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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a summary of the title, but not of the article.
What more substance is there?
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.
This was an excellent piece that was well written in a unique and engaging style - almost like a Chuck Palahniuk book or something. Written words and spoken words are two very different things unless you are a dullard and want the world to be reduced to a brief conversation.
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…
Want to find the best mathematician, the best engineer? Easy: just give them a hard test. Or more generally follow the metrics. The one with the highest score is the best, generally speaking. In that sense it's uncomplicated: administer the test, the highest scorer is your guy/girl.
For sales there is no equivalent. There is no "test" (crude sell me a pen type exercises notwithstanding). There often is a mysterious hard-to-quantify quality to the best sellers.
Of course with a track record it's much easier - the one w/the highest sales in the district, say - but without that it's quite difficult.
In that sense it's very different from other fields.
Can't recommend it enough.
Send it to all your friends. Everyone should read it.
I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS
That's honestly one of the best pieces of writing I've read in my life. Can't recommend it enough. Send it to all your friends. Everyone should read it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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 s…
Can someone from the industry tell me if this is some kind of ritual of passage? Maybe a prank on new authors? It doesn't make any sense to me. All these articles are the same trick repeated over and over.
> Firms working the lightning-rod grift sent effete dandies to sell farmers on lightning rods for their house, barn, even their outhouse and doghouse, with no money required upfront, but when it was time to collect payment, the salesman was replaced by two or three hulking roughnecks.
And this:
> The majority of the leads hung up in the first three seconds; others stayed on the phone only long enough to detail the sexual acts they’d performed on my mother the previous night.
Interesting line:
> 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.