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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

#182

The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual. I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS

This is backwards. How do you get a market leading product? Years of good work in marketing and selling.

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

#183

The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual. I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS

This is backwards. How do you get a market leading product? Years of good work in marketing and selling.

[deleted]

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

#184

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…

How does a salesperson deliver exceptional work? In every place I’ve worked, outside of independent contracting, the sales person didn’t do the trench work.

By finding people who will actually benefit from the product and setting their expectations appropriately.

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

#185
post #31

> 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 t…

Isn’t the point being made in that passage that the better you are at sales, the more you treat your loved ones as customers you can transactionally extract value from by leveraging your sales tactics, rather than just… loving them? I don’t see how this connects to your comment on chefs and F1 drivers needing both grit and talent.

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

#186
post #27

There are no wages without sales.

There are no wages without electricity. I have a million of these, all true.

I know this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but it doesn't make sense. There absolutely are wages without electricity. There are no wages without sales - either to an investor or a customer. It's the absolute foundation of a business without which there is nothing.

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

#187

The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual. I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS

Then you don't need salespeople as it sells itself. You need on-boarding support people.

Huh? You absolutely still need sales people even with a market leading product. It sells itself, sure, but someone needs to work with the client and close the best possible deal.

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

#188

The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual. I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS

You should separate between inbound and outbound sales. If you work at AWS you are receiving a lot of inbound inquiries which make sales much easier than doing outbound work. In the case of top companies such as AWS, their marketing team performed a big part of the work while in small companies marketing cannot move the needle with a minimal budget, so they should be smarter, lucky, etc.

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

#189
post #46
post #44

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.

Why?

Because it's funny, honest, has nice turns of phrase, is well-structured and engaging, and speaks truth about something at the core of modern life. I worked in door-to-door sales for a while and this article really captures something about the experience.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wolf of wallstreet 2 should be about the making of the wolf of wallstreet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52661779 the whole thing is crazier than the original.

This reminds me of how the film Catch Me If You Can about a credit card / pilot con man was in itself a con and the whole story was made up. It's great, the author did not actually commit any of the crimes he "confessed" to, and at best there's a civil case of the claim of the story being true events not in fact being true. But I hope the filmmakers had a good laugh about the irony.

Wolf of Wall Street even opens by reminding the viewer that Belfort is a convicted fraudster, you are watching and listening to him tell his version of the story, and he's almost certainly lying to you.

The difference between a racounteur and a bullshitter is that one is entertaining.

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