[HN Gopher] In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople a...
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In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work
Author : mooreds
Score : 86 points
Date : 2025-01-05 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| billy99k wrote:
| "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.
| I-M-S wrote:
| 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._
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| Ozarkian wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| > 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".
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| Vedor wrote:
| 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.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > 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.
| kcplate wrote:
| > 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.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| 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."
| normie3000 wrote:
| > a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose
| weight without exercise
|
| Sadly only one of these exists.
| hansvm wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| 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.
| imperfect_light wrote:
| >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)
| pingou wrote:
| 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).
| darepublic wrote:
| I remember those days of four hour telemarketing shifts. And
| there was an older woman with a silky smooth voice where I worked
| too
| armchairhacker wrote:
| #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!_ "
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Which one translates best into high ticket SaaS sales?
| all2 wrote:
| My vote is for #3 during the next closing talks with an
| enterprise customer.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Hire #2 for the first call, #1 to close, and #3 for contract
| renewals
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > "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
| dgfitz wrote:
| Ah slate.com, always delivering.
|
| I'll never get those 7 minutes back.
| inSenCite wrote:
| 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'.
| dstroot wrote:
| This. This is elite sales.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| 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.
| wwarner wrote:
| There are no wages without sales.
| mmaunder wrote:
| "...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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| mtrovo wrote:
| > 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.
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(page generated 2025-01-05 23:00 UTC)