are also required to continue the call if the only reason they would not is that I didn't consent to being recorded.
It'd be a bit silly if not as where I live I can also request them to delete the recording immediately after the call ends. So yes many businesses operate like this.
When you go to a shop and talk to the person there for help with a previous purchase they aren't recording your interaction, why is it so surprising?
> So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?
And Uber is a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, AirBnB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels. Find a hyper-successful company or person, and start digging. The secret 99/100 times is crime (or incredibly crime-adjacent behaviors).
Isn't it "always" rather than "frequently"? In case of hotels. Hotel chains are brand operators, their job is to build up brand value through ads, enforcing quality standards within hotels of their chain, and managing their loyalty program. They are not supposed to operate hotels, let alone own them.
Because entities that operate hotels (paying royalty to the hotel chain), almost always do not own the hotels per se i.e. real estate. They rent it. From holding companies that did not build it, they bought them ready from real estate developers who start a project targeting several potential buyers usually picking the actual one while construction is near finishing. And the developer is also not building the building, construction company does it, the developer just manages the land deal, licensing, permitting, and architectural designs, asking construction company to do particular phases of work with a particular budget. And that one then subcontracts different things to different entities, who in turn manage imports of the labor force and materials and manage people who do the work... The chain is looong.
The disclosure should be outside the phone conversation prior to funds transferring.
Send them to confirmation who should have a process of, we're sending you the email now where you enter you make an account and enter payment details. Stay on the phone with them while they do it to avoid drop off rates. During the account creation is the disclosures.
That’s why you don’t answer phone calls with „yes” as sometimes they would say your name and you would be inclined replying „yes, speaking”.
Just heard stories some shitty companies/sales would push you over they have your „yes” on recording. I don’t believe it would hold in any court if they would have to play the whole thing. But it would work on people who are not so tough.
Sattelite TV sellers were awful they almost got my mother to buy second one because they told her BS new one will void competition contract and then sales rep was pushy she wanted to back out - good thing was she did not sign anything before asking me.
So yeah I have seen some pushy idiots pushing old people or not confident people into signing stuff.
There is no evidence of a company using the fact that you've said "yes" at a random point in the conversation as confirmation that you've agreed to their (maybe unheard) pitch, despite variations on that urban legend doing the rounds for years.
I just read in the article and I replied to a comment that has:
I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.
Few years in my ago we had telemarketing company. "Good morning Orange".
No, that was their name. People thought they were from Orange company, but they just were stating their full name ;)
So many people got scammed.
It's also why I don't have any respect for the sales people.
Sales is about closing. He ignored rules to do it. Is it 'right' no. But he was successful at it for awhile.
The two most epic sales I ever saw where these.
One guy I saw some how resurrected a customer of ours. I flat out asked him. His words to me were 'I have no idea how I did it'. While he was saying that he pulled out his wallet and started laying 20s on the table. 'you didnt...' 'i have no idea what you are asking'.
The second one was in the dead of july at a garage sale my family was running. Suddenly a guy comes up and hands me money for a Christmas lightbulb (who put that out there?!). 'did you just get that guy to buy a light bulb' 'i showed him how he needed it'.
Sales is not about doing the right thing. But creating a need and filling it and closing the sale. In the first case he showed the guy that he needed money. In the second somehow he talked the guy into needing a lightbulb before Christmas. It works even better if you somehow get the customer to think they came up with the idea.
If you understand that rule of 'creation' you can actually make yourself immune to most sales bots. The first thing most do is create a need and magically they can fill it with the thing they just happen to sell.
Unfortunately that is pretty much how society works. As long as the right people are making money, or getting paid off by the people who are making money.
It's interesting how different responses this article evokes. Many commenters found the writing "very good", "excellent", etc, while others thought the article "terrible" or "empty".
How comes?
Despite the hard to believe "No. 1 telemarketer in the United States" claim at the beginning, I ultimately found the author relatable. The article offered a glimpse into a world foreign to me, made interesting points about how doing sales changes one forever, and ended ironically wondering whether this article will help close a book deal.
> Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem.
This hits hard.
I enjoyed reading that far more than I expected, even if I did keep glancing at the scroll bar and wondering if the juice would be worth the squeeze. The meta-commentary at the end (maybe this Slate article will finally seal a book deal) felt faintly reminiscent of the end of the Stephen King "Dark Tower" novels.
There is an absolute flood of internet articles that tell basically the same anecdote "the best salesman I ever met is not a salesman", or simple variations. Most of them have this talkative, knowledgeable salesman character.
Can someone from the industry tell me if this is some kind of ritual of passage? Maybe a prank on new authors? It doesn't make any sense to me. All these articles are the same trick repeated over and over.
Quite some years back, I did some door-to-door political canvassing. (Agitate the base, get people to tell a stranger they were absolutely going to vote, maybe recruit some more canvassers if we were super lucky.)
This is utterly shocking to anyone who knew me back then, as it was a complete 180° from my socially-petrified personality. I believed in the cause, but when I showed up at the local campaign office, they didn't need the printers fixed or any data entered (several folks in wheelchairs had that covered), and they explained that the best place I could be was on someone's porch. I couldn't bring myself to walk away, so I forced myself out of my comfort zone, picked up a clipboard, and rang a doorbell.
The world did not end.
I figured out some hacks pretty quickly.
First, like all canvassers, I prominently displayed several campaign buttons AND a badge that identified me, so verbally reiterating THAT was a really dull way to open. Door closed in face, politely if I was lucky.
It was much better to size up the house as I walked up to it, and pick something to open with. If they grew plants I recognized, I'd point that out, and talk about the environment. If they had a flag out, I'd thank them and talk about civic pride. If they had a compact fluorescent bulb in their porch light, I'd point to it and say "And I'm pretty sure we agree on a lot of things beyond that!". I dared not elaborate on that one, lest I interrupt their ear-to-ear grin, that someone had picked up on their little spiral sign.
All of these were things that THEY had done. They planted the flowers. They hung the flag. They chose the lightbulb. And I sussed out the little decisions embodied in those things, things that they were quietly proud of, and complimented them for their good taste, and explained that I, too, found these things important. So important that I forced myself out of my comfort zone, and found myself on a stranger's porch asking if they also felt strongly enough to join me in taking action. Of course, they already HAD taken action, and we both knew it.
Who's going to say no to that?
Second, there was the noncommittal "I'm still doing my research / just don't know enough about the candidate yet". Technically noncommittal, but it was pretty late in the game, and this was actually a polite "no". I suspected that many of them were a thin façade for racism, as gutting as that felt, and feels to this day.
But I thanked them profusely for "still doing their research". I was SO GLAD that they wouldn't vote for someone they didn't know enough about yet! Because of course all voters have a duty to be informed, and it was really gratifying that they took it so seriously. And besides, I confided: I was quite comfortable that when they actually DID do a satisfactory amount of research, when they DID get to know the candidate better (as I had, obsessively, read everything I could get my hands on over the prior weeks), that I could count on their vote. I thanked them again for their diligence, and left that to linger as I trotted back to the sidewalk.
Followups showed that of these "3" (on a scale of 1 to 5) contacts were incredibly likely to swing to a 4 or a 5 after my visit. Vastly more so than other canvassers' 3's. And later, they actually did get out and vote, at abnormally high rates.
Because I'd structured it such that supporting the candidate was the obvious and inevitable outcome of learning more about him. And who wants to remain ignorant? (Okay, note for 2025: A decade or two ago, this question was much more rhetorical.)
Third, and I hinted at it above, I was very open and self-deprecating about how uncomfortable I was with canvassing in general. But I was really glad that, if I had to be on a stranger's porch, at least it was their porch. They'd been very nice, despite my interrupting their dinner! I was asking them for the favor of their vote, and they'd already done me a favor in answering the door. They clearly were kind, thoughtful people, and that's exactly the theme of hope and pride and support that I knew I could count on.
There's a well-worn anecdote about Benjamin Franklin asking to borrow a rare book from someone who disliked him. In asking for it, Franklin showed his good taste in books, a thing that the two men now shared. And refusing the loan would've been uncouth, so the man loaned it, but now he'd done Franklin a favor, and who would do a favor for someone they disliked? So logically, goes the story, he must like Franklin.
I had people leave their plates mid-dinner, to walk back to the campaign office with me and sign up for tomorrow's canvassing shift. If I could handle it, so could they, and gosh darn it, they were going to.
I was so proud that I was good at this, until one day:
I'd been doing a lot of it (being between jobs, as I was), and I had a pretty good track record, so they started sending new canvassers out with me to show them the ropes. We'd knock the first street or two together, then split up and do opposite sides of the same street until we finished our turf, then they'd get their own and go out solo. One such newbie, as I shared the tips described above, said those were great, then casually asked "so how long have you been in sales?"
>"I'm still doing my research / just don't know enough about the candidate yet" … it was pretty late in the game, and this was actually a polite "no".
See, that's exactly what I'd say when I haven't finished my research yet.
Buying people's vote with charm is subversion of democracy, they're supposed to vote if they like your policies. The 'cult of personality' politics is doom.
I mean the publishing industry. Is this like some junior writer practicing with a known article formula? Like junior devs do todo apps that end up flooding github.
This was the most interesting part IMO. There is definitively some truth to it:
“In ways large and small, we live in a world shaped by telemarketing. When’s the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? How many tweets do you encounter without bots in the replies? Have you seen how many spam emails your parents receive? I chuckle to think how mad people used to get when we called during dinner—when do you have privacy now? Even your sleep app is hawking your data to companies trying to sell you melatonin gummies. Are these intrusions any less intrusive because they’re silent?
Worse yet, decades of wage stagnation and the emergence of the gig economy have generalized the anxiety and pressure that used to be the exclusive domain of sales sweatshops; now we’re all pitching all the time, unironically using phrases like “building my personal brand,” indefatigably selling versions of ourselves via social media posts that fool no one, soliciting eyeballs, donations, subscriptions, views and clicks, for our Twitch streams, OnlyFans, Substacks, stand-up shows, GoFundMes, podcasts, NFTs, sending emails to our agent like, “Another piece in Slate, hmm, wonder if there’s a book in this one?” Manufactured precarity and the Hobbesian competition of all against all, combined with the public insistence on moral rectitude, have us all scrambling for grievances so we can justify doing what we must—even presidents and billionaires insist they are victims now. We’re all trapped in the back-office cubicle pod, our desperation rebranded as hustle, bitter entrepreneurs of abjection competing for the same dwindling pool of broke rubes.”
This piece obviously puts sales in a bad light. If you had asked me what a salesman is like in my early 20s, I would have described them much as this article expresses.
But in my career in Silicon Valley I really came to respect good salespeople. I often had roles where I was debugging customer-reported issues, and good salespeople make everything smoother.
I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction.
The one-time salespeople were just like this article: they are just trying to close a sale knowing that they don't ever have to deal with you again. If they lie, they don't have to deal with the consequences. So their incentive is to spew any kind of nonsense or lies or manipulation to close the deal.
The other type of sales guys depending on building relationships. with engineers on both sides, with management, with purchasing and billing people, with everyone. When I was working on customer bugs, having a great sales guy representing the account made everything much easier. They could get the customers to loan hardware, assign more resources, get documentation, negotiate for time, etc. I respected these great sales guys because they had real skills and talent in these spheres that I didn't.
For a real estate agent knowledgeability about the property would be even more important than maintaining relations, even if you're just trying to sell me this thing to never see me again, when I ask to see the breaker box or what kind of heating system is this and get a "I don't know where/what that is" It's not making a strong case for a six-figure purchase.
I used to work in real estate. My boss, an experienced agent, told us that the most powerful phrase an agent can use is "I know that house". As in, they'd been in that house before, knew the construction, location attributes and history.
Case 3: got his commission and left his company without telling me and before the deal was 100% completed.
Case 4: sent me a threatening SMS (watch out, I know where you live, etc) because I didn't want to take his calls to listen to new deals I wasn't interested in.
You can respect a person without respecting their profession. I also serve the same dysfunction in much more widely respected ways, but my role is still part of the same cancer.
I’d venture to guess that almost everyone reading this thread owes their job to talented salespeople and more importantly the sales profession as a whole.
I respect them and their profession because it’s kept my family fed for nearly 40 years. I am not a salesperson, but they sure as shit sell the things I build. I need them more than they need me because talent salespeople can sell nearly anything.
Huh? There are very few things that are “salesperson sold” today that are needed. People just go buy what they need.
Pretty much if there is a salesperson involved today it’s an item that is not needed/critical to your life. That’s the whole point of a salesperson, convince you to buy something you don’t necessarily need.
I think they were trying to get at something (not very successfully). I'd put it like this.
Want to find the best mathematician, the best engineer? Easy: just give them a hard test. Or more generally follow the metrics. The one with the highest score is the best, generally speaking. In that sense it's uncomplicated: administer the test, the highest scorer is your guy/girl.
For sales there is no equivalent. There is no "test" (crude sell me a pen type exercises notwithstanding). There often is a mysterious hard-to-quantify quality to the best sellers.
Of course with a track record it's much easier - the one w/the highest sales in the district, say - but without that it's quite difficult.
In that sense it's very different from other fields.
I don't think the people you are describing are called "sales" - usually they are "post-sales support", or "account manager", or something similar.. Basically "project manager" equivalent for customer relationship.
In smaller companies, one person might cover multiple roles. Also, it might be different when your employer is focused on B2B sales, though I don't have enough experience to be sure about that.
Anyway, when I was working in sales, I was handling pre-sales, closings, and post-sales support. We were manufacturing and selling security equipment. The goal never was to simply close the deal. We wanted to expand the network of distributors, and to do so, we needed to build long-lasting relationships.
I quite liked the experience, but I was always more tech guy than salesman – I guess most of my clients were coming back because I was preparing projects of CCTV installations, I was providing trainings for clients and their crew.
But as a typical salesman described in the article, I would be terrible.
The author draws broad conclusions about sales from just three cherry-picked examples from high-pressure, ethically questionable contexts (jail, telemarketing scams, aggressive panhandling) and creates a false dichotomy of being ethically compromised or unsuccessful in sales.
My father has a business that sells physical products. We had a salesman that was soo good, that customers used to call us asking us to take back our product because they actually had no use for it. They bought it because he convinced them that it was good for them. The salesman passed away long back. Rest in peace.
That was a long and tedious article. It describes how to adopt a hardened & transactional mindset. UGH.
Consumer sales is not Software Sales. In general - the professionals/engineers/managers I spoke with were really gracious and insightful.
Most sales organizations operate like a factory producing widgets. This is fine. It produces outcomes at the lowest possible cost of sales.
There are times when there is no substitute for elite sales:
1) Getting customer #2-100.
2) Most products which sell for over 200k
3) Complex engagements with multiple decision makers
I worked in early stage startups and sold software to the Global 2000.
How?
1) Never contact someone unless you have very (*very) strong indicators that what you are offering has high value to them and their goals
2) KNOW what you are talking about. Be able to engage in conversations about their technical infrastructure, options, goals and politics.
3) The goal of every call is to add value... NOT to make a sale. Adding value will open doors and people pick up the phone. Trusted peers provide referrals. They provide insight.
A classic failure of early stage founders it to mistake the factory model of sales (efficiency) for the required model of sales (inefficient, research based, strategic).
Most sales people are factory workers. They crank widgets.
Most products don't have sufficient margin to justify hiring expensive talent.
Professional sales is complex, chaotic, political, layered with inter-dependencies, and fought with constraints. It's a great career -- once you get good at it.
For what it's worth, this article has given me ample moral justification for the disdain I show for cold-callers and relationship-based sellers alike (though typically I'll be openly hostile only to the first group): I don't owe them anything, even people I work with over a period of years. As long as they're trying to sell me something, I have the thing they want and not the other way around. What's truly astonishing to me is that so many people I work with don't see the con and think their "relationship manager" actually cares about them and is genuinely trying to get them a good deal. No, they're trying to sell you underbody coating and should be treated accordingly.
I remember one guy, years ago, who ended a 45-second year-end cold call with me with a "Come on man, I have a family. At least hear me out!" I responded, "Get a better job then. I have work to do." As a moral human, I feel sort of bad about that response, but then I remember there's a substantial likelihood he was lying to me to keep the call going to score a sale and the grift depends on me being moral.
I hang up the moment I realize it’s a sales call. If I’m in a particularly great mood that day, I might mutter a quick “No thank you I’m not interested.”
The way I vindicate myself morally is by knowing I’m not wasting their time this way. People like me are dead ends —— I know that I’m never going to be convinced to buy whatever they’re selling in a million years. By ending the call quickly, I feel like I’m doing them a favor. They can move on to someone who might actually be interested.
I try to do that, and if I get the robodialer pause I do hang up without any preamble. But some of the sales scripts are unnervingly similar to normal work conversations I have any day of the week. Those folks? They get the “no thank you” first, but sometimes they call back, and it’s open season after that.
> it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes. If you don’t, you could be selling a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose weight without exercise, and they’ll still turn you down flat.
The old adage is as true as ever. People do not remember what you did or what you said. People remember how you made them feel.
Later on in the article the author also says that it's luck.
Of course you need to be better than your colleagues to be the best, but also the environment you're working in should help.
If there is demand for the product you're selling, and you can actually offer them an interesting deal, then you have a lot more chance of succeeding in your elite sales person life.
If there's little demand, and the industry has changed and people are more aware, the same old tactics and products are not gonna work anymore. Because these customers also get called by other new sales people with new exciting products and new ways of persuasion.
It's not just about how you make people feel, it's also about the product, company, and market situation, obviously.
The company the author worked for went bankrupt eventually. So I imagine no sales people were doing great at the end.
The shift to luck part of it could be expanded on more I think, its emblematic of many believing they are hot shit at their new job or hobby. You have the right idea: the product matters and the market and shift underneath the best salespeople. But salespeople like this are also like chameleons who don't really care about the product in the first place, they go on to hock something else that's hot.
It also reminds me of every would-be day trader that posts to /r/wallstreetbets. Many will hit a hot streak after they figure out how the options market works, they start getting fancy and making bigger bets and dreaming about quitting their day job. Suddenly the luck runs out and their accounts hit zero. They thought they had the talent and wisdom to conquer the market, but they were just lucky at the casino for a little while.
That line made me stop and think. At first I thought it was an exaggeration, but then I realized it was exactly true - however, I don't think the author understands it fully.
If someone offered to sell me that pill, I wouldn't say, "Ah, but you were kind of brusque, I don't think I'll buy it." I would say (well, think, actually), "I don't think I trust you that it's this easy and safe, so I won't buy it."
The key is trust. The insight the author missed is that we more easily trust people who make us feel good, among other things (attraction, social standing, etc.).
> Shelly in Wichita is not going to buy what you’re selling, no matter how good the deal is, if she can clearly hear in your voice how much you hate your job and, by extension, her.
I think this again misses the point. Shelly doesn't necessarily think you hate her, but she has no reason to trust you. If your product was good, and people were better off for buying it, you probably wouldn't hate selling it so much.
Telemarketing is mostly just sleazy upselling. And the _sleazy_ feeling is why most people avoid selling and salesmen, but it might just be sleazy from your perpsective.
The best salesman I ever met was peddling boat tour tickets.
He wore the same suit and flip-flops every day, visibly messy, like he never heard about ironing even as a concept.
On a first look, you'd probably guess he was either a down on his luck businessman or a drunkard, but if you spent 5 minutes observing him sell, you'd think he fits the definition of a sleazy salesman.
Yet damn, that man could sell.
Even the customers that ignored everyone would fall for his traps.
He did this long enough that he recognised the type of customer almost immediately and could just "vibe shift" to their vibes.
From "Hey guys, you look hungry, have you had lunch yet?" to just "Hey, welcome!" - he'd slowly reel them in and either he'd hook them now, or redirect them to a restaurant/bar/shop he had an affiliate deal with and get some commission.
While none of the things he was peddling were bad, from the local perspective it felt like he was scamming these people and they were poor innocent tourists.
But after a few talks with him, figured out it wasn't like that at all - his trick was he'd make them feel like they "know an insider", someone who can recommend them to good stuff and not "touristy" stuff.
And he would be that guy for them - he'd get them local wine, local honey, oils, meats, anything.
He'd set them up a dinner or help them rent a car. He'd call up boat owners and get them private cruises.
Basically, he'd be their "concierge".
The boat tours were just a way to hook new customers in, and he'd both be getting a kickback from the owners and a tip from the customers.
He'd basically be making everyone happy, making the tourists experience amazing and bringing a lot of money to small local businesses, while earning a nice comission in the process.
Even tho I've later worked with everyone from door-to-dooor all the way to high ranking MAG7 salesbros, this one was the least sleazy of them all.
Unfortunately, the man was a heavy gambler, which would mean he'd lose all his money quite fast and be extra motivated to work again.
When sales people post that picture of a saleperson with a round wheel and the "customers" too busy on the side of the road to switch from the square wheel as too justify something for themselves.
elites in sales are a myth. it's a manufactured playground.
at least 50 % of customers were primed out of any natural fuck.
( natural/organic meaning intrinsic or emerging desires that are not anchored in any psycho-social perception/manipulation, after the fact of a more or less evolved consciousness/awareness of self )
and a great amount of your customers was fake to make you fucking love your job and feel that success.
Great article, which reminded me of my brief flirting time with sales while I was in college and working retail jobs. Anyone who has worked retail probably knows there are the same level of sales involved, though its pretty low stakes. I'd sell extended warranties on laptops and other equipment at CompUSA. My manager on a few instances refused to let a laptop out the door without talking to the customer 3-4 different times, and sometimes they even relented. One time a large man began getting very angry with me for not selling him the laptop and looked like he was about to punch me in the face. Even though I was sometimes decent at it, I really hated how slimy it was for very measly commissions. I could see the appeal to some people, but I never wanted that to be my life. It was constantly stressful and demoralizing and at the end of the day you're just trying to extract more money from folks by whatever means necessary.
For folks praising their own SaaS salespeople or whatever, that's not really the type of person we're talking about here. And I daresay you probably just don't see that side of them because they know to hide it from non-sales folks.
Lucky for me i learned at a young age that all sales people are complete and total inhuman indifferent biological entities when it comes to make a sale and reach their target. I don't blame them, because they need to make a living and have targets to meet to get that living. I just care as much as they do. :)
Occasionally my wife still falls for it, and for the sake of my marriage i tend to tag along sometimes.
This really is a cynical take and is probably reinforcing how many view salespeople. "Oh I could be good at sales, but I have morals."
Sales isn't difficult. It's just telling people what you have that makes their lives better. The particulars matter - who are these people, what do you have, how it makes their lives better. Dodgy salespeople cheat on the latter two - they have an inferior product and try to convince others it does more than what it should. And then they double down on this skill of BS. The right way to do sales is to have a good product, figure out how to find leads that want it, and figure out how to best explain it.
You began your lead generation process by making cold calls, starting with your family and friends before expanding outward.
Securing an appointment with a potential customer allowed you to demonstrate the product directly in their home or office. A key part of the sales presentation in people’s homes involved vacuuming the customer’s mattress using a black cloth, secured with an elastic band, instead of the usual vacuum bag. As the demonstration progressed, the accumulated debris—dirt, dust, and dead skin—would inevitably overwhelm the elastic band, causing the black cloth to burst off and release a cloud of white dust into the air. This shocking and unpleasant visual often left customers both disgusted and embarrassed, making it easier to close the $800 vacuum cleaner sale.
Horrible business. Product was pretty good though.
This guy didn’t make an explicit comparison to tech in describing his scummy history in telemarketing and how it’s a clear expression of our cultural values…but it’s an easy one to make—ad slop, algorithmic feeds, deceptive product websites, etc. We’re really no different as an industry, are we?
In the early 90s, I had a job door to door selling in America. This was a 3 month holiday job post-uni, part of the BUNAC scheme.
We were selling aerial photos of people's neighbourhoods/streets. (This was pre-Google Earth and pre-web).
I was a crap salesperson, but was luckily enough to bump into the best one, another student called Owen. I got chatting to him at one of the periodic parties the company threw and he had this knack for acting (maybe it was genuine?) like he was hanging on your every word, and how you were the most interesting person he'd ever spoken to. This is 30 years ago and I still remember it.
> Firms working the lightning-rod grift sent effete dandies to sell farmers on lightning rods for their house, barn, even their outhouse and doghouse, with no money required upfront, but when it was time to collect payment, the salesman was replaced by two or three hulking roughnecks.
And this:
> The majority of the leads hung up in the first three seconds; others stayed on the phone only long enough to detail the sexual acts they’d performed on my mother the previous night.
Interesting line:
> Eventually, it clicked, and I learned one of the bedrock principles of salesmanship: Whether you’re peddling long distance over the phone, Bibles door to door, or your own political candidacy on live national TV, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes.
Things have to fall in place - even in the example of Nebraska lightning rod scam, people had to move out of sod houses to framed ones for the demand to be there. You are just a cog in the wheel. The economy, regulations, market fad or flavour of the month, competitor missteps, timing all these make "great salesmen".
I have no joke known some sales people so good ive legitimately seen one sell icebags during a snowstorm. To be fair, it was for a cooler inside and who is going outside to collect ice lol?
You might incorrectly think they followed 'how to win friends and influence people' but that's beginner tier.
The best sales people never sell anything. They are only there to be a smile and react to those coming to them. They'll prefer to talk about anything but what they plan to sell.
It's interesting how this phenomenon is completely nonexistent in Europe. On none of my EU phone numbers, in 15 years, i have ever received a telemarketing call apart from about 1-2 calls a year from phone company itself who usually tries to push some new tariff plan on me. Why?
Not sure where the why belongs, but some EU countries have rather strict rules about what you can sell when call without prior approval, e.g. newspapers only in Denmark.
As to why the phone company call: Because they need you to approve the move to a new plan. At least previously, when contracts where 12 months, forcing customers to a new plan would immediately release the customer allowing then you move their number to a competitor. Given that most contracts now are just month to month, if that, it's only expedite the porting of contracts. My old employer, a telco, wanted my grandfather to move from a landline and a basically free service, to a cell phone and a contract where they could actually make a profit on him. It took them years and a pretty large (temporary) discounts to get him (and others obviously) to move his number, so they could shutdown their landline service.
Telcos hate losing customers for two reasons. Firstly it takes over a year to turn a profit on a customer, if you factor in cost of acquiring the customer. Secondly, the different phone companies meet up a few times a year and compare number and figure out how much each should pay to have the other companies customers call their customers. If you have the most customer, you get the most money. (Not sure how this works across the global).
You're not old enough to be an easy and profitable mark. Telemarketers judge by the name in the phone book how old the person on the other end is. Why would they waste their time with you when they can scam thousands from elderly who are trained to worship any "authority" on the phone?
Let me save u 10 minutes and get to the punchline.
"Eventually, it clicked, and I learned one of the bedrock principles of salesmanship: Whether you’re peddling long distance over the phone, Bibles door to door, or your own political candidacy on live national TV, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes. If you don’t, you could be selling a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose weight without exercise, and they’ll still turn you down flat."
I asume that you mean only the weight loss pill exists? Would that be something like manjaro (inhibiting the desire to eat) or one of the few _actual_ metabolism boosters in existence (which all make you produce insane amounts of heat and have fairly high fatality rates -- not necessarily a bad thing given their other side effects)?
Assuming that's what you mean, reversing has spotty success, but prevention is easy for most men if you can tolerate the side effects. Just take your favorite testosterone-blocker.
You could really generalize and say this is about relationships in general. If people leave interactions with you feeling good about themself, it will be a relationship they want to continue and grow.
And the ratio of good interactions to bad needs to be at least 5X (at least that's what the Gottman Institute found with romantic relationships)
It was the Y2K-adjacent midpoint between the door-to-door salesmen of the boomer era and the present-day dystopia of A.I.–enhanced robocalling — the last few years before American credulity (and disposable income) was decisively strip-mined by post–9/11 disillusionment, the emergence of the internet, an economy that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and, well, petty cheats like me, the bedrock of this nation.
That’s some of the worst wannabe Cory Doctorow edge lord crap writing I’ve ever read. I’m surprised the author was able to resist the urge to use the word “sheeple”.
That's a gem of a sentence? It reads like someone wanted to sound like The New Yorker, so they overused their thesaurus and wound up just sounding insufferable.
Write in your voice. If this person actually speaks like that normally, I'm glad I don't know them personally.
Not everything in the world has to be written like a manpage.
This was an excellent piece that was well written in a unique and engaging style - almost like a Chuck Palahniuk book or something. Written words and spoken words are two very different things unless you are a dullard and want the world to be reduced to a brief conversation.
I found this to be relatively cynical. Not every type of salesperson is like the types explored in this article.
When I was in sales we were taught to disqualify prospects, precisely because we had to find those 5-10% for whom we could resolve business pain or provide value.
Most businesses don’t benefit from signing up customers bound to be unhappy. It costs money to sell to them in the first place. Typically your ideal customer profile (ICP) is going to be someone who is going to love your product and have a lot of money to spend on it with the need to buy a lot of it. We wouldn’t waste precious time trying to scam people who weren’t that.
So really I felt this article was mostly talking about the author’s lived experience of sleazy sales: telemarketers and panhandlers and inmates.
I think some of that philosophical exploration was extended much too far into societal changes like going from an agrarian to an industrial society.
The author seems to consider the role of sales to be like the great scam of modern society.
But the reality is, products that salespeople were selling like the cotton gin or the steam engine were absolutely things that buyers wanted and benefited from.
Another example was a friend of mine who worked for Apple retail. For some people retail is soul crushing, and you’d be correct to point out that many people are completely insufferable to deal with.
But the story I got from them was that, for the most part, selling at Apple (especially 10 years ago when their products were arguably more exciting) involved a lot of time spent with customers who were having a whole lot of fun buying stuff for themselves.
If only the author got to witness an elite salesperson selling things that people really like.
#1: An inmate who preaches "criminal wisdom" of questionable quality, like "want to know how to disable a burglar alarm with aluminum foil?"
#2: A telemarketing old lady with a "warm voice and metronomic cadence".
#3: An NYC beggar who "walks up to a table, falls to his knees, interlaces his hands as if in prayer, and begs, at the top of his lungs, Please please please, money, please I need a dollar!"
The article was pretty much empty: someone trying to be edgy and making their word count. I didn’t enjoy reading the article and wish that for once I read the comments before the link.
an intimate discussion of his life and how it was forever changed by being a telemarketer? It was actually a very interesting and well written read - an autobiography disguised as a sales advice article.
The message seems to be: sales is a soul-sucking job, a demoralizing exercise on psychopathic exploitation in which making people feel something (be it good or not) is the way into their wallets.
The greatest minds of our generation are hard at work creating algorithms to give kids eating disorders, making the next iPhone 3mm thinner, and figuring out how to make a TV dinner that contains no actual food.
Our modern world is so incredible. I wish we could do some good things.
#1 is true. All salespeople are fantastic storytellers. They got a secret, a charmed life, and they are willing to show how you too can be as successful and happy. Unfortunately everything they said was embellished or completely untrue.
I know this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but it doesn't make sense. There absolutely are wages without electricity. There are no wages without sales - either to an investor or a customer. It's the absolute foundation of a business without which there is nothing.
Are you sure? I'm pretty certain wages were being paid long before electricity was invented and will be paid long after WW3 when there are no power stations left.
Because it's funny, honest, has nice turns of phrase, is well-structured and engaging, and speaks truth about something at the core of modern life. I worked in door-to-door sales for a while and this article really captures something about the experience.
The best sales people I've worked with were incredible strategic thinkers and not really sales people at all.
They built an intimate knowledge of their customer and their industry, built strong connections with the top brass of their client by delivering exceptional work that got those people promoted, and were really good at building autonomous teams that could get the (exceptional) work done with their guidance on the customer/industry/client. These folks would also often deliver very difficult messages to their clients, which often resulted in more business not less.
The sleazy sales people can build decent pipelines/sales numbers but they are not what I would ever label as 'elite'.
Sales are maligned.
There is the guy at the car dealership who specializes in adding an extended service contract for your new car.
Then there's the guy who sells a software development project that lands a well qualified customer (joy to work with) and a good specification which was well estimated and price so you can complete the work profitably. Maybe you know nothing about formalwear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in.
Sales are maligned for good reason. I'd wager I've experienced the "you know nothing about formal wear but somebody sells you a suit you really feel good in" salesperson a handful of times. Now, the number of times I've had someone try to sell me something while clearly not listening to what I have to say and getting uncomfortably pushy about it, well... yikes.
Two types of sales philosophies: 1. It doesn't matter what you're selling, it's about the sales technique. 2. Develop deep domain and customer expertise.
The former is the scammy type, the latter is the type we love to work with.
But the same is true in any industry. Too many of us in technology are doing the technology equivalent of 1--becoming experts in C++ or React--instead of becoming deep domain and user experts.
In software I like the person knows C++ or React in and out and I like the person who understands the domain, UX and such. I want both on the team.
I despise the guy who sells extended service contracts at the car dealership. I sure as hell don't want that guy selling software work because I won't be able to complete the work profitably and I'll be dealing with angry customers who don't trust me.
Engineers are awful too. The number of times I have been subjected to needlessly bad product designs far exceeds my negative interactions with sales people. And then there are the products that fail at their one function.
Not to mention the type of telemarketing salespeople being ragged on here are the equivalent of "software engineers" in bottom bracket outsourcing companies whose principal skills are installing WordPress templates and making excuses...
At least Engineers are trying to create something of value. Salespeople are just trying extract your value.
Positive sum exchange is value creation.
To take an extreme example: Selling a starving person a meal doesn't just extract the price value, but creates it too.
You might argue that there are better or more efficient was of creating that value, but the fact that it is created is inescapable.
If you want to make a utilitarian value argument against it, you need to compare it to a real world alternative subject to scrutiny that is just as harsh, not a perfect world one.
If no one was selling, all that engineering wouldn't be "of value".
Engineers can create things that don't have value and salespeople can create value by matching problems with solutions, there are a lot of things we all very happily pay for after all. It's just not that simple.
Good salespeople are trying to connect customers with solutions that provide them value that they otherwise wouldn't have access to (generally because they weren't aware of it). Obviously, in practice, the line between that and the more negative experiences can be fuzzy and vary by one's perspective, but unless you have someone in-house who's dedicated to searching for new solutions... And then, they turn into a sort of salesperson themselves, with ambiguous allegiances. At least someone from the outside is someone you will always be skeptical about.
What a bad, reductive point of view. While it's true there are shitty bad salespeople (as there are engineers), try selling anything without doing any selling of the product. Once the company gets to a certain size, having someone work on sales full time instead of getting an engineer who doesn't whan to do that work, work on that part time.
Low-recurrence and low-value sales are almost entirely about exploiting information asymmetry. Most peoples’ sales experiences are almost entirely low value. (Low here meaning the client isn’t going to do independent diligence and doesn’t have the capacity and willingness to retaliate if screwed.)
The first type is vastly more common than the second. So I don't think it's unfair to malign sales in general. And if I'm buying a suit I need a skilled tailor to alter it to fit me, not someone to convince me to buy a suit - if I'm in the suit store I already know I want a suit and for what purpose.
> The first type is vastly more common than the second.
Depends- you might not even qualify non-type-1s as sales people. Especially the type that's trying to help you get what you need, and listen to you in the process.
How does someone become someone who sells the software development project? Is this an architect or sales engineer? I’m confused by how a sales engineer would gain the level of expertise needed to sell the project and specs/implementation.
Do they usually come from an IC developer role?
While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better. It's also true that some sales people learn enough about coding to be dangerous and transition to sales engineering that way.
While there are successful sales engineers and unsuccessful sales engineers, some of whom come from IC backgrounds, this isn't a comment about causation (or even correlation) between the two. But yes, many sales engineers transition from SWE to sales engineering for various reasons including they just like the work better.
Note that car dealerships are like that because the dealership cannot offer you the later. You go into the dealer having looked up their cost on Edmunds/kbb/... and are determined to give them zero profit from the sale. Worse you know (right or wrong) what you want to buy and so they can't even provide the service of listening to your needs and getting you in the right car.
In theory you should have better luck by walking in and saying I'll pay MSRP (thus giving them a reasonable profit) if you don't add all that other BS. In practice they won't know how to do that because nobody else does
Having just went through the process of buying a car, and the amount of work, research and effort needed on my part to ensure that I didn't pay through the nose on a car, this is, in my opinion, squarely in response to the car sales industry almost universally adopting predatory sales tactics.
If I could go into a dealership and trust that everyone in the building wasn't out to get me, and instead wanted to build a longterm relationship with me from sales to service, advertised the actual cost of the vehicle instead of a BS pre-fees, pre-additional markup price, then I wouldn't do that. Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole story, but as I understand it the dealerships changed their behavior first, and the customer _had_ to get more savvy as a result.
You put enough customer predatory sales practices everywhere, and you raise a generation who just doesn't trust sales staff. It doesn't have to be this way though.
I gotta be careful though, I'm dangerously close to getting on my soapbox about how difficult it is to be a sustainable lifestyle business in today's day, and how much I wish a return to that.
Okay, I've worked at a company that had that kind of sales. It is indeed very impressive to see. But I think that worked because there were only a small number of vendors who could potentially deliver for these (giant) customers in the first place. Otherwise the immense investment to attempt to land one of these customers would have too low a chance of paying off.
Although they have the same title I think it's a different job to when there are a lot of options for the customer.
Generally done for large deal sizes. there can be 100 vendors but when you spend 50 mil+/year on a vendor the strategy matters.
> The sleazy sales people can build decent pipelines/sales numbers but they are not what I would ever label as 'elite'.
Absolutely. I have had the pleasure of working with a few elite sales people and none of them were sleazy. They were all extremely confident on the inside, but present as humble and even a little vulnerable on the outside. This is strategic as it builds trust, but I think it was also genuine for the most part -- they really wanted their customers to be happy and they wanted their customers to know that.
They dress nicely, but again in a humble way. They're not quite as polished looking as the "slick" sales people, and this too is part of their strategy. They can pull out a post it note or notebook and sketch a rudimentary diagram they've drawn a thousand times, and every time it looks like they just thought of this idea and are drawing it with wavy lines for the first time. I'm not sure if this one is intentional, but they all do it, and it always looks like they don't know how to draw straight lines.
I actually ran into someone like this at lens crafters recently. They were quite young, early to mid 20s I'd say, but after a few minutes of them telling me about the various lens options, I stopped and said, "You're the top salesperson here aren't you?" They gave me a funny look, and asked how I knew. "Just a guess" I said -- but in reality, I had seen all of their human dark-patterns before. Most people wouldn't even know they were being sold to, in fact, they would probably think the opposite... that the salesperson didn't care if they bought anything from them as long as they got the right solution from somebody in the end. Some of them will literally even say that. Of course, this only works when it is 100% believable and you don't identify it as part of their sales strategy.
How does a salesperson deliver exceptional work? In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.
> In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.
Have you ever worked at a place where the sales people promised features that didn't exist? A bad sales person can ensure you're in the trenches doing work that is urgent but not important. A good sales person anticipates requirements, identifies when they're not currently available, and proactively works with the right people to get the important features prioritized strategically.
The sales people talk to the customers, so from a certain perspective they're the ones in the trenches and talking to customers while you're in the back office plugging away at a keyboard.
By meticulously, accurately, and skeptically gathering ALL the requirements from the customer and bringing them to the engineers.
It sounds inane, but it's appalling how often that doesn't happen, and how it irretrievably dooms a project before it starts.
This is software sales, which has long cycles, ongoing relationships and is a tiny sliver of the "hires salesmen" industry. For commoditized markets like phone plans, cable TV / ISPs, paper, or roof repairs after a hurricane, the ones who get the most sales are the ones without scruples.
> For commoditized markets like phone plans, cable TV / ISPs, paper, or roof repairs after a hurricane, the ones who get the most sales are the ones without scruples
You’re describing low value, low recurrence sales. Those are numbers, not relationship, games, with high churn at that.
I think low recurrence is the bigger factor for sleaziness: roof replacement aren't low value, same goes for the archetype for sleazy sales tactics: car salesman.
> roof replacement aren't low value, same goes for the archetype for sleazy sales tactics: car salesman
They’re low value, comparatively speaking. High-value sales starts where your client can afford to do their own diligence and retaliate if you screw them; that’s typically around the $10+ million level.
I've worked adjacent to technical consultants for a decade, and in tech sales leadership for the past few, and there's a lot of misleading information in this thread.
For one, there's a huge gulf between product sales and services sales. In product sales roles you'll almost never find people who are strategic advisors to their clients. Why would they be -- they'll selling products? On the other hand, in roles responsible for selling services (which may also include products, from a single or multiple vendors), you'll be far more likely to see strategic thinkers focused on business transformation or business outcomes.
That said, there are also very good reasons why even at big consulting shops (Deloitte, Accenture, BCG, EY, etc) the roles of Client Partner or Client Account Lead (the person on the hook for client revenue) is the one responsible for client relationships and client contracting, but is usually not the one providing strategy or technology advice. That comes cross-functionally.
In small tech product companies -- especially where the product isn't just plug & play -- my experience is that the sales rep is responsible for contracting and business relationships, but it's the technical pre-sales architects & the post-sales service delivery manager + architects who are providing the most value. It's exceptionally difficult to hire rockstars senior architects and always will be. It's one of the most in-demand roles in tech.
> In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.
Because they were not "elite salespeople"? Jokes aside, I guess the best salesperson is the one whose title is not "Sales".
We had a sales guy that the rest of the office hated, but whom I absolutely loved. He'd sell the craziest shit. E.g. him and I attempted to replace a customers Kubernetes stack with Azure websites and CosmosDB, saving them two years of hosting the first month (We failed because the client didn't feel like we where being serious).
At one point he sold a project that would lead to his termination and it was the most brilliant sale I've ever seen. A customer wanted monitoring and a 24/7 "operation center", but one which didn't have access to any systems. We'd channel alerts from the customer into our on-call, which would then phone the customers staff and tell them that "YO! X is broken" and hang up. The price was insane, is was free money, but the customer was excited and felt like they got a great deal.
What lead to his termination? Was the on-call team not thrilled with having to (even minimally) deal with issues from the systems of another company?
That was a major part of it. I never completely understood why, but for some reason the majority of the staff really hated that project. I though it was a brilliant move. The problem may have been that people attempted to over-engineer the project and handle scenarios that wasn't in scope, setting unrealistic goal resulting in a lot of pretty dumb and boring work.
Another part was that was yet another service which we technically didn't offer, which he sold. He was always very upfront about the fact that he knew that a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do. That pissed of a lot of people, but in hindsight, five years later: He sold the right things and we should embraced those sales/potential sale, because the local market has moved in the direction he was going.
> a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do
This may not be the situation but I’m willing to bet he created an insane amount of chaos for everyone else by doing this. Existing projects constantly getting delayed or cancelled because he sold something that wasn’t planned for.
At my last job, we had a department who delegated all of their quarterly goals to the development team. They made us responsible for accomplishing their goals on top of everything else we were doing.
They delayed critical projects for years for marginal gains.
I once worked for a company that sold industry cleaning supplies in the food processing vertical. The amount of industry knowledge that salespeople required to simply be able to offer one product over another was staggering. The best salespeople knew the industry, the end products, the supply chain, the internal processes, the potential improvements, and could present it in a way that was clear to operators, technical to supervisors, and commercially viable to decision makers.
My archetype of a good sales person is the successful realtor. Realtors tend to “eat what they can kill”, so you can see the skills power law clearly. They are selling themselves more than houses, but there’s a lot to learn from that.
Some people love their realtors, although they do very little for their outlandish commissions. They do however, guide you through the process and give you transactional advice. Like any sales person, they generally have an interest in the transaction closing but they are only trusted if they come off as acting in your interest. That trust can ultimately help the transaction close — this is the line that I think good sales people walk.
> although they do very little for their outlandish commissions
Realtors exist because buyers and sellers usually don't trust each other enough to talk directly.
It's stupid and inefficient, but here we are.
I think you value their work too little. I worked as a realtor for a time and admittedly not a good one.
A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services.
There is often an element of buffering communication between buyer and seller, but it's not just a trust problem. Due to their different interests and perspectives, they will tend to communicate in ways that could offend the other party inadvertantly. A good realtor is skilled in smoothing this over and being more objective.
As an aside, the term realtor is trademarked and is something on top of real estate agent, but for the American public the realtor association has been so successful that almost every agent joins.
At the time I did this work, the requirements for licensing were indeed too lax in my state and therefore a commensurate number of lower quality agents. Which of course feeds the impression that agents are useless, because it was more true.
My understanding is that licensing the has since tightened.
None of that detracts from the fact that a good agent does quite a bit of work to build up knowledge, and to assist through a huge transaction that most people will seldom make and therefore more likely mess up.
Unfortunately this work is also often spent doing things that never lead to a transaction, such as multiple showings to buyers prior to finding a fit, or preparing listings that ultimately fail to sell for whatever reason. These costs need to be accounted for somehow, so we end up thinking only of the services rendered in our dealings.
I realize I have even more to say but I gotta stop sometime...
>A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services.
Even if a "good" Realtor actually knows these things (and they don't, even though most think they do), you can't trust anything they say because they have misaligned incentives from you. So what service am I paying for, again?
And if only .001% of Realtors are "good", what does it even matter? You're not likely to be able to find a "good" one anyway. And if I do how do I verify they are "good?" You can't. And you straight up can't change your mind about who you are working with midway through the process, you sign a contract.
If I want home buying/selling services I should be able to pay a fixed fee (either per service or per hour) and get those services on the open market (and pay for them even if I don't close). Them demanding 6% of the value of my house is straight criminal. As is, the buyers agent works for the seller, because that's who is paying them.
>My understanding is that licensing the has since tightened
You're wrong. Even if they have tightened, any dingus can still get a real estate license.
Real estate agents are the house version of used car salesman.
Incentives should be aligned because you will use that agent again if they do a good job for you. Not all realize this, but repeat moves (every 5-10 years) and referrals are how good agents make their money and both mean that they need to be trustworthy.
> And you straight up can't change your mind about who you are working with midway through the process, you sign a contract.
You don't have to, those contracts are optional. They will threaten to not represent you, but if you are a well qualified buyer, this is something you can force without much risk.
The more well qualified buyers refuse, the more normalized working for clients without contracts will be
>> These costs need to be accounted for somehow.
Why?
Realtors have for years committed antitrust violations to the detriment of home buyers and sellers and helped push home values up for no reason because they act in their own interest instead of their client’s. A realtor’s ultimate goal is to close the deal at any price, not get you a good deal. They are beholden to the sell side. They were a key reason for the housing crash of 2008. They offer very little value in 2025, and the value they do offer is sourced from their monopoly practices. They are strictly rent seekers (no pun intended).
I think they provide a quite useful service.
As a seller, they can handle all the visits for you - no need to take calls from potential buyers, arrange times with them to show them the house, etc. This becomes almost indispensable if you live far away from the house you're selling.
As a buyer, they also provide convenience - sometimes I've seen 3 or 4 different apartments in two hours, which would almost certainly be impossible if I needed to contact and arrange time slots with 4 different sellers. They also filter properties with unrealistic prices - I have seen many owners who have massive bias, having grown in the house, etc., and will charge like 100K over reasonable prices. A good realtor would probably not even show you that home or warn you beforehand so you don't waste your time.
In my country, they also help with the bureaucracy associated with actually performing the purchase, which is far from trivial - although this can vary per country, I guess.
They exist because they've embedded themselves in the process and are hard to get rid of. If you want to buy a specific house it's already set up for you to find a realtor and the homeowner has already agreed to pay them a fat stack of cash. I needed a realtor to send an email, he dragged his feet then went on vacation, and I ended up overpaying to beat offers that showed up later. Rent seekers.
> Some people love their realtors
I'm sort of concerned that some people have "their realtor". I've sold a few houses, realtors are companies I contract to sell my house and they can be fired.
By finding people who will actually benefit from the product and setting their expectations appropriately.
Precisely! Rather than sell a lot my nr 1 priority was to have enjoyable conversations. nr 2 is to explain the company.
I aced it but at the time it didn't seem like elite sales, not to anyone, not even to me. I just felt this is how it should be done.
Then I ran into a manager 3 years after I quit. He said, I don't know how you've done it but we still get clients from your work, a lot of them.
Apparently, when people [actually] need something they look at some business directory. If they then see a name they know and remember having an enjoyable conversation where they've learned all the ins and outs from someone who didn't even try to sell them anything... who do you think they are going to call?
I was able to do thousands of calls per day because I wasn't trying to force anything and the process was enjoyable.
If there is one trick to share here: Make people talk, listen to them, pay close attention to the speed at which they talk and the duration of their pauses then gradually try to match it. If someone is super energetic and talks really fast I unload the material on them slightly faster, make a joke and thank them for their time. If they talk slow feed them one sentence at a time and have them confirm they got it.
I'm pretty sure people were quite confused by my not trying to sell them anything. this is what we do, this is what we offer, thanks for listening, enjoy your day I already know they aren't buying. I could definitely add a 3 minute grind to the end but why? Waste energy annoying people? Better get to the next customer.
A lot of places skate with shitty salespeople. If nobody is moving the product, that trench is a grave.
Yeah... "elite" tends to mean different things at different levels.
There are definitely "salesmen" with long term industry credibility, relationships and such. Probably reads as more of a "businessman" than salesman, regardless of how the bread is buttered.
That said, I think this is fundamentally different from a Salesman who can join, start or lead a sales team and start putting up sales numbers.
It's inglorious work, ultimately. Not a tone of respect for the salesman.
That said... in terms of performance... there are totally different levels here. For some businesses, this can be a key hire of the highest order. Equivalent to ceo, cto and such... potentially.
Also, worse salesmen in trashier sectors tend to be more visible. A lame pressure sales guy will just seem more salesman. They'll also work colder pipelines and leads, annoy more people.
That bias makes salesmen's reputation even worse.
> That said... in terms of performance... there are totally different levels here. For some businesses, this can be a key hire of the highest order. Equivalent to ceo, cto and such... potentially.
Absolutely. Used to do Sales Engineering, and the different Account Execs were light years apart, even when you looked at the top performers. Definite 80/20 rule here.
This. This is elite sales.
That only works as a sales strategy with savvy customers.
If you’re cold-selling people on a shitty widget they don’t need, you’re going to have to be a sleazeball.
In the telecom industry/ISP infrastructure business, the very best sales people are much more like business intelligence/market research people. They know where everyone's infrastructure is in a given region, for fiber cable routes, right of way, POPs, and what carrier is riding on top of which one. Knowing who owns and operates the underlying dark fiber route, DWDM systems, regen huts and similar on a multi state region is what gives them the power to be so effective.
Being able to operate from a position of confidence and assurance on "who has what, where" is a very powerful tool. Then, when communicating with potential customers (particularly where it's one ISP entering into a relationship with another ISP), they can offer the correct product for what the customer is looking for. Or, if they can't, they can quickly say "sorry no we can't do that, we don't have any of our own stuff there, and we can't get there by an NNI".
No no no, endulging in fancy diners with industry, running around with gifts and selling from gorrila size vendor catalog is job well done, but not ELITE. Cold sales are KING.
New leads are where it's at
This. The elite salesperson is great at understanding and solving problems, not BS.
The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual.
I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS
I was talking to a sales person at Research in Motion back when Blackberry and mobile enterprise email were hot; asked him how things are. He replied it was like selling oxygen, he would walk in and take an order for how many they wanted. Every RIM salesperson looked like an amazing sales person based on sales metrics.
Also the inverse is true. A great sales team can disguise a mediocre product team.
That's the difference between being a great salesman and having great sales. Any idiot can sell something that's in demand. It takes a genius to sell something that nobody wants. It's better to be the idiot.
I worked (in sales engineering) at such a company with a market-leading product. For a few years there, at the height of the market/mindshare dominance for their main product, I observed a recurring theme:
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.
That's fair. I should amend my comment. Even stuff that's highly in demand often has competitors with equivalent products, and often the products are complex and business relationships need to be maintained and there are a thousand and one complexities to understanding and executing the business. I apologize for the "any idiot" line.
But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
> But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
Definitely. Another big driver is recurring relationships, either with customers or a larger peer selling community[0]. Most people won't buy more than once from someone unreliable, and ethical people generally don't want to work alongside or be associated with unethical people. Sales people that have options will gravitate towards products/companies they think they can sell more of and most won't consider working for companies that make useless crap or companies that can't or won't support what they make.
0 - think multi-tier tech sales, where you might have an OEM that makes a product, a distributor that either holds stock on the product or handles receivables for the OEM, and a VAR who might directly sell the product to an end-user, all with sales reps that work together on most (or all) deals.
Even a genius can't keep up selling stuff nobody wants. If you're a genius, you won't be so foolish attempting that.
> It takes a genius to sell something that nobody wants.
Or just a regular crook.
Not just any crook. A great crook.
[dead]
The non market leading company sometimes do very well if/where they have good sales. The easy mode is work for the market leading company while the others don't have great sales staff. But if the others have great sales staff your job as the market leader becomes much harder - your market leading position ensures you are invited to the table when something is bought, but it doesn't ensure you have the sale. (the non-market leaders sometimes are not even invited to the table even when their offering is clearly better)
I saw this when I worked for a SaaS that was incredibly dominant in some countries, and almost non-existent in others (where an incumbent player was dominant).
Every year or so top performing sales and marketing folks from the dominant countries would be tapped on the shoulder and tasked with growing the company in our less dominant markets. Everyone failed.
This is backwards. How do you get a market leading product? Years of good work in marketing and selling.
Then you don't need salespeople as it sells itself. You need on-boarding support people.
I'm guessing you've never worked in sales.
Even well-known product lead companies like Atlassian employ sales reps, especially at the enterprise and strategic levels, because demonstrating value to the end user is only a part of the sales process. There's lots of additional work that's closer to project management that's required to close a deal. It's identifying and aligning stakeholders, helping to justify budget by putting together a business case for leadership and finance teams who won't directly interface with the product and need to be sold on it's value. This is the sort of thing high level business to business sales reps spend a ton of time doing.
You are right, I haven't done that level of B2B sales ever. Thanks for explaining.
Huh? You absolutely still need sales people even with a market leading product. It sells itself, sure, but someone needs to work with the client and close the best possible deal.
What this guy is describing is called "grifting." A "grifter" is "a person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling."
I've done millions of dollars in sales, and have been sold to by elite salespeople (e.g. buying data centre capacity, software, etc). There are a few tricks to the game:
* An "elite salesperson" is essentially a "rolodex." They have relationships with potential buyers.
* It's usually a "2 person show." An "elite salesperson" who does all the smooth talking and a "technical sales assistant" who answers all the technical questions.
* It's a "consultative process." You figure out what the client needs, and then come up with a solution to sell.
* "Elite salespeople" choose what product or service they are willing to sell and can identify a possible market leading product before they agree to do the job.
At least that's how it used to work.
It still works this way. If you're a seller and don't work this way or don't know the game, you'll probably find yourself looking for a new job every year.
The better the marketing, the easier the sales.
You should separate between inbound and outbound sales. If you work at AWS you are receiving a lot of inbound inquiries which make sales much easier than doing outbound work. In the case of top companies such as AWS, their marketing team performed a big part of the work while in small companies marketing cannot move the needle with a minimal budget, so they should be smarter, lucky, etc.
> The better you are at selling, the more debased your life becomes, as everything is reduced to a transaction, a leveraging of the smallest edge
I think that's the essence of having a sales mindset if I had to explain it. It's really hard to convey what it means and I think only those that worked close with people with this talent would have a chance to know what this really means. Sales is an art on top of a very technical game, where you have an unlimited number of secret knobs to balance. It's like seeing chefs or f1 drivers performing at their best, and as such it's not just about grit, you also need talent on top.
Isn’t the point being made in that passage that the better you are at sales, the more you treat your loved ones as customers you can transactionally extract value from by leveraging your sales tactics, rather than just… loving them? I don’t see how this connects to your comment on chefs and F1 drivers needing both grit and talent.
The quoted paragraph literally ends with
‘“Doris, what if I throw in a $50 calling card?” mutates into “I’ll be charming at your office Christmas party if you do the dishes this month,” aimed at a befuddled partner who may or may not have yet realized that what they thought was a partnership is in fact closer to a mutual exploitation.’
So yes, it’s not at all about some preternatural gift for perception or intuition that the parent commenter shoehorned in. Less artful, more “gross”.
I see it with relatives in who are always thinking they should be working on closing the next deal rather than at the aquarium with their kids. The incentive structure feels almost corrosive.
> We were victims. Therefore, we had license to take whatever measures were necessary. Once this worldview sets in, it’s very difficult to break out of, not least because it often feels so perfectly just.
One of many nuggets of wisdom in this excellent text.
For the would be thief, a real or imaginary victimhood is eagerly sought, or welcomed, to justify your actions.
Maybe this is the real motivation behind the "victims" of the PC mindset: its a cadre of justifications to plunder the status quo.
There’s an entire political culture built on this framework. And it’s spreading.
It's telling that I have no idea what your politics are from this statement. It could equally be a criticism of the left or the right in America.
Exactly. Identity politics and victim culture is everywhere right now. Different sides of the same coin.
It’s weird to meet people who look for the short-term gain in every single situation.
Especially if they’re semi-talented but perennially “unlucky”. Usually trading on a curated public image or “likability” backed by nothing but positive sounding words and shifting excuses. Unable to build anything sustainable because they piss off every person with the ability to make them rich.
Walk away. Remember them as they were; and write them off.
I know this is about sales but your last words was what I needed to hear to get over my ex. Thank you!
Not my words. Hemingway's.
Entertaining piece, the writing is very good. But the author was honest enough to tell us he had no problem lying at anytime when working as a salesman, so I take this article as a work of fiction (although I am sure that part, or perhaps most of it, is true).
> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States.
Oh neat, how?
> Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.
[…]
> I was one of the first to go, technically for not making my required disclosures—about cancellation fees, international rates, all that fine print nobody ever bothered to recite—on a sale.
So, he and his boss did crime together for a while and then eventually their scam stopped working and he got fired.
Articles like this are valued not based on how noble is the protagonist but based on how truthful is the account. The latter is of course not granted either but I would be even less inclined to believe a story of an airtight telemarketer.
In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how". From that perspective I enjoyed this read quite a bit.
> In general I think it's very easy to _not understand_ people i.e. "how could you". The interesting part for me is when I do understand: "oh this is how".
“How could you” is a rhetorical question to which the asker already knows the answer they would be given, which is almost invariably “because I lack empathy”.
To reward positive stories that include crime, just because other people "might also be doing it" is ehhh. That's literally what criminals tell themselves, that everyone else does it.
For a liar and a cheater, it's basic modus operandi to tell you some of their lies to give themselves a veneer of honesty.
Agree with you in some sense, it is what it is, but why trust anything else they say to "rescue the story"? That's the game they play.
Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?
The little in the story that speaks about the author, is necessary as a vehicle to narrate the experience.
The crux of the story is sales, and how it worked. The core point was the dehumanization, as well as the people who are the most effective in this era.
Also, I can appreciate someones shoes, while acknowlding they are a terrible person. Style isnt the causative factor for criminality or bad decision making.
A more mature position than mine, thanks for perspective.
Yes, if people are being crooks I'd rather know about it than to believe everyone has the same ethical code as myself.
> Is it not that we grant that person no reward, and instead take from their story lessons to our benefit?
I think that this is the way how most reasonable/average people will view it? Reading the article doesn't make me think: "Gee, I should swindle some people out of a lot of money for personal gain!" but rather feel happy that my own career doesn't put me in a spot where I'd need to do anything similar to that.
And even if someone does take that as a playbook, it's not like the article is advocating for that or that author would benefit from that (e.g. like the lifestyle gurus and self-proclaimed pros at anything, that are almost always selling courses, often coupled with a get rich scheme).
This is not... good sales. This is making the numbers. The customers acquired with this method are not good customers.
To future salespeople in here: please work on selecting customers carefully, and pitch only to great two-way fits. That way, both customer and your organisation will thrive.
I get that the salesperson is judged by volume closed, but this gives the rest of the organisation churn problems to deal with.
I can’t remember if it’s against HN rules to implore people to read the actual article.
The reason he became good at selling (according to the article) is because he changed his attitude despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment.
It’s an interesting and probably helpful lesson for the startup hustlers here on HN if they can make it through this admittedly long essay.
> despite reading the sales scripts verbatim both before and after his attitude adjustment
The article states that he was fired because he did not read the script he was required to read.
The article states that he was fired because the company had financial problems, and not reading the required stuff was used as an excuse
The point is he did not read the scripts verbatim as you claimed.
(Wasn't me claiming that, read usernames)
Yeah, but you are, at least seemingly, missing the point: the scripts he was referring to in context weren't the legal disclosures but the sales tricks that were handed to them to use. He is pointing out that the 'elite' saleswoman wasn't better at strategy or sales tricks, but was effective because she made them feel good.
The article was also written by someone who is not a reliable narrator.
The type of person who would skip the legally required stuff while working as a telemarketer is exactly the kind of person who'd tell you he got fired for a "technicality", while he was actually fired because he was breaking the law and lying to customers.
Especially considering that even the unreliable narrator himself admits he was one of the first ones to be fired - why would you fire the best employee first if it wasn’t for cause?
It is against the rules to imply that the person you are responding to hasn’t read the article, but I don’t think it is against the rules to implore the community to read it, generally.
Also just to be more explicit, people can (should) read the article and decide. It is not super long and it is engagingly written. I think the author is kind mythologizing his job… there’s clearly a fraud component to how he got better, and a skill improvement component. It isn’t obvious which contributed more from his telling, and given that his telling is probably inclined to put him in a good light, I lean toward the fraud.
I doubt there is such a thing as good sales from telemarketing. It's almost by definition a way to make a buck with no cares whatsoever if the person will ever return.
It's amazing how often "illegally" is the American Way. I only wish it were a joke.
What makes you think this is uniquely American versus human?
On the contrary, it’s the immigrants that understand it better than the native born.
This whole thing feels like drawing blood from stone. If your company/industry is abusive and miserly, you can go above and beyond and still make a pittance. If you put in the effort, the years, whatever, what you could get is a token recogniton of your efforts like raising your wages from minimum wage to 30% above that.
Poverty, scarcity and desperation drives people to evil. If you work a stable job for a respectable wage for an industry that makes money, and is willing to share said money with you, all this stuff sounds strange to you.
All the machiavellian scheming and power games that take place in a call center on the shift manager level might only show up close to C-level in an IT company, as its only there that the opportunities grow scarce enough, and the people desperate enough that these darwinian environments arise.
Americans surely do love to make things illegal.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent...
Three felonies a day for everyone. More if you use a computer.
It's kind of amazing how no one seems to care that the only reason why they aren't in prison currently is that no one's bothered to arrest them yet.
52 bucks for the paperback! That price is a felony!
It's by design to be able to go after anyone. Well known dictatorship method.
US consumer protection law is actually fairly feeble compared to, say, the EU equivalents, generally (for a particularly dramatic example see treatment of EULAs and similar). The US does seem keen on making regulations terribly _complex_, but not particularly strong.
> Americans surely do love to make things illegal.
That's certainly not the issue here - where the secret was to avoid informing or giving time to think by skipping the fine print.
The occasional, feeble, rarely enforced speed bumps that we occasionally throw up around some largely performative ideal that working people shouldn’t just get constantly ripped off via structural advantage for self-styled job creators almost always lead to temporary increases in broad based prosperity as judged by honest and humane notions of the common good for Res Publica. A limited but meaningful subset of the population was seeing substantial increases in prosperity in the post war period of comparatively high taxation and comparatively high regulation. It sucks that we didn’t extend those benefits to minorities, that was a glaring flaw, but that was fixable without throwing the whole thing out and handing the reins over to Art Laffer and Milton Friedman and other goblins like that.
This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.
We’re now deep into a regression on this that has the typical person struggling via a combination of monopoly and monopsony pricing power enabled by blank check lobbyism that creates de facto indentured status for anyone with a kid who needs medication.
Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.
Alas, the straw man you argue against doesn't exist. (Though my adopted homeland of Singapore probably comes closer than the so called Land of the Free.)
Remember: even Bill Gates had to fight for a decade or so to get his favourite car imported. And that was when he was the richest guy on the planet. Bloomberg and Romney lost their bids for the presidency against much poorer opponents with less support from the rich. You guys still have minimum wage laws on the books, too. Rent control and price controls ('anti-price gouging laws') are ever popular. To name just a few examples.
> This is a culture so extreme around its idea of private property and private enterprise that treating human beings as property is a habit of thought as a culture we just can’t seem to quit in spite of a bloody, declared civil war and a thousand violent skirmishes that don’t quite qualify as wars.
You know that (orthodox) economics is known as the dismal science because they opposed slavery? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science
Please don't brand Milton Friedman as some kind of slavery advocate.
> Low effort quips from people who haven’t felt cold or hunger or illness recently enough to remember are a serious part of the problem.
I don't think they make much of a difference on way or another. But you are right, that thanks to relatively freer markets, more and more people can enjoy the ignorance of bliss of not knowing what hunger feels like. That's how progress looks like.
It is beyond dispute that liberalizing the markets in a society is an almost guaranteed way to lift a society out of a confused manufacturing sector and into a much better organized manufacturing sector: markets are a much better way to price cars and consumer electronics than planning committee guesses. No one disputes that other than Jensen Huang.
But using a log scale and a ruler to apologize for flagrant grift is nothing to do with capitalism, markets, democracy, common sense, or humanity.
Rent seeking is the original sin of capitalism: don’t take my word for it, re-read your Adam Smith and pay attention this time.
And if by “you guys” you mean advocates for the broader public?
To the death.
Between Suchit and Felix in the last few months alone? Hard ass hackers with a conscience are dropping like flies but we learn fast, so bring a fucking platoon from Triple Canopy if you can convince Katis it’s the play.
Luigi is busting caps, the public applauds.
We’re done with this shit.
Are you part Tamarian? I can't understand half of what you're saying because it's all vague, half-completed cultural references.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime"
In this case it is more like “Behind every mediocre fortune is a pretty lame crime.”
Like it isn’t even a cool crime, like doing a heist or something. It’s just tricking confused people by not letting them know about the fine print.
Yep, fraud is pretty lame…
Or to translate a dutch expression, "whoever does not steal or inherit will work until they die" (it rhymes in dutch).
The owning class wants no competitors. The only way to get there is to break the rules that those who got there before create and enforce.
This is why sales is such a difficult medium to respect even if it's clearly a craft. There's a dance but no music.
tbf, this is to sales what "I developed a shell script that automatically appends extended comments and now I'm the highest line-of-code outputting developer in my cheap IT outsourcing company" is to software development....
It varies to be honest, the one in the article - telemarketing, or broader speaking, selling something they don't need to someone - is scummy. But when working in IT you have to make a decision on a solution, be it a library, a service, or something like that; the role of sales becomes more difficult then, and will involve presentations, live demos, POCs, etc.
It's less about sales being a difficult medium to respect.
There might be more about the people and the behaviour they are choosing. Like anything it has to be managed, because it's only a sale when the customer is satisfied to retain the sale, let alone renew.
Getting good at helping qualified leads can be just fine.
If inbound is garbage, it invites less than ideal behaviour.
A great mentor once taught me, "when you hear a yes, immediately agree and stop selling." Usually this means stop talking.
My company is a division in a political minefield that is the greater organization. In particular, my company is filled with people who have spent their entire careers as rank and file workers with their heads down and never had to develop the political savvy to steer through the minefield.
I don't know how many times I've told, and to how many coworkers, if the enemy is going to hang himself, stop talking and give him more rope.
So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?
I'm getting the strangest feeling that maybe this guy isn't done peddling bullshit?
I thought it was a series of realizations - First he learned to stop sounding like he hated his job, and focus on making the other persons feelings. This got him to people saying "yes".
To close more, he started dropping the disclosures and sending people to the next department.
The point you are raising does make sense, I suppose the lesson for him was getting to yes, and then ensuring you dont blow the lead. Which I suppose is the core lesson to selling. You cant sell if people get out of the flow.
And he does allude to this, that the economy is small constant hustles that convince people to buy things, as opposed to the sterile idea of economic demand.
It's kind of like claiming you're the world's best trader, but all your winnings come from insider trading.
That's fine, when and where that's legal.
Eg even the US has no laws against insider trading in commodities. Similarly, French insider trading laws work on rather different principles than US ones. So it's hard to attach much moral significance to the legal accident of insider trading laws in one place and one time.
(And arguably, laws banning insider trading are bad for the general public, because to the extent they are respected and enforced, they keep information out of market prices.)
True, but they also make it hard for a cynical exec to game the system, for instance by shorting the stock and then tanking the company on purpose.
Contracts and laws around fiduciary duties already handle that just fine.
This is exactly what the laws around fiduciary duty "really" cover. I say "really" because the term is often invoked to justify/excuse scummy behavior from executives, arguing that they're legally obligated to behave that way because of fiduciary duty. In reality it just means you must act in the interests of the company, largely to prevent this exact sort of scenario (or an exec just being butthurt or whatever).
Yes, though it goes a bit further than just a blanket 'in the interest of the company'.
Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's in the interested of the shareholders, sometimes it's also in the interest of (some) customers, etc.
sounds like hes setting the stage for a movie script - "wolf of wall street 2"
The wolf of wallstreet 2 should be about the making of the wolf of wallstreet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52661779 the whole thing is crazier than the original.
This reminds me of how the film Catch Me If You Can about a credit card / pilot con man was in itself a con and the whole story was made up. It's great, the author did not actually commit any of the crimes he "confessed" to, and at best there's a civil case of the claim of the story being true events not in fact being true. But I hope the filmmakers had a good laugh about the irony.
Wolf of Wall Street even opens by reminding the viewer that Belfort is a convicted fraudster, you are watching and listening to him tell his version of the story, and he's almost certainly lying to you.
The difference between a racounteur and a bullshitter is that one is entertaining.
I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't jumped all over that yet lol.
> the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures
Honestly, when I’m on a call with customer service I could do without being reminded every microsecond that I’m actually on a phone call that might be recorded.
Appealing to be recorded in secret is a weird one to read in the morning. Another solution to your problem that respects the law is for them to not record you.
> Another solution to your problem that respects the law is for them to not record you
You'd run a customer-service operation that has no record of who said what?
I worked in a professional services department that did not record calls, except at the request of the customer. We took copious notes on each call, shared things that showed up repeatedly over a few days to weeks in wikis, and shared things that showed up repeatedly over a single morning in Slack channels.
Where I live companies are required to get my explicit consent before recording me and are also required to continue the call if the only reason they would not is that I didn't consent to being recorded.
It'd be a bit silly if not as where I live I can also request them to delete the recording immediately after the call ends. So yes many businesses operate like this.
When you go to a shop and talk to the person there for help with a previous purchase they aren't recording your interaction, why is it so surprising?
> So... the thing that made him America's top telemarketer was... illegally omitting the disclosures... which everyone was doing... but also, it made him uniquely successful because many of his colleagues didn't do it?
And Uber is a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, AirBnB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels. Find a hyper-successful company or person, and start digging. The secret 99/100 times is crime (or incredibly crime-adjacent behaviors).
Hotel chains frequently don't own hotels, but rather franchise their name to them.
Similarly, taxi companies are much less ethical than you're implying here. Often more criminal too.
Isn't it "always" rather than "frequently"? In case of hotels. Hotel chains are brand operators, their job is to build up brand value through ads, enforcing quality standards within hotels of their chain, and managing their loyalty program. They are not supposed to operate hotels, let alone own them.
Because entities that operate hotels (paying royalty to the hotel chain), almost always do not own the hotels per se i.e. real estate. They rent it. From holding companies that did not build it, they bought them ready from real estate developers who start a project targeting several potential buyers usually picking the actual one while construction is near finishing. And the developer is also not building the building, construction company does it, the developer just manages the land deal, licensing, permitting, and architectural designs, asking construction company to do particular phases of work with a particular budget. And that one then subcontracts different things to different entities, who in turn manage imports of the labor force and materials and manage people who do the work... The chain is looong.
> Uber is a taxi company that doesn't own taxis, AirBnB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels
Most taxi companies don’t own cars. Almost none of the hotel operators own real estate.
> secret 99/100 times is crime
Nope. This is the excuse of stupid criminals.
[flagged]
If you don't have anything substantive to say, consider moving on rather than commenting. The HN guidelines are there if you need a refresher.
[flagged]
The disclosure should be outside the phone conversation prior to funds transferring.
Send them to confirmation who should have a process of, we're sending you the email now where you enter you make an account and enter payment details. Stay on the phone with them while they do it to avoid drop off rates. During the account creation is the disclosures.
That’s why you don’t answer phone calls with „yes” as sometimes they would say your name and you would be inclined replying „yes, speaking”.
Just heard stories some shitty companies/sales would push you over they have your „yes” on recording. I don’t believe it would hold in any court if they would have to play the whole thing. But it would work on people who are not so tough.
Sattelite TV sellers were awful they almost got my mother to buy second one because they told her BS new one will void competition contract and then sales rep was pushy she wanted to back out - good thing was she did not sign anything before asking me.
So yeah I have seen some pushy idiots pushing old people or not confident people into signing stuff.
There is no evidence of a company using the fact that you've said "yes" at a random point in the conversation as confirmation that you've agreed to their (maybe unheard) pitch, despite variations on that urban legend doing the rounds for years.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-hear-me-scam/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_you_hear_me%3F_(alleged_te...
I just read in the article and I replied to a comment that has:
I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.
Few years in my ago we had telemarketing company. "Good morning Orange". No, that was their name. People thought they were from Orange company, but they just were stating their full name ;)
So many people got scammed.
It's also why I don't have any respect for the sales people.
Sales is about closing. He ignored rules to do it. Is it 'right' no. But he was successful at it for awhile.
The two most epic sales I ever saw where these.
One guy I saw some how resurrected a customer of ours. I flat out asked him. His words to me were 'I have no idea how I did it'. While he was saying that he pulled out his wallet and started laying 20s on the table. 'you didnt...' 'i have no idea what you are asking'.
The second one was in the dead of july at a garage sale my family was running. Suddenly a guy comes up and hands me money for a Christmas lightbulb (who put that out there?!). 'did you just get that guy to buy a light bulb' 'i showed him how he needed it'.
Sales is not about doing the right thing. But creating a need and filling it and closing the sale. In the first case he showed the guy that he needed money. In the second somehow he talked the guy into needing a lightbulb before Christmas. It works even better if you somehow get the customer to think they came up with the idea.
If you understand that rule of 'creation' you can actually make yourself immune to most sales bots. The first thing most do is create a need and magically they can fill it with the thing they just happen to sell.
Reminds me of the guys in The Big Short who don’t realize they’re fiddling while Rome is about to burn.
Lying and breaking the law are ok as long as everyone keeps making money.
Unfortunately that is pretty much how society works. As long as the right people are making money, or getting paid off by the people who are making money.
[dead]
“…and you won’t like their secret”
And y’all just keep scrolling through the ads for that secret that’ll explain to you what to be angry about. Some shit will never stop working.
I’ll forgive the clickbait, which could have come full circle to explain “you keep people interested”
But the whole article was so terrible that I forgive nothing and want my time back. Who upvotes this trash?
It's interesting how different responses this article evokes. Many commenters found the writing "very good", "excellent", etc, while others thought the article "terrible" or "empty".
How comes?
Despite the hard to believe "No. 1 telemarketer in the United States" claim at the beginning, I ultimately found the author relatable. The article offered a glimpse into a world foreign to me, made interesting points about how doing sales changes one forever, and ended ironically wondering whether this article will help close a book deal.
> Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem.
This hits hard.
I enjoyed reading that far more than I expected, even if I did keep glancing at the scroll bar and wondering if the juice would be worth the squeeze. The meta-commentary at the end (maybe this Slate article will finally seal a book deal) felt faintly reminiscent of the end of the Stephen King "Dark Tower" novels.
There is an absolute flood of internet articles that tell basically the same anecdote "the best salesman I ever met is not a salesman", or simple variations. Most of them have this talkative, knowledgeable salesman character.
Can someone from the industry tell me if this is some kind of ritual of passage? Maybe a prank on new authors? It doesn't make any sense to me. All these articles are the same trick repeated over and over.
Quite some years back, I did some door-to-door political canvassing. (Agitate the base, get people to tell a stranger they were absolutely going to vote, maybe recruit some more canvassers if we were super lucky.)
This is utterly shocking to anyone who knew me back then, as it was a complete 180° from my socially-petrified personality. I believed in the cause, but when I showed up at the local campaign office, they didn't need the printers fixed or any data entered (several folks in wheelchairs had that covered), and they explained that the best place I could be was on someone's porch. I couldn't bring myself to walk away, so I forced myself out of my comfort zone, picked up a clipboard, and rang a doorbell.
The world did not end.
I figured out some hacks pretty quickly.
First, like all canvassers, I prominently displayed several campaign buttons AND a badge that identified me, so verbally reiterating THAT was a really dull way to open. Door closed in face, politely if I was lucky.
It was much better to size up the house as I walked up to it, and pick something to open with. If they grew plants I recognized, I'd point that out, and talk about the environment. If they had a flag out, I'd thank them and talk about civic pride. If they had a compact fluorescent bulb in their porch light, I'd point to it and say "And I'm pretty sure we agree on a lot of things beyond that!". I dared not elaborate on that one, lest I interrupt their ear-to-ear grin, that someone had picked up on their little spiral sign.
All of these were things that THEY had done. They planted the flowers. They hung the flag. They chose the lightbulb. And I sussed out the little decisions embodied in those things, things that they were quietly proud of, and complimented them for their good taste, and explained that I, too, found these things important. So important that I forced myself out of my comfort zone, and found myself on a stranger's porch asking if they also felt strongly enough to join me in taking action. Of course, they already HAD taken action, and we both knew it.
Who's going to say no to that?
Second, there was the noncommittal "I'm still doing my research / just don't know enough about the candidate yet". Technically noncommittal, but it was pretty late in the game, and this was actually a polite "no". I suspected that many of them were a thin façade for racism, as gutting as that felt, and feels to this day.
But I thanked them profusely for "still doing their research". I was SO GLAD that they wouldn't vote for someone they didn't know enough about yet! Because of course all voters have a duty to be informed, and it was really gratifying that they took it so seriously. And besides, I confided: I was quite comfortable that when they actually DID do a satisfactory amount of research, when they DID get to know the candidate better (as I had, obsessively, read everything I could get my hands on over the prior weeks), that I could count on their vote. I thanked them again for their diligence, and left that to linger as I trotted back to the sidewalk.
Followups showed that of these "3" (on a scale of 1 to 5) contacts were incredibly likely to swing to a 4 or a 5 after my visit. Vastly more so than other canvassers' 3's. And later, they actually did get out and vote, at abnormally high rates.
Because I'd structured it such that supporting the candidate was the obvious and inevitable outcome of learning more about him. And who wants to remain ignorant? (Okay, note for 2025: A decade or two ago, this question was much more rhetorical.)
Third, and I hinted at it above, I was very open and self-deprecating about how uncomfortable I was with canvassing in general. But I was really glad that, if I had to be on a stranger's porch, at least it was their porch. They'd been very nice, despite my interrupting their dinner! I was asking them for the favor of their vote, and they'd already done me a favor in answering the door. They clearly were kind, thoughtful people, and that's exactly the theme of hope and pride and support that I knew I could count on.
There's a well-worn anecdote about Benjamin Franklin asking to borrow a rare book from someone who disliked him. In asking for it, Franklin showed his good taste in books, a thing that the two men now shared. And refusing the loan would've been uncouth, so the man loaned it, but now he'd done Franklin a favor, and who would do a favor for someone they disliked? So logically, goes the story, he must like Franklin.
I had people leave their plates mid-dinner, to walk back to the campaign office with me and sign up for tomorrow's canvassing shift. If I could handle it, so could they, and gosh darn it, they were going to.
I was so proud that I was good at this, until one day:
I'd been doing a lot of it (being between jobs, as I was), and I had a pretty good track record, so they started sending new canvassers out with me to show them the ropes. We'd knock the first street or two together, then split up and do opposite sides of the same street until we finished our turf, then they'd get their own and go out solo. One such newbie, as I shared the tips described above, said those were great, then casually asked "so how long have you been in sales?"
That's when the world ended.
This is great story, thanks! Happy 2025!
>"I'm still doing my research / just don't know enough about the candidate yet" … it was pretty late in the game, and this was actually a polite "no".
See, that's exactly what I'd say when I haven't finished my research yet.
Buying people's vote with charm is subversion of democracy, they're supposed to vote if they like your policies. The 'cult of personality' politics is doom.
No. In industry, the best salespersons are listeners and thinkers.
I mean the publishing industry. Is this like some junior writer practicing with a known article formula? Like junior devs do todo apps that end up flooding github.
And yet you read the whole thing.
This was the most interesting part IMO. There is definitively some truth to it:
“In ways large and small, we live in a world shaped by telemarketing. When’s the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? How many tweets do you encounter without bots in the replies? Have you seen how many spam emails your parents receive? I chuckle to think how mad people used to get when we called during dinner—when do you have privacy now? Even your sleep app is hawking your data to companies trying to sell you melatonin gummies. Are these intrusions any less intrusive because they’re silent?
Worse yet, decades of wage stagnation and the emergence of the gig economy have generalized the anxiety and pressure that used to be the exclusive domain of sales sweatshops; now we’re all pitching all the time, unironically using phrases like “building my personal brand,” indefatigably selling versions of ourselves via social media posts that fool no one, soliciting eyeballs, donations, subscriptions, views and clicks, for our Twitch streams, OnlyFans, Substacks, stand-up shows, GoFundMes, podcasts, NFTs, sending emails to our agent like, “Another piece in Slate, hmm, wonder if there’s a book in this one?” Manufactured precarity and the Hobbesian competition of all against all, combined with the public insistence on moral rectitude, have us all scrambling for grievances so we can justify doing what we must—even presidents and billionaires insist they are victims now. We’re all trapped in the back-office cubicle pod, our desperation rebranded as hustle, bitter entrepreneurs of abjection competing for the same dwindling pool of broke rubes.”
This piece obviously puts sales in a bad light. If you had asked me what a salesman is like in my early 20s, I would have described them much as this article expresses.
But in my career in Silicon Valley I really came to respect good salespeople. I often had roles where I was debugging customer-reported issues, and good salespeople make everything smoother.
I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction.
The one-time salespeople were just like this article: they are just trying to close a sale knowing that they don't ever have to deal with you again. If they lie, they don't have to deal with the consequences. So their incentive is to spew any kind of nonsense or lies or manipulation to close the deal.
The other type of sales guys depending on building relationships. with engineers on both sides, with management, with purchasing and billing people, with everyone. When I was working on customer bugs, having a great sales guy representing the account made everything much easier. They could get the customers to loan hardware, assign more resources, get documentation, negotiate for time, etc. I respected these great sales guys because they had real skills and talent in these spheres that I didn't.
> I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction.
Incidentally, this is the difference between a good real estate agent and a "door opener".
For a real estate agent knowledgeability about the property would be even more important than maintaining relations, even if you're just trying to sell me this thing to never see me again, when I ask to see the breaker box or what kind of heating system is this and get a "I don't know where/what that is" It's not making a strong case for a six-figure purchase.
I used to work in real estate. My boss, an experienced agent, told us that the most powerful phrase an agent can use is "I know that house". As in, they'd been in that house before, knew the construction, location attributes and history.
I have not yet met a "good real estate agent". I dread having to deal with these people.
Case 1: a puddle in the centre of a room; agent comments that the window had been left open.
Case 2: "this view will never change" as a building was going up right in front of us.
There's more.
Case 3: got his commission and left his company without telling me and before the deal was 100% completed.
Case 4: sent me a threatening SMS (watch out, I know where you live, etc) because I didn't want to take his calls to listen to new deals I wasn't interested in.
Ooof.
They are out there; I've worked with them. They're still salespeople, trying to close.
But the good ones are trying to close you as a customer for the next N deals, not just this one.
> I really came to respect good salespeople
You can respect a person without respecting their profession. I also serve the same dysfunction in much more widely respected ways, but my role is still part of the same cancer.
> without respecting their profession
I’d venture to guess that almost everyone reading this thread owes their job to talented salespeople and more importantly the sales profession as a whole.
I respect them and their profession because it’s kept my family fed for nearly 40 years. I am not a salesperson, but they sure as shit sell the things I build. I need them more than they need me because talent salespeople can sell nearly anything.
There’s selling things you build and selling things to people who don’t need it. You don’t have to feel good about things that feed you.
Huh? There are very few things that are “salesperson sold” today that are needed. People just go buy what they need.
Pretty much if there is a salesperson involved today it’s an item that is not needed/critical to your life. That’s the whole point of a salesperson, convince you to buy something you don’t necessarily need.
I think they were trying to get at something (not very successfully). I'd put it like this.
Want to find the best mathematician, the best engineer? Easy: just give them a hard test. Or more generally follow the metrics. The one with the highest score is the best, generally speaking. In that sense it's uncomplicated: administer the test, the highest scorer is your guy/girl.
For sales there is no equivalent. There is no "test" (crude sell me a pen type exercises notwithstanding). There often is a mysterious hard-to-quantify quality to the best sellers.
Of course with a track record it's much easier - the one w/the highest sales in the district, say - but without that it's quite difficult.
In that sense it's very different from other fields.
I don't think the people you are describing are called "sales" - usually they are "post-sales support", or "account manager", or something similar.. Basically "project manager" equivalent for customer relationship.
Fully agree that they are great though.
In smaller companies, one person might cover multiple roles. Also, it might be different when your employer is focused on B2B sales, though I don't have enough experience to be sure about that.
Anyway, when I was working in sales, I was handling pre-sales, closings, and post-sales support. We were manufacturing and selling security equipment. The goal never was to simply close the deal. We wanted to expand the network of distributors, and to do so, we needed to build long-lasting relationships.
I quite liked the experience, but I was always more tech guy than salesman – I guess most of my clients were coming back because I was preparing projects of CCTV installations, I was providing trainings for clients and their crew.
But as a typical salesman described in the article, I would be terrible.
The author draws broad conclusions about sales from just three cherry-picked examples from high-pressure, ethically questionable contexts (jail, telemarketing scams, aggressive panhandling) and creates a false dichotomy of being ethically compromised or unsuccessful in sales.
My father has a business that sells physical products. We had a salesman that was soo good, that customers used to call us asking us to take back our product because they actually had no use for it. They bought it because he convinced them that it was good for them. The salesman passed away long back. Rest in peace.
I came in hoping for inspiration, got punched in the face by reality instead.
It's a good read, just know what you are in for.
That was a long and tedious article. It describes how to adopt a hardened & transactional mindset. UGH.
Consumer sales is not Software Sales. In general - the professionals/engineers/managers I spoke with were really gracious and insightful.
Most sales organizations operate like a factory producing widgets. This is fine. It produces outcomes at the lowest possible cost of sales.
There are times when there is no substitute for elite sales: 1) Getting customer #2-100. 2) Most products which sell for over 200k 3) Complex engagements with multiple decision makers
I worked in early stage startups and sold software to the Global 2000.
How? 1) Never contact someone unless you have very (*very) strong indicators that what you are offering has high value to them and their goals 2) KNOW what you are talking about. Be able to engage in conversations about their technical infrastructure, options, goals and politics. 3) The goal of every call is to add value... NOT to make a sale. Adding value will open doors and people pick up the phone. Trusted peers provide referrals. They provide insight.
A classic failure of early stage founders it to mistake the factory model of sales (efficiency) for the required model of sales (inefficient, research based, strategic).
To site the Cynefin framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework) They mistake mistakenly believe that sales is simple and can be structured like a factory.
Most sales people are factory workers. They crank widgets.
Most products don't have sufficient margin to justify hiring expensive talent.
Professional sales is complex, chaotic, political, layered with inter-dependencies, and fought with constraints. It's a great career -- once you get good at it.
> That was a long and tedious article. It describes how to adopt a hardened & transactional mindset. UGH.
It's not a how-to article: it's someone's story. I think they regretted the hardened and transactional mindset.
For what it's worth, this article has given me ample moral justification for the disdain I show for cold-callers and relationship-based sellers alike (though typically I'll be openly hostile only to the first group): I don't owe them anything, even people I work with over a period of years. As long as they're trying to sell me something, I have the thing they want and not the other way around. What's truly astonishing to me is that so many people I work with don't see the con and think their "relationship manager" actually cares about them and is genuinely trying to get them a good deal. No, they're trying to sell you underbody coating and should be treated accordingly.
I remember one guy, years ago, who ended a 45-second year-end cold call with me with a "Come on man, I have a family. At least hear me out!" I responded, "Get a better job then. I have work to do." As a moral human, I feel sort of bad about that response, but then I remember there's a substantial likelihood he was lying to me to keep the call going to score a sale and the grift depends on me being moral.
I hang up the moment I realize it’s a sales call. If I’m in a particularly great mood that day, I might mutter a quick “No thank you I’m not interested.”
The way I vindicate myself morally is by knowing I’m not wasting their time this way. People like me are dead ends —— I know that I’m never going to be convinced to buy whatever they’re selling in a million years. By ending the call quickly, I feel like I’m doing them a favor. They can move on to someone who might actually be interested.
I try to do that, and if I get the robodialer pause I do hang up without any preamble. But some of the sales scripts are unnervingly similar to normal work conversations I have any day of the week. Those folks? They get the “no thank you” first, but sometimes they call back, and it’s open season after that.
Ah slate.com, always delivering.
I’ll never get those 7 minutes back.
Later on in the article the author also says that it's luck.
Of course you need to be better than your colleagues to be the best, but also the environment you're working in should help.
If there is demand for the product you're selling, and you can actually offer them an interesting deal, then you have a lot more chance of succeeding in your elite sales person life.
If there's little demand, and the industry has changed and people are more aware, the same old tactics and products are not gonna work anymore. Because these customers also get called by other new sales people with new exciting products and new ways of persuasion.
It's not just about how you make people feel, it's also about the product, company, and market situation, obviously.
The company the author worked for went bankrupt eventually. So I imagine no sales people were doing great at the end.
So there is no golden rule.
The shift to luck part of it could be expanded on more I think, its emblematic of many believing they are hot shit at their new job or hobby. You have the right idea: the product matters and the market and shift underneath the best salespeople. But salespeople like this are also like chameleons who don't really care about the product in the first place, they go on to hock something else that's hot.
It also reminds me of every would-be day trader that posts to /r/wallstreetbets. Many will hit a hot streak after they figure out how the options market works, they start getting fancy and making bigger bets and dreaming about quitting their day job. Suddenly the luck runs out and their accounts hit zero. They thought they had the talent and wisdom to conquer the market, but they were just lucky at the casino for a little while.
That line made me stop and think. At first I thought it was an exaggeration, but then I realized it was exactly true - however, I don't think the author understands it fully.
If someone offered to sell me that pill, I wouldn't say, "Ah, but you were kind of brusque, I don't think I'll buy it." I would say (well, think, actually), "I don't think I trust you that it's this easy and safe, so I won't buy it."
The key is trust. The insight the author missed is that we more easily trust people who make us feel good, among other things (attraction, social standing, etc.).
> Shelly in Wichita is not going to buy what you’re selling, no matter how good the deal is, if she can clearly hear in your voice how much you hate your job and, by extension, her.
I think this again misses the point. Shelly doesn't necessarily think you hate her, but she has no reason to trust you. If your product was good, and people were better off for buying it, you probably wouldn't hate selling it so much.
Telemarketing is mostly just sleazy upselling. And the _sleazy_ feeling is why most people avoid selling and salesmen, but it might just be sleazy from your perpsective.
The best salesman I ever met was peddling boat tour tickets. He wore the same suit and flip-flops every day, visibly messy, like he never heard about ironing even as a concept.
On a first look, you'd probably guess he was either a down on his luck businessman or a drunkard, but if you spent 5 minutes observing him sell, you'd think he fits the definition of a sleazy salesman.
Yet damn, that man could sell. Even the customers that ignored everyone would fall for his traps. He did this long enough that he recognised the type of customer almost immediately and could just "vibe shift" to their vibes.
From "Hey guys, you look hungry, have you had lunch yet?" to just "Hey, welcome!" - he'd slowly reel them in and either he'd hook them now, or redirect them to a restaurant/bar/shop he had an affiliate deal with and get some commission.
While none of the things he was peddling were bad, from the local perspective it felt like he was scamming these people and they were poor innocent tourists. But after a few talks with him, figured out it wasn't like that at all - his trick was he'd make them feel like they "know an insider", someone who can recommend them to good stuff and not "touristy" stuff.
And he would be that guy for them - he'd get them local wine, local honey, oils, meats, anything. He'd set them up a dinner or help them rent a car. He'd call up boat owners and get them private cruises. Basically, he'd be their "concierge". The boat tours were just a way to hook new customers in, and he'd both be getting a kickback from the owners and a tip from the customers. He'd basically be making everyone happy, making the tourists experience amazing and bringing a lot of money to small local businesses, while earning a nice comission in the process. Even tho I've later worked with everyone from door-to-dooor all the way to high ranking MAG7 salesbros, this one was the least sleazy of them all.
Unfortunately, the man was a heavy gambler, which would mean he'd lose all his money quite fast and be extra motivated to work again.
Random salesman movie association: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glengarry_Glen_Ross_(film)
Coffee is for closers!
Fantastic.
I’ve sold SaaS for three different companies.
B2B accounting, Procurement SaaS, and Senior living SaaS (niche, I know).
My only rule:
1. Have a good product.
> You thought that your success was a product of your gifts, but the success itself was a gift, a gift of randomness, of luck
This is important to remember, and also: those gifts themselves are yours due to luck. That’s why we call them “gifts”.
This post is relevant for commoditised industries (e.g. insurance) where you aren't selling on value but on cost.
When sales people post that picture of a saleperson with a round wheel and the "customers" too busy on the side of the road to switch from the square wheel as too justify something for themselves.
elites in sales are a myth. it's a manufactured playground.
at least 50 % of customers were primed out of any natural fuck.
( natural/organic meaning intrinsic or emerging desires that are not anchored in any psycho-social perception/manipulation, after the fact of a more or less evolved consciousness/awareness of self )
and a great amount of your customers was fake to make you fucking love your job and feel that success.
Great article, which reminded me of my brief flirting time with sales while I was in college and working retail jobs. Anyone who has worked retail probably knows there are the same level of sales involved, though its pretty low stakes. I'd sell extended warranties on laptops and other equipment at CompUSA. My manager on a few instances refused to let a laptop out the door without talking to the customer 3-4 different times, and sometimes they even relented. One time a large man began getting very angry with me for not selling him the laptop and looked like he was about to punch me in the face. Even though I was sometimes decent at it, I really hated how slimy it was for very measly commissions. I could see the appeal to some people, but I never wanted that to be my life. It was constantly stressful and demoralizing and at the end of the day you're just trying to extract more money from folks by whatever means necessary.
For folks praising their own SaaS salespeople or whatever, that's not really the type of person we're talking about here. And I daresay you probably just don't see that side of them because they know to hide it from non-sales folks.
> elite salespeople
Syntax error.
Lucky for me i learned at a young age that all sales people are complete and total inhuman indifferent biological entities when it comes to make a sale and reach their target. I don't blame them, because they need to make a living and have targets to meet to get that living. I just care as much as they do. :)
Occasionally my wife still falls for it, and for the sake of my marriage i tend to tag along sometimes.
I remember those days of four hour telemarketing shifts. And there was an older woman with a silky smooth voice where I worked too
It sounds like he’s talking about interviewing for swe jobs.
This really is a cynical take and is probably reinforcing how many view salespeople. "Oh I could be good at sales, but I have morals."
Sales isn't difficult. It's just telling people what you have that makes their lives better. The particulars matter - who are these people, what do you have, how it makes their lives better. Dodgy salespeople cheat on the latter two - they have an inferior product and try to convince others it does more than what it should. And then they double down on this skill of BS. The right way to do sales is to have a good product, figure out how to find leads that want it, and figure out how to best explain it.
In a past life I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners.
You began your lead generation process by making cold calls, starting with your family and friends before expanding outward.
Securing an appointment with a potential customer allowed you to demonstrate the product directly in their home or office. A key part of the sales presentation in people’s homes involved vacuuming the customer’s mattress using a black cloth, secured with an elastic band, instead of the usual vacuum bag. As the demonstration progressed, the accumulated debris—dirt, dust, and dead skin—would inevitably overwhelm the elastic band, causing the black cloth to burst off and release a cloud of white dust into the air. This shocking and unpleasant visual often left customers both disgusted and embarrassed, making it easier to close the $800 vacuum cleaner sale.
Horrible business. Product was pretty good though.
This is frighteningly similar to the "I Love Lucy" episode "Sales Resistance" from 1953:
https://youtu.be/TVJNQhGpwSw?si=heoJVivgwhj6Kpj8&t=86
Hmm funny, I wouldn't buy a $800 vaccuum cleaner that a salesperson just blew up in my house.
This guy didn’t make an explicit comparison to tech in describing his scummy history in telemarketing and how it’s a clear expression of our cultural values…but it’s an easy one to make—ad slop, algorithmic feeds, deceptive product websites, etc. We’re really no different as an industry, are we?
In the early 90s, I had a job door to door selling in America. This was a 3 month holiday job post-uni, part of the BUNAC scheme.
We were selling aerial photos of people's neighbourhoods/streets. (This was pre-Google Earth and pre-web).
I was a crap salesperson, but was luckily enough to bump into the best one, another student called Owen. I got chatting to him at one of the periodic parties the company threw and he had this knack for acting (maybe it was genuine?) like he was hanging on your every word, and how you were the most interesting person he'd ever spoken to. This is 30 years ago and I still remember it.
This made me laugh:
> Firms working the lightning-rod grift sent effete dandies to sell farmers on lightning rods for their house, barn, even their outhouse and doghouse, with no money required upfront, but when it was time to collect payment, the salesman was replaced by two or three hulking roughnecks.
And this:
> The majority of the leads hung up in the first three seconds; others stayed on the phone only long enough to detail the sexual acts they’d performed on my mother the previous night.
Interesting line:
> Eventually, it clicked, and I learned one of the bedrock principles of salesmanship: Whether you’re peddling long distance over the phone, Bibles door to door, or your own political candidacy on live national TV, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes.
> it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures
It was illegal and the reason for that regulation is to prevent exactly what author was doing.
Great piece..TLDR is this: 'Everything is luck'
Yup.
Things have to fall in place - even in the example of Nebraska lightning rod scam, people had to move out of sod houses to framed ones for the demand to be there. You are just a cog in the wheel. The economy, regulations, market fad or flavour of the month, competitor missteps, timing all these make "great salesmen".
"to working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour adult video store (fired for being “too horny”)"
I really don't think this is why he was fired.
Oh my, please don't glorify bs-itters. They are time and patience thieves.
I have no joke known some sales people so good ive legitimately seen one sell icebags during a snowstorm. To be fair, it was for a cooler inside and who is going outside to collect ice lol?
You might incorrectly think they followed 'how to win friends and influence people' but that's beginner tier.
The best sales people never sell anything. They are only there to be a smile and react to those coming to them. They'll prefer to talk about anything but what they plan to sell.
It's interesting how this phenomenon is completely nonexistent in Europe. On none of my EU phone numbers, in 15 years, i have ever received a telemarketing call apart from about 1-2 calls a year from phone company itself who usually tries to push some new tariff plan on me. Why?
Not sure where the why belongs, but some EU countries have rather strict rules about what you can sell when call without prior approval, e.g. newspapers only in Denmark.
As to why the phone company call: Because they need you to approve the move to a new plan. At least previously, when contracts where 12 months, forcing customers to a new plan would immediately release the customer allowing then you move their number to a competitor. Given that most contracts now are just month to month, if that, it's only expedite the porting of contracts. My old employer, a telco, wanted my grandfather to move from a landline and a basically free service, to a cell phone and a contract where they could actually make a profit on him. It took them years and a pretty large (temporary) discounts to get him (and others obviously) to move his number, so they could shutdown their landline service.
Telcos hate losing customers for two reasons. Firstly it takes over a year to turn a profit on a customer, if you factor in cost of acquiring the customer. Secondly, the different phone companies meet up a few times a year and compare number and figure out how much each should pay to have the other companies customers call their customers. If you have the most customer, you get the most money. (Not sure how this works across the global).
You're not old enough to be an easy and profitable mark. Telemarketers judge by the name in the phone book how old the person on the other end is. Why would they waste their time with you when they can scam thousands from elderly who are trained to worship any "authority" on the phone?
Tin Men.
A great film.
Let me save u 10 minutes and get to the punchline.
"Eventually, it clicked, and I learned one of the bedrock principles of salesmanship: Whether you’re peddling long distance over the phone, Bibles door to door, or your own political candidacy on live national TV, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes. If you don’t, you could be selling a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose weight without exercise, and they’ll still turn you down flat."
> a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose weight without exercise
Sadly only one of these exists.
I asume that you mean only the weight loss pill exists? Would that be something like manjaro (inhibiting the desire to eat) or one of the few _actual_ metabolism boosters in existence (which all make you produce insane amounts of heat and have fairly high fatality rates -- not necessarily a bad thing given their other side effects)?
Assuming that's what you mean, reversing has spotty success, but prevention is easy for most men if you can tolerate the side effects. Just take your favorite testosterone-blocker.
I assume they were referring to semaglutide.
>If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes.
You could really generalize and say this is about relationships in general. If people leave interactions with you feeling good about themself, it will be a relationship they want to continue and grow.
And the ratio of good interactions to bad needs to be at least 5X (at least that's what the Gottman Institute found with romantic relationships)
My 10 minutes aren’t actually worth that much (and thus not worth saving). So for me it was fun to read the entire article.
Amazing piece. Full of gems like this sentence:
It was the Y2K-adjacent midpoint between the door-to-door salesmen of the boomer era and the present-day dystopia of A.I.–enhanced robocalling — the last few years before American credulity (and disposable income) was decisively strip-mined by post–9/11 disillusionment, the emergence of the internet, an economy that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, and, well, petty cheats like me, the bedrock of this nation.
That’s some of the worst wannabe Cory Doctorow edge lord crap writing I’ve ever read. I’m surprised the author was able to resist the urge to use the word “sheeple”.
That's a gem of a sentence? It reads like someone wanted to sound like The New Yorker, so they overused their thesaurus and wound up just sounding insufferable.
Write in your voice. If this person actually speaks like that normally, I'm glad I don't know them personally.
Not everything in the world has to be written like a manpage.
This was an excellent piece that was well written in a unique and engaging style - almost like a Chuck Palahniuk book or something. Written words and spoken words are two very different things unless you are a dullard and want the world to be reduced to a brief conversation.
Elite salespeople don't write articles like this for Slate, even when Slate meant something.
I found this to be relatively cynical. Not every type of salesperson is like the types explored in this article.
When I was in sales we were taught to disqualify prospects, precisely because we had to find those 5-10% for whom we could resolve business pain or provide value.
Most businesses don’t benefit from signing up customers bound to be unhappy. It costs money to sell to them in the first place. Typically your ideal customer profile (ICP) is going to be someone who is going to love your product and have a lot of money to spend on it with the need to buy a lot of it. We wouldn’t waste precious time trying to scam people who weren’t that.
So really I felt this article was mostly talking about the author’s lived experience of sleazy sales: telemarketers and panhandlers and inmates.
I think some of that philosophical exploration was extended much too far into societal changes like going from an agrarian to an industrial society.
The author seems to consider the role of sales to be like the great scam of modern society.
But the reality is, products that salespeople were selling like the cotton gin or the steam engine were absolutely things that buyers wanted and benefited from.
Another example was a friend of mine who worked for Apple retail. For some people retail is soul crushing, and you’d be correct to point out that many people are completely insufferable to deal with.
But the story I got from them was that, for the most part, selling at Apple (especially 10 years ago when their products were arguably more exciting) involved a lot of time spent with customers who were having a whole lot of fun buying stuff for themselves.
If only the author got to witness an elite salesperson selling things that people really like.
#1: An inmate who preaches "criminal wisdom" of questionable quality, like "want to know how to disable a burglar alarm with aluminum foil?"
#2: A telemarketing old lady with a "warm voice and metronomic cadence".
#3: An NYC beggar who "walks up to a table, falls to his knees, interlaces his hands as if in prayer, and begs, at the top of his lungs, Please please please, money, please I need a dollar!"
I thought this comment was a very clever joke, then I clicked the link and realised it’s an actual summary of the article.
Thanks for saving me seven minutes.
It's a summary of the title, but not of the article.
The article was pretty much empty: someone trying to be edgy and making their word count. I didn’t enjoy reading the article and wish that for once I read the comments before the link.
I enjoyed the article very very much but I accidentally completed a BFA in creative writing in my youth so my taste in writing might be a bit off.
Knowing nothing about creative writing, I too enjoyed the article very much.
What more substance is there?
an intimate discussion of his life and how it was forever changed by being a telemarketer? It was actually a very interesting and well written read - an autobiography disguised as a sales advice article.
It's the most interesting article I've read in quite a long time.
Take the time to read it.
Same here. But I can’t oversee the irony. I was sold.
It's actually quite well written
The message seems to be: sales is a soul-sucking job, a demoralizing exercise on psychopathic exploitation in which making people feel something (be it good or not) is the way into their wallets.
The message is also that consumerism is driven by demand creation - and that demand creation takes its toll on both the demander and the buyer.
The greatest minds of our generation are hard at work creating algorithms to give kids eating disorders, making the next iPhone 3mm thinner, and figuring out how to make a TV dinner that contains no actual food.
Our modern world is so incredible. I wish we could do some good things.
#1 is true. All salespeople are fantastic storytellers. They got a secret, a charmed life, and they are willing to show how you too can be as successful and happy. Unfortunately everything they said was embellished or completely untrue.
Which one translates best into high ticket SaaS sales?
Hire #2 for the first call, #1 to close, and #3 for contract renewals
Damn this is a wickedly awesome response.
Damn the #3 part was too accurate
[dead]
My vote is for #3 during the next closing talks with an enterprise customer.
> "want to know how to disable a burglar alarm with aluminum foil?"
He just saw Beverly Hills Cop and wanted to sound impressive.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DupMnMsQXxM
Trump is the best salesman in history.
I don't mean it as a compliment. But it is a fact.
There are no wages without sales.
There are no wages without electricity. I have a million of these, all true.
I know this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but it doesn't make sense. There absolutely are wages without electricity. There are no wages without sales - either to an investor or a customer. It's the absolute foundation of a business without which there is nothing.
Are you sure? I'm pretty certain wages were being paid long before electricity was invented and will be paid long after WW3 when there are no power stations left.
Can someone summarize this insane wall of text?
Those stories about people (the internet generation) not being able to read anymore are true!
AI can, you fool!
I'm reading this in the voice of the mad scientist from a 1950s B-Movie.
(Seriously, it's only a few hundred words).
Haha ok, I was referring to Mister T ;)
You dislike wokeness and reading. Interesting.
That's honestly one of the best pieces of writing I've read in my life.
Can't recommend it enough.
Send it to all your friends. Everyone should read it.
Why?
Because it's funny, honest, has nice turns of phrase, is well-structured and engaging, and speaks truth about something at the core of modern life. I worked in door-to-door sales for a while and this article really captures something about the experience.
Slate is in a rough way huh? Will your next article talk about how great st internet promotion you are?