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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is a point I keep coming back to, which is that many jobs without obvious arcane technical skills nonetheless require a skill, it just happens to be one which is hard to define.

Sales is a good example here. Sales people have to understand their clients, they have to understand how to take clients golfing or fishing or bring in a mobile barbecue trailer to their place of business, how to field client concerns- which necessarily entails being able to understand their product and then explain it in an 85 IQ way, because clients rarely have specific knowledge of your product- how to present as competent professionals representing their chosen field, and finally have to have good enough people skills to forge a meaningful connection with their client(this is usually but not always by discussing something completely unrelated to the product), move it into a discussion of the product, and then ask for the sale, all without the client noticing or feeling awkward. They also need to be able to get inside their client's head and figure out who to talk to.

All of this is a skill, it's a totally separate skill from engineering, and it's also a more or less full time job because sales guys need a lot of flexibility to respond to client needs which necessarily entails taking time out of doing some other job. All of these factors militate heavily against hiring an engineer to do sales.

All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.

There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.

The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).

I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.