Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 305 posts

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

#241

Post by crowcroft »

nextworddev wrote: post #45

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

I saw this when I worked for a SaaS that was incredibly dominant in some countries, and almost non-existent in others (where an incumbent player was dominant).

Every year or so top performing sales and marketing folks from the dominant countries would be tapped on the shoulder and tasked with growing the company in our less dominant markets. Everyone failed.

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

#242

Post by bluGill »

astura wrote: post #224
davidcalloway wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you value their work too little. I worked as a realtor for a time and admittedly not a good one. A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services. There is often an element of buffering communication between buyer and seller, but it's not just a trust problem. Due to…

>A good realtor has knowledge of current values in the local market, issues to look for throughout the transaction, which services will be needed and who can be trusted to provide those services. Even if a "good" Realtor actually knows these things (and they don't, even though most think they do), you can't trust anything they say because they have misaligned incentives from you. So what service am I paying for, agai…

Incentives should be aligned because you will use that agent again if they do a good job for you. Not all realize this, but repeat moves (every 5-10 years) and referrals are how good agents make their money and both mean that they need to be trustworthy.

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

#244

Post by bluGill »

nextworddev wrote: post #45

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

The non market leading company sometimes do very well if/where they have good sales. The easy mode is work for the market leading company while the others don't have great sales staff. But if the others have great sales staff your job as the market leader becomes much harder - your market leading position ensures you are invited to the table when something is bought, but it doesn't ensure you have the sale. (the non-market leaders sometimes are not even invited to the table even when their offering is clearly better)

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

#245

Post by incomingpain »

I have no joke known some sales people so good ive legitimately seen one sell icebags during a snowstorm. To be fair, it was for a cooler inside and who is going outside to collect ice lol?

You might incorrectly think they followed 'how to win friends and influence people' but that's beginner tier.

The best sales people never sell anything. They are only there to be a smile and react to those coming to them. They'll prefer to talk about anything but what they plan to sell.

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

#246

Post by zhughes3 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #226
inSenCite wrote: post #18

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…

Sales are maligned. There is the guy at the car dealership who specializes in adding an extended service contract for your new car. Then there's the guy who sells a software development project that lands a well qualified customer (joy to work with) and a good specification which was well estimated and price so you can complete the work profitably. Maybe you know nothing about formalwear but somebody sells you a suit…

How does someone become someone who sells the software development project? Is this an architect or sales engineer? I’m confused by how a sales engineer would gain the level of expertise needed to sell the project and specs/implementation.

Do they usually come from an IC developer role?

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

#247

Post by jpadkins »

nextworddev wrote: post #45

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

I was talking to a sales person at Research in Motion back when Blackberry and mobile enterprise email were hot; asked him how things are. He replied it was like selling oxygen, he would walk in and take an order for how many they wanted. Every RIM salesperson looked like an amazing sales person based on sales metrics.

Also the inverse is true. A great sales team can disguise a mediocre product team.

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

#248

Post by carlosjobim »

anovikov wrote: post #127

It's interesting how this phenomenon is completely nonexistent in Europe. On none of my EU phone numbers, in 15 years, i have ever received a telemarketing call apart from about 1-2 calls a year from phone company itself who usually tries to push some new tariff plan on me. Why?

You're not old enough to be an easy and profitable mark. Telemarketers judge by the name in the phone book how old the person on the other end is. Why would they waste their time with you when they can scam thousands from elderly who are trained to worship any "authority" on the phone?

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

#249

Post by kayodelycaon »

mrweasel wrote: post #235
DavidPeiffer wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lead to his termination? Was the on-call team not thrilled with having to (even minimally) deal with issues from the systems of another company?

That was a major part of it. I never completely understood why, but for some reason the majority of the staff really hated that project. I though it was a brilliant move. The problem may have been that people attempted to over-engineer the project and handle scenarios that wasn't in scope, setting unrealistic goal resulting in a lot of pretty dumb and boring work. Another part was that was yet another service which w…

> a lot of the stuff he sold was not actually something we offered or necessarily knew how to do

This may not be the situation but I’m willing to bet he created an insane amount of chaos for everyone else by doing this. Existing projects constantly getting delayed or cancelled because he sold something that wasn’t planned for.

At my last job, we had a department who delegated all of their quarterly goals to the development team. They made us responsible for accomplishing their goals on top of everything else we were doing.

They delayed critical projects for years for marginal gains.

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

#250

Post by forinti »

forinti wrote: post #170
mooreds wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction. Incidentally, this is the difference between a good real estate agent and a "door opener".

I have not yet met a "good real estate agent". I dread having to deal with these people. Case 1: a puddle in the centre of a room; agent comments that the window had been left open. Case 2: "this view will never change" as a building was going up right in front of us.

There's more.

Case 3: got his commission and left his company without telling me and before the deal was 100% completed.

Case 4: sent me a threatening SMS (watch out, I know where you live, etc) because I didn't want to take his calls to listen to new deals I wasn't interested in.

Post reply on HN