There are countless theories on what it takes to be a great salesperson.
When I began my career in sales back in the day, Harvard Business Review called out Empathy and Ego Drive as the most important qualities of a great salesperson.
A few years later, it changed its mantra to “A good salesperson does X; a great salesperson does X+”. Duh Captain Obvious. TBH, I found this revised description rather tautological – and useless.
Cue to the present day.
Business has changed in many ways in recent times.
- A lot of wealth creation is driven by technology, innovation, startups, and venture capital
- Loss making companies enjoy stratospheric valuations in both B2C and B2B industries e.g. AirBnB, PayTM, Plaid, SnowFlake, Uber
- Founders of loss making companies feel free to give advice to others on how to run a business
- Assets that proudly reject fundamentals deliver the highest returns of all asset classes e.g. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, GameStop, AMC, NFT
- FOMO / BAAP is the most profitable investing strategy
- Even the quintessentially conservative Indian regulator is now allowing loss-making companies to IPO. The long standing condition “3 years of profit out of last 5 years” has gone. Delhivery, PayTM and Zomato are just three loss-making Indian companies that have announced plans to list in the Indian bourses in the near future
- Tycoons are preaching to startups to ignore customer service as a conscious growth strategy aka blitzscaling
- “Underpromise and Overdeliver” is passé. For at least a decade or so, the success mantra has changed to “Overpromise and Overdeliver”.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that we’re living in “strange and unprecedented times”, to borrow an expression from my favorite financial columnist Matt Levine.
If business has changed so much, it stands to reason that sales, a function so crucial to business, must have also changed a lot.
It has.
But probably not in the way it’s portrayed in the popular narrative.
Theories abound on the traits of a successful salesperson for the current zeitgeist. The one that I keep hearing about most often is “Sales should always be helping”. I’ve found these theories to be out of sync with the ground-reality of modern times.
Until I came across Matt Levine’s take on billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya in the Money Stuff newsletter dated 3 June 2021.
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I enjoyed this New Yorker profile of serial SPAC sponsor Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire venture capitalist who nonetheless says mean things about billionaires and venture capitalists. One important theme of the profile, I think, is that the essential skill in finance is not really predicting the future or evaluating business plans but salesmanship, and that if you are an enormously talented salesperson you will go far.
Another important theme is that sales is a deeply humanistic and all-encompassing endeavor: Great salespeople are not in the business of pushing products but of making people love them as people; once you can do that, selling products is easy. The article makes it clear that Palihapitiya is a great salesperson. So for instance he was an early Facebook Inc. employee:
The C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, asked him to oversee efforts to grow the social network’s audience. Given that Facebook was expanding with little effort, this task, as one of Palihapitiya’s former colleagues put it to me, “wasn’t sexy,” and few colleagues wanted to join his team.
To recruit co-workers, Palihapitiya promised them the most important project of their lives. Facebook would perish if it didn’t defeat MySpace and other social-media rivals. His team members would be underdogs fighting for a brighter future.
To emphasize his point, Palihapitiya sometimes recalled a time he’d won fifty thousand dollars playing poker and then had gone to a BMW dealership. The salesman – eying Palihapitiya’s rumpled clothes and brown skin – refused him a test drive. Palihapitiya walked across the street to Mercedes-Benz, bought a car, and then drove it into the BMW parking lot to taunt the guy who’d rebuffed him.
Palihapitiya assured Facebook colleagues that, if they joined him, they were showing up every bully -landing a blow for people who looked different and had unfamiliar pedigrees. Soon, many top employees were clamoring to join Palihapitiya’s group. One told me, “It’s intoxicating to hear someone describe your work like it’s this noble calling.” Within four years, Facebook was closing in on a billion users. Today, four of Facebook’s top executives are alumni of Palihapitiya’s team.
In hindsight, it seems unlikely that growing Facebook’s audience was the most important project of their lives, or that it created a brighter future, or that it struck a blow against bullying. But that’s not the point, and there’s not even a real argument for those claims. Instead the argument was Palihapitiya’s personal appeal, a story about himself that somehow became a vague metaphor for his Facebook team.
But a third theme is that, to be a truly great salesperson, you don’t need everyone to love you, you just need the right people to love you, and sometimes the way to do that is to have the wrong people hate you:
Other Palihapitiya stories go viral because they capture how delectably outrageous he can be. In 2019, when he was trying to persuade investors to support his first SPAC—for the space-tourism company Virgin Galactic—he met in New York with a group of mutual-fund managers and gave a dazzling speech about helping mankind reach for the heavens. …
One listener—an older gentleman, conservatively dressed—began interrupting Palihapitiya to question both his track record and his projections.
Palihapitiya let the man spout off for a bit, and then replied, “You’re a complete … idiot.” The older man looked as if someone had just punched him. “Have you even looked at the prospectus? Did you even … Google me before you came in here?”
All the eyes in the room went wide.
“How lazy are you?” Palihapitiya said. “I don’t even want your … money.”
Silence. Then one of the younger listeners started chuckling. Everyone under the age of fifty began grinning uncontrollably: now they had a Palihapitiya story of their own.
“It was brilliant,” an attendee told me. “It was completely calculated. That old guy wasn’t ever gonna invest in space tourism. But the other people in the room—they loved it!” About half of the investors called Palihapitiya’s office afterward to say that they wanted in on the deal.
“People either love Chamath or they hate him, and that’s fantastic, because polarization gets attention,” the attendee said. “Polarization gets you on CNBC, it gets you Twitter followers, it gets you a megaphone. If you believe that Chamath can get an hour on CNBC to explain Virgin Galactic, then you want to buy into this deal, because attention is money.”
I have bleeped some swears there; one way to be polarizing is by swearing a lot. “Everybody wants in on this deal” is a good way to sell a deal, but “all the young cool forward-thinking people want in on this deal and all the stuck-in-the-past losers don’t” is somehow even better.
In investing — particularly in tech investing — the main goal is to be contrarian; if everyone loves you then you are not contrarian enough. You have to cultivate the right friends and also the right enemies.
ENDQUOTE
Here’s a tl;dr version of Matt Levine’s theory on what it takes to be a great salesperson in today’s strange and unprecedented times:
To be a great salesperson, you must be loved by some people – but you must also be hated by some others. Polarization is extremely important. It gets you a megaphone, Twitter followers and attention. Attention is money.
IMO, polarization resonates very well with the zeitgeist.
I also agree that attention is more important than ever before. The title of a recent ET Brand Equity article captures one overlooked fact about sales in the present era:
I know that Max Levine’s theory is specific to financial services but I think it fits other industries way better than nebulous maxims like “Always be helping”.
If you know of a better theory with a wider applicability to all industries, especially B2B technology, please share in the comments below. Thanks in advance.