In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

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.

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.

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?

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

Generally done for large deal sizes. there can be 100 vendors but when you spend 50 mil+/year on a vendor the strategy matters.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

By finding people who will actually benefit from the product and setting their expectations appropriately.

> 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.

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.

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.

[dead]

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.

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.

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 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”.

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.

Not my words. Hemingway's.

> 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.

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.

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.

What makes you think this is uniquely American versus human?

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.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime"

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.

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.

sounds like hes setting the stage for a movie script - "wolf of wall street 2"

> 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.

> 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).

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.