In praise of salespeople!

Call them what you like: salesmen and saleswomen, business development managers, relationship managers – we used to call ourselves ‘consultants’ when I started in financial services 100 years ago. They’re the glamour guys, right? They get all the praise, and all the awards, they make a fortune, and they act like they’re God’s gift. I spent a long time as one of these people and the pressure and culture was a contributor to what nearly killed me.

So, here’s my statement, I’m open as ever to debate:

Technical people see the world as a series of choices from a vast array of stable, obtainable ‘things’. Salespeople see the world as a place where opportunities might be unearthed and if not taken, are gone. Worse, if not taken, that might be the end of a lot of soul-destroying relationship-building.

Wearing one of my hats, I work with a very technical person, and something happened this weekend that made this penny drop.

It's not only technical people, it's all people whose job doesn't directly rely on making a sale. I have had a number of conversations whereby a techy, or admin person extolls the virtues of their technical skills whilst bewailing their lack of recognition. These are highly paid techy people btw. They cannot understand why the salespeople were so highly prized. Do they provide the stuff that ‘is’ the company? No, they do not! No, they swan about in their flashy clothes, with their flashy cars, they are praised by the board at company meetings and have awards and prizes bestowed upon them… etc.

For people in sales, and marketing, there can be only extremely finite and often very hard-to-find opportunities. These opportunities involve really tricky things called “prospects” and “clients”. People, who are in no way under the control of the company and can do what they like, when they like, with whosoever they like. They are mercurial, have choices, can and do change their minds often, and usually want some special deal or feature that is not standard. Big, meaningful opportunities are rare and hard-won. There is pressure to make this work, extreme pressure. Getting fired if it doesn’t work kind of pressure, and here’s the KEY point – none of it is under the salesperson’s control the opportunity can just walk away or get pulled away by the competition.

Technical people can control everything. That’s not to say that what they do isn’t enormously skillful and difficult, but it’s all ‘there’, it’s not going to change its mind in a way that cannot be changed back. They have a huge array of opportunities at their disposal, they are brought stuff to work on, or they invent stuff that might be useful, but the thing isn’t going to walk out the door. There is always a solution available. Their work doesn’t have the option to go elsewhere, doesn’t have feelings, preferences, or biases, it doesn’t change its mind for some petty reason, and they don’t have to sell their soul, or ‘relax’ their values. There is no requirement to cajole, schmooze, placate, entertain, be nice to, remember the birthdays of the children and partner or be interested in the pastimes of, technical things. With technical things, it just takes knowledge.

Technical people see the world as information from which they choose what they want. It may take a good bit of knowledge and a lot of perseverance – I am in no way denigrating what it takes – it’s beyond my ability, but it’s all ‘there’, it just has to be found.

What happened this weekend threw a switch in me as the ‘salesperson’ in a working relationship. As the saying goes “I’m over it”. It’s a pity because what we do is enjoyable and fulfilling. I think I’m going to try me some “quiet quitting”. Stop breaking my ass trying to make things happen and see if opportunities just magically materialize. In the meantime, I have options in this particular field, and my efforts will now go there.

This is why salespeople are highly regarded; their work is high-pressure (OK, that’s not unique), but in a way which they have a very slippery grasp upon. There are actual people, teams of people, highly skilled sales, and marketing people, who are under pressure to make their lives a misery.

Their own colleagues are in competition with them. Techies, imagine your performance being ranked and publicly displayed, with the knowledge that spending too long near the bottom and you’re for the chop!

It's relentless. It never stops. There are fashions, fads, delivery problems, stock problems, and all the time the pool of opportunities is uncertain. In many cases what’s being sold is extremely necessary and extremely boring and laborious. It’s not all ‘shopping’. In fact, it’s very rarely just ‘shopping’.

Working in this shifting sea of uncertainty, with no guarantees, there are fixed targets that increase all the time. An expectation by the bean counters that there will be a numerical baseline of money coming in each month, each week, and each day. Every year, because this is Capitalism right, the targets have to go up because production, growth and profits must go up. All this from a situation in which every day, the salesperson has to try to overcome the fear that this day, this week, this month, is going to be a ‘bad one’, and that the unforgiving eye of Sauron does not fall upon them.

There is a drinking, and drugging, and gambling culture associated with sales. It’s a pressure that is out of control and doing something artificial, self-medicating, just to get some relief, makes the doubt and the fear go away for a while. Too often it becomes ‘the’ answer.

I must insist that I’m not suggesting that pressures and heavy workloads do not exist elsewhere, I’m just saying that salespeople have to live with a fear and uncertainty that others don’t. Salespeople have to live for the dopamine of the sale, the chase and the ‘kill’. They respond to praise and awards because in their role, they are let down far more often than they win, and they have to keep coming back for more. Imagine a role where most of the time, the people you’re depending on to maintain your job, drifted in and out and it was the norm for them just not to do what you need them to do…

So, this is in praise of the salespeople. I have been one of you and in some respects I still am. No-one brings me anything. No-one offers me a choice of things to do. I have to create them, every day, out of thin air. I am fortunate that I no longer have to rely on making sales to live on, I can now be an intellectual and an artist. I do have a choice these days, I can choose how and when I do things, but I still have to create all my own opportunities. The difference now is that I have no monthly target and I am extremely grateful for this, on SO many levels.?