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

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

#11

Post by normie3000 »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #5

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

Sadly only one of these exists.

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

#12

Post by admissionsguy »

armchairhacker wrote: post #10

#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! "

Which one translates best into high ticket SaaS sales?

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

#13

Post by PittleyDunkin »

Ozarkian wrote: post #4

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 tra…

> 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.

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

#15

Post by AnimalMuppet »

I-M-S wrote: post #3

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, pett…

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.

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

#16

Post by Vedor »

theamk wrote: post #9
Ozarkian wrote: post #4

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 tra…

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.

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

#17

Post by arrowsmith »

armchairhacker wrote: post #10

#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.

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

#18

Post by inSenCite »

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'.

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

#19

Post by all2 »

admissionsguy wrote: post #12
armchairhacker wrote: post #10

#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! "

Which one translates best into high ticket SaaS sales?

My vote is for #3 during the next closing talks with an enterprise customer.

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

#20

Post by paulcole »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #5

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…

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.
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