Ask HN: Why Do Tech's Gatekeepers Despise Salespeople?

It is very difficult for a technical person to assess a salesperson candidate's true abilities. Since most people have come across pushy, commission focused salespersons, those experiences support their stereotyped view.

I have met some 7 figure earning sales persons working for IBM, SAP, Oracle. They thrive in the big corporate environment. They have networks of past clients and extensive knowledge of the industries they specialize in. Obviously to hit those sales targets they focus on government and large corporations. Enterprise scale clients are wary of products from startups regardless of the salesperson's skills.

Perhaps you could use your cold-calling and sales skills to approach the VCs directly and sell them on the benefits of your services to their investments.

Your question was about why many hackers stereotypically don't like sales people. I gave you the information you were asking for. If you want validation, I charge $500/hour.

Out of curiosity, what's your specialization?

Bias for or against something depends on the context and timing. When it comes to salespeople, it's not bias against hiring salespeople, but against hiring them before they could be successful at their job. When the situation is very fluid: product changes often, market re-defined, target customer changes, hiring salespeople early can be frustrating for all parties involved.

Now, if the product is not complex and the sales process is not complex, then you could get away with it and the salesperson could go after landing enterprise clients.

If the sales process is complex (compliance, security, many stakeholders, committees, etc) then an effective way is to reduce the sales process complexity through technical means in the product. For example: in conversations with people who were afraid about their data and a service shutting down or our ability to provide compute power on demand (that's a parameter that makes the sales complex, one technical way of overcoming it was to have no client data hosted and instead use their own storage and compute for which they had already a budget, a storage provider, SLAs, etc. This reduced the activation energy, or the number of converations and people required to make a purchase. Integration that made it possible for them to run their workloads on their data with their own already-budgeted/access-policies for compute and storage reduced the sales complexity through technical means.

It did not make the product more simple, but the sale more simple, until the next objection.

You need people who can think about incentives, decision processes of the client, and technical ways to circumvent them. In a startup, it's typically technical founders with knowledge of sales or salespeople with knowledge of technology which could be a non-technical CEO who also understands product (not automatic, as many are hands off with sales experience in the proverbial, sometimes literal, sugar water). One risk is the "XY problem" and solutionism.

These iterations lead to acquiring the language of a customer which leads to effective copywriting and marketing material to have leads, and to reduce the number of objections and a "sales script" that contains arguments for those objections/questions. This allows you to lower the bar for the salespeople required to sell your product and increases the chance of them being able to do their job well when you hire them.

If you were asking me, nowadays it's network analysis/visualization. But I am very much a solo hacker and not product oriented, sometimes to an unwise degree.

I don't hate sales people and think they provide a valuable service many engineers would rather not have to deal with; but the hyper-competitiveness of many sales folk optimizes for a zero-sum scarcity paradigm that is often in tension with what motivates engineering types.