The best salespeople I worked with at $LAST_VENDOR_JOB could have given a flying fuck about the product they were selling. None of them understood it. Belief in your product is simply not a requirement for successful sales. It may be for a startup, but not in the general case.

Sales is a skill. I could try to break it down in a neat little bulleted list, but I'm not a good salesperson and so wouldn't be credible.

The problem I have found is that many supposedly-good sales people seem to set customer expectations too high. After the fact, there is a lot of effort expended on easing customer concerns.

I'm not a good salesperson either, as I will easily give away my concerns about a product I'm not completely sure of, but I've worked for people that are great at closing deals for shoddy products.

At one time, I worked with the sales guys from Akamai-during-the-ipo. It was very interesting to see them operate (and how specifically they wanted our salesforce account configured).

True, single sales can be won and lost by skill alone, but without some passion for either the product, your employer, or your customer, you may end up as a Glengarry Glen Ross style frustrated burnout :)

> I could try to break it down in a neat little bulleted list,

Well, can you give it a whirl, anyways? I'd love to hear how it came off to you/ what made them different from other vendors who approached you to make them stand out/ etc. I (and other HN'ers) would really appreciate it, I'm sure.

This is precisely why large companies selling big-ticket products/services to the enterprise seem to have clueless hacks as salespeople.

IMHO, this is a big reason why technical people struggle in sales: they're likely to be more honest/open about the limitations of the product when asked.

The less the saleschap knows about the product/service in question, the more he can confidently claim. Also, it helps when the sales function is separated out from delivery and support, as they can ensure that the next pitch is not coloured by those sausage factories.

Technical people struggle in sales most likely because technical training is not sales training. Sales is a learned and highly skilled occupation.

Read a good book on sales, like one by Zig Ziglar. Effective sales is not at all about lying to customers. The best sales professionals rely on repeat sales, and you don't get repeat sales by lying to your customers.

I have a technical degree, and it includes zero sales training. Even born salesmen need practice and training.

BTW, when Boeing sells airplanes it sends out its top engineers. Engineers with sales training make darn good salesmen for highly technical products, and there's no way in hail you're going to sell an airplane to an airline by lying to them.

I really don't think it's simply a choice between honest or dishonest. Sales is telling a story. It's your opportunity to craft a narrative complete with good guys, bad guys, a quest to solve a specific problem, and a happy ending of how successful your prospect will be if they buy your product. You can highlight the weaknesses of your own product and actually improve your case by then explaining why these aren't actually weaknesses at all. These aren't the droids you're looking for... Further, a product is more than the sum of its features, just like your career is more than the sum of your resume and your life is more than the sum of your bank account or how many trophies you have on your wall. Sell the big picture.

Also, if your product really does suck, get a job working for someone who has a better product. If no one has a better product, build it or do the best you can with what you've got. There's quite a bit of that in software where the best product simply doesn't exist yet, so sell the current best despite its shortcomings. Great salespeople have to be sold on the product they're selling before they're willing to sell it to someone else--it's easier for everyone that way.

Sales is all about understanding people quickly and helping them get to where they want to go, I'm not sure why technical people often have a problem with this but I suspect it has to do with an underlying lack of confidence when it comes to people and asking for things; it's not that they're inherently more honest than people who work in sales, I've heard that one plenty and I find "honesty" (as they see it) is usually just an excuse for their timidity, something to hide behind. And your average salesperson probably is a hack, but so is your average engineer.

I'm inclined to agree, but there's maybe more to that: another reason why many technical people struggle with sales/marketing is that they simply assume that sales is all about tricking people into buying stuff they don't need / stuff that doesn't work. So once they find themselves in a salesy situation or role, they might feel like overcorrecting in the negative direction, just to not be salesy.

Being salesy is what bad, incompetent salesmen do.