71–77 of 77 posts
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> commuting to NY four days a week How on earth do people do this? This is 3 hours of flight time each way 4 days a week...do they do something like fly 6am-9am, work 10am-5pm, fly 6pm-9pm, then do it all again the next day (this is also giving woefully small buffer times)? Or am I misunderstanding? Sounds awful.
Fly in Monday morning and back Thursday evening.
Sounds like a somewhat uniquely New York problem, rather than a generally applicable lesson. An equally valid position is: don’t cap the size of your addressable market to just people who live in the place you work.
> a somewhat uniquely New York problem, rather than a generally applicable lesson An oil & gas start-up in San Francisco is going to have a tougher time than one in Houston. You don’t see those much. But you do see e.g. agtech in the Bay Area flying out weekly salespeople to Iowa. It’s trivial for a competitor to undercut them on credibility alone. That said, I think this is more pertinent to sales than other fields.…
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Where would the cash come from?
Details are missing of course. I'm saying that there are many 20-50 person small businesses which are doing well for many decades.
There are loads of 20-50 person small businesses who raised money in many different ways ( from personal savings to bank loans to customer prepays ). Many of those likely started with a small number of people, growing over many decades one paying customer at a time.
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Are there really online communities that are so welcoming to salespeople? How can one authentically exist in a community while taking money to do so? It feels inauthentic, a lie by omission, astroturfing. I'm genuinely curious if there's a way to exist "authentically" when money is attached. That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corpor…
At the risk of getting downvoted: most of the impressions IT people have on other jobs are extremely one-dimensional and naive. In my personal opinion, a lot of IT people have the impression that their job is "the most important and complex" job, and they could easily do another job of they put their minds to it. My suggestion is to put your money where your mouth is, and try it. You will most likely figure out soon…
So maybe acting authentically in sales role is doing the best you can (authentic to yourself and the customer) to a point where there comes to exist a conflict of interest with your employer?
Though, it still feels like there are too many constraints on your own authenticity? At all the jobs I've worked at, there existed a gap between who I was and what the company saw as an "ideal" me in practice (how I acted versus how HR or company policy or how higher ups would like people to act or how I've seen in brand guidelines for tone and word choice for social media). I feel like the individuality/mindset I bring to the table is a large part of why I'm paid for what I do. But if I applied the employer's constraints wholly and sincerely to myself without individual thought, I would most likely be awful at my job in practice. I feel these constraints apply much more in sales, as an agent of the company, you must _act_ like the company.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, and only truly hellish employers would want this. But it still feels, averaged over all employers, the "employer ideal" salesperson could not authentically act as an individual while being an agent of their employer. Which usually inspires distrust, and empathy at their constraints.
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I don't think you really do if you are just responding to comments with useful info. You might if you want to make top level submissions. But I don't think anyone has an issue with for example, Gitlab people commenting officially answering questions on Gitlab. Their contributions on other threads is irrelevant.
I don’t think people have a problem with that, but it’s not the same thing as what the OP was talking about. You aren’t living alongside your customers by popping in and answering questions about your product when you get an alert that someone mentioned it on HN.
It really comes down to the sales hiring manager recognizing this passion/emotional investment in applicants and weighting it properly. And also having a pool of people with this passion who want to work sales at this employer to begin with! How often would this actually happen in practice?
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Are there really online communities that are so welcoming to salespeople? How can one authentically exist in a community while taking money to do so? It feels inauthentic, a lie by omission, astroturfing. I'm genuinely curious if there's a way to exist "authentically" when money is attached. That said, there are great examples of ways to do it right. Sponsoring events, sharing cool things from your position of corpor…
Huh, the comment claiming that "Salespeople are people too" got deleted. I guess responses were along the same lines as what I was going to post. It would be a shame to waste that piece of writing, so I'll put it here (while noting that, /u/cobertos, this is not a direct reply to you, but rather to another comment which was mostly along the lines of "it is not morally abhorrent to sell things, it can be mutually-bene…
> As you say, you _can_ be an authentic community member if you happen to have something to sell to the community - but if your _reason_ for joining the community is to try to sell to them, that is highly unlikely.
Yeah, this feels like the problem to me. The unlikeliness of it is why there is such a distaste societally for salespeople, causing the blindness to the least evil type of sales person.
I sorta figured this out in another comment too. Thinking about the corporate mechanisms, sales hiring managers would need to weed people out properly based on them recognizing this balance. And on top of that, you would need a pool of applicants who actually have the personal investment in the community in the first place, or the potential to become personally invested. Very unlikely! Or so it feels across most sales hiring interactions.
> FALGSC
Haha, aaahh, if only