Ask HN: Why Do Tech's Gatekeepers Despise Salespeople?

5 points by jdileo 3 years ago | 17 comments

Ellison, Horowitz, PG, Nadella and countless others of import have espoused the critical role elite salespeople play in startup cultural and financial success (hustle, relentlessness, fierce advocacy of product teams, iterating user value prop, etc.) Yet hiring managers remain routinely and unapologetically bias towards salespeople. Bias increases by multiples when the record of sales achievement isn't related to a technical product.

For context, I've earned a 7 figure income for 10+ years as an individual contributor and have also recruited, hired & trained extraordinary achieving sales teams.

Please, please dear HN I implore you to counsel me on this subject. --->Does it not strain all credulity to believe that the totality of skills + IQ + EQ, etc. possessed by a high achieving sales professional are incompatible with mastery of a technical product, rapport with engineers & PM's, ability to facilitate TAM & competition due diligence, etc, etc, etc.?

As it stands presentlythe status quo is lose-lose. I lose an opportunity to join the tech pioneers building the future.....and they lose a 80-100 hours a week sales machine with instant ability to move the needle.

anigbrowl 3 years ago |

Many people in tech has had a bad experience (or sometimes several) with sales people who make commitments to a client to close a deal, and then come back to the office and tell the tech people what they need to deliver. Finding oneself having to bridge the gap between reality and what the client imagined they were going to get is an acutely unpleasant experience. Recall too that many people work with computers because they don't particularly enjoy working with people. Of course, it's equally true that good sales people take that social burden off engineers and act as bridge builders with clients rather than selling used cars.

On a more general level:

> I've earned a 7 figure income for 10+ years > a 80-100 hours a week sales machine

Maybe just chill out a bit? A lot of people don't want to work 4-5000 hours a year, and if their utility function doesn't match yours then they're just going to find you stressful to be around. By most people's standards you've already Made It economically speaking, yet you sound anxious as hell about everything falling apart.

jdileo 3 years ago | |

Respectfully, the experience you outline above is a routine example of sales hackery. Does it not ideally underscore precisely why startups/tech orgs strategically error in their woeful sales hiring protocols?

anigbrowl 3 years ago | | |

Your question was about why many hackers stereotypically don't like sales people. I gave you the information you were asking for. If you want validation, I charge $500/hour.

Jugurtha 3 years ago |

Bias for or against something depends on the context and timing. When it comes to salespeople, it's not bias against hiring salespeople, but against hiring them before they could be successful at their job. When the situation is very fluid: product changes often, market re-defined, target customer changes, hiring salespeople early can be frustrating for all parties involved.

Now, if the product is not complex and the sales process is not complex, then you could get away with it and the salesperson could go after landing enterprise clients.

If the sales process is complex (compliance, security, many stakeholders, committees, etc) then an effective way is to reduce the sales process complexity through technical means in the product. For example: in conversations with people who were afraid about their data and a service shutting down or our ability to provide compute power on demand (that's a parameter that makes the sales complex, one technical way of overcoming it was to have no client data hosted and instead use their own storage and compute for which they had already a budget, a storage provider, SLAs, etc. This reduced the activation energy, or the number of converations and people required to make a purchase. Integration that made it possible for them to run their workloads on their data with their own already-budgeted/access-policies for compute and storage reduced the sales complexity through technical means.

It did not make the product more simple, but the sale more simple, until the next objection.

You need people who can think about incentives, decision processes of the client, and technical ways to circumvent them. In a startup, it's typically technical founders with knowledge of sales or salespeople with knowledge of technology which could be a non-technical CEO who also understands product (not automatic, as many are hands off with sales experience in the proverbial, sometimes literal, sugar water). One risk is the "XY problem" and solutionism.

These iterations lead to acquiring the language of a customer which leads to effective copywriting and marketing material to have leads, and to reduce the number of objections and a "sales script" that contains arguments for those objections/questions. This allows you to lower the bar for the salespeople required to sell your product and increases the chance of them being able to do their job well when you hire them.

jdileo 3 years ago | |

True thanks for the time and care needed to script above. All points clear and logical.

The vast majority of engineers will always view sales as a necessary evil, and thus the percentage whom achieve even base level competency is staggeringly low. In contrast, elite sales people are both driven and financially rewarded to master the nuances and myriad client incentives you outline above. Further, they are high IQ and will work tirelessly from outset to acquire deep knowledge of all required to serve the engineering team, close customers and contribute to P&L.

With rare exceptions a startup is ill-advised to not hire a sales lead from very early days. Involving this high achiever intimately with totality of inaugural customer acquisition is best practice, not doing so is akin to asking an offensive lineman to run a crossing route in the red zone.

GianFabien 3 years ago |

It is very difficult for a technical person to assess a salesperson candidate's true abilities. Since most people have come across pushy, commission focused salespersons, those experiences support their stereotyped view.

I have met some 7 figure earning sales persons working for IBM, SAP, Oracle. They thrive in the big corporate environment. They have networks of past clients and extensive knowledge of the industries they specialize in. Obviously to hit those sales targets they focus on government and large corporations. Enterprise scale clients are wary of products from startups regardless of the salesperson's skills.

Perhaps you could use your cold-calling and sales skills to approach the VCs directly and sell them on the benefits of your services to their investments.

jdileo 3 years ago | |

Agreed on all, thx for the note!

elmerfud 3 years ago |

In my experience most of the time sales people spend their efforts selling the engineers on the lies they told the customer rather than selling the customer on the product that already exists and creating a market for that product. This is why a lot of engineers do not like sales.

jdileo 3 years ago | |

Kindly see above reply.

sirspacey 3 years ago |

I think you’ll find there are plenty of tech companies who value your skill

Engineers tend to undervalue sales, so companies founded by engineers can reflect that

I’m curious what your process has been for finding a potential team to join?

jdileo 3 years ago | |

This month marks the 14th anniversary of the '08 financial collapse, a debacle founded upon naked greed, corruption and cronyism.

In late August '08 I was epitome of rags to riches American Dream, bootstrapped founder of a 100+ person startup boasting 12 consecutive years 2x growth, 8-figs liquid and a signed LOI that represented generational wealth. Easy guess what happened next......

To answer your question Sirspacey, I'm nearly as passionate about crypto/blockchain rendering global feds impotent as I am about loving my amazing wife and children.

scombridae 3 years ago |

If we assume every one-on-one transaction is a zero-sum game, and if we assume the salesperson aims to gain, then the buyer necessarily loses.

While not every transaction is zero-sum, nearly all those being shoved in our faces daily are.

The irony is most programmers are aware their software is a solution looking for a problem, and rely on their own salespeople to win the game they despise. It's not hypocrisy if we do it.

jdileo 3 years ago | |

Dear friend, grab a pitcher of water and fill the glass to minimum 51%.

Your response, while applicable to the car salesman pushing the useless add-on feature or Best Buy associate shilling a warranty for the crappy laptop you just bought, is a galaxy away from the issue I've raised. Each of us is granted limited time on this earth, I'd urge you to consider only working on software that remedies a problem you truly care about.