COFFEE'S FOR CLOSERS 

6/26/2022

Over the last few years, I’ve been doing sales at various software startups. During this time, I've learned a lot of important lessons, some useful and others slightly disturbing.

I'll start with a positive lesson: salesmanship is a real skillset that's useful to have even if you aren't a salesperson. There’s a version of this argument that’s already pretty common. I’ve heard it said many times that sales is a great “soft skill” because in life you have to “sell yourself.” That’s a vanilla version of the truth. The real reason sales is a useful skillset is because it teaches you how to make money manually. 

Here’s what I mean: there are three ways to create interest in your business. The best way is through word-of-mouth, i.e. your friend tells you about a product he loves. The second way is through marketing. You see an ad on TV and think “hey that’s cool, I’m gonna buy that.” The third way is someone sells to you. Maybe they call you out of the blue, maybe they come to your door, maybe they blow up your email inbox. Whatever their method, they personally convince you to buy.

Of all three, selling is the least efficient method of creating interest because it’s so manual. But it’s also the method with the lowest barrier to entry, and that’s what makes it useful.

To generate interest organically, your product has to already be successful enough so that people encounter it in the wild. To run a marketing campaign, you need a marketing budget. But sales? You need a phone and the right person’s contact info. 

The reason this matters so much is because sometimes growth needs to be forced. If you have a business that isn’t growing, there’s always a phone. The only question is whether you want to succeed badly enough to start dialing. This is what I mean by making money manually.

Ideally your company becomes so successful that you don’t have to sell manually anymore. But sometimes the only way to get to that point is to force it.

It's important to note that sales has a dark side, too. The ability to influence people can easily be abused, and some people are, it turns out, highly impressionable. For example, I've cold called people, and within minutes they gave me their credit card information over the phone. They didn't know anything about me, and I could've easily been a scam artist, but they went along because they were excited about something I sold them.

It's actually even worse than mere gullibility; deep down, some people want to be persuaded. Once you tell them a story about how your product will make their lives better, certain prospects want to believe it so badly that they'll suspend disbelief and begin to overlook things they shouldn't. At that point, it's important to show restraint, lest you go from persuasion to manipulation.  

Another unfortunate lesson sales teaches you is that a lot of companies are dysfunctional. You can learn this specifically by doing sales because as a salesperson, you depend on so many other departments to do your job. If the product is bad, and the marketing is bad, and the website looks dodgy, you're in trouble. I'm not saying an individual's selling ability doesn't matter, but it can't magically make a bad company good. 

My advice for salespeople who find themselves in such a position is to simply act as though, through their own force of will, they can find success by pushing through the larger systemic failures around them. In life as in business, sometimes you just gotta force it and make money manually.

***