I didn't say that.
I did say it was counterproductive. Making a career out of selling means you're going to need repeat customers, and customers don't return when they realize they were hoodwinked.
People who sell me what I want make a lot of money off of me because I keep coming back for more.
Sales has earned a slimy reputation. Slapping the word in front of hard, earnest work to brand it as something better than it is, is lying.
Clear communication has nothing to do with sales because sales has nothing to do with anything other than making a sale. Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.
It certainly does. It produces the best kind of sales - transactions that work well for buyer and seller.
> cars
I asked the prof who taught my accounting class about his career in used car sales. He said you could tell a good dealer from bad by how long he'd been in business. A good lot will last more than 5 years, because by then he'll be running on repeat business rather than running out of suckers in the community.
> houses
I've moved around Seattle a bit. I only deal with one agent now, because she's honest and reliable, and I recommend her to anyone who asks. Real estate agents rely heavily on recommendations from satisfied customers.
> Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.
I'm pointing out that the path to great profits is not by lying - it's by building a track record of satisfied customers. And that's how the best salesmen operate.
Consider insurance salesmen. I gave all my insurance business to one Charles Kern, who was very old school in that he always personally went way out of his way to take good care of all my insurance needs, including claims. His prices were higher, but were damn well worth it. I was very sad when he passed away, and have not found another agent since who was like him, and I'm correspondingly less loyal to them.
I have a similar relationship with my business accountant, who I've been using for 35 years. He's expensive, but he's earned my loyalty and I don't hesitate to recommend him to others. (And I started doing business with him from a recommendation by a friend of mine.)
And that's darn good salesmanship.
Here's an incomplete list where I've seen dishonest sales, and expect that the entire market category is thoroughly corrputed by such:
- Cases where you buy something very rarely (like cars or houses).
- Cases where there isn't much choice in the first place (banks, telecoms, ISPs, but also SaaS products).
- Cases where there is a steady flow of new customers, and repeat ones are unlikely (lots of e-commerce, in particular on big e-commerce platforms).
B2B sales are different but incentives there aren’t the same as for individuals—I might take more sales pitches in private life if someone was paying me to do it, it wasn’t my money on the line, and so on.
Actually, I take that back: recruiters sell to me quite a bit. Though they’re trying to convince someone else to give us both money, not me to give them money, so that’s a bit different in that I’m not purchasing anything they’re “selling”.
Before I moved to a smaller town, there was a grocery store I bought regularly from due to optimal location and relatively middle-level prices. I was pretty sociable back then, and befriended some employees. This eventually led to them warning me about buying meat on certain days - turns out, they were forced to wash stale meat with detergent to erase the bad smell, and sell it as fresh. I recently confirmed it with one of the ex-employees, turns out their manager actually opposed that, but this was forced by the higher ups in the management of the whole shop chain.
That, and bunch of other stories (some second-hand, some first-hand), essentially ruined my trust in regular small business.
I've been investing in stocks ever since my first job. I've done reasonably well, and I focus on companies that focus on making their customers happy - and they do better than average long term. That's great salesmanship.
Only bread, cheese and processed products in original packaging, so I guess this proves your point. But they are doing fine to this day, because there's only so many people you could tell (for various personal reasons I didn't want to pursue anything serious, like ratting them out to safety inspectors and hoping they didn't bribe the local inspector, like a certain bookstore I know of... but that's another story), and people tend to stick to their local grocery stores anyway (price and location sensitivity).
For what it's worth, despite that I'm now distrusting businesses by default, I try to compensate for that; if there's a store or service provider that I feel treats me fairly, and I don't see any obvious signs of deception in their overall business practices, I tend to stick to them despite cheaper options available. I feel fair business should be rewarded, and I do my best to put my money where my mouth is in this area.