Salespeople: People I’ve Grown to Trust
Let me come clean: I have a huge distrust for salespeople, even if they’re my friends. Especially, when they stop being a friend, and start turning into a salesperson. Rather than give them the benefit of the doubt, my basic notion is to keep them negative, and give them bonus points each time the prove me wrong. Only a few of my salespeople friends and contacts are actually in the positive.
The reason I dislike it is pretty simple: they talk and promise things that can’t be done. Disclaimer: I was assigned to do sales a few times in my early working years. Those times helped me learn that I didn’t like doing sales as a formal job function, and that salespeople are not to be trusted.
My background in sales
A bit of a backstory: I was hired to be the first management trainee of my first company. I got to go around in every department, and then choose which I would end up with. I started with the sales department. As I went around my route and re-established ties between our company and our partners, I learned that the previous salespeople in the area had many unfulfilled promises. I took the brunt of irate partners whose freebies were never handed out, even after helping the previous salesperson achieve his targets.
Later on, in the same company, I was also asked to handle another area of sales — selling advertising. As I took over, I learned that we were over-promising on our metrics and we had no humanly, practically, realistically possible way to meet our targets. I then had to bear the anger of the client, and I had to have the gall to bill them.
In my last job at STORM, our CEO, Peter, instilled the importance of sales to me. This was one of his takeaways from Zero to One. It’s been mine, too. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of what good salespeople are like, but basically from what I’ve experienced, the good ones always know how to figure out solutions to needs and manage expectations.
“The good salespeople always know how to figure out solutions to needs and manage expectations.”
This brings me to my learning about sales and product development: each person in product needs to think about how we will get our products into our users’ hands. The biggest myth in making products is that if you make a great product, they will ‘just come’. This is especially true in B2B, and even more so in enterprise B2B. Maybe they may just come, but it won’t guarantee that everyone understands the product enough for a mass adoption to happen. In B2C, I think it’s always safe to assume that only the early adopters will arrive. Getting it into the masses’ hands will only make sense if we think about how to sell it.
Even Supercell marketed Clash of Clans crazily to get it even more into the mass market. Before they partnered with a telco in the Philippines, I never saw a random person on the street playing the game.
In STORM, I was part of the team working on 2 products: an incentives platform, and an internal communication platform. Both times, our CEO, Peter, never failed to ask me how I planned to get products into the hands of the users and their approvers. This not only included how to reach out to them, but also how to show the product to them, how to make the benefits clear to them, and how to make it address their needs.
This challenged me to think of everything else I’d usually not think of (aside from sales, I had to think of managing the team, roadmap, and hitting our milestones). I came from a game studio wherein we didn’t have to worry about sales, because we had publishers handling that for us. Now, all of a sudden, I had to consider the actual users of the product.
How did it affect my work?
It put the end-user at a point of equal importance as our beliefs. When you make games, you think of a fun concept, test it out, and build it. You don’t need to do any extensive studies about how a user will play it; they just will. In making tech products for teams, I had to shift my thinking into realising that users will have problems, and we had to solve them using our product. What I thought as someone who knew what was capable or not mattered, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
It made me understand our potential users more. In the times wherein I had to join sales and pitch meetings, I took every opportunity to stay silent and observe the people we were talking to. Their reactions to our statements and pitch points said it all. I also took every opportunity to clarify how they did certain things that we aimed to help solve for them. These insights, though we got them late, led to great improvements in the products we built.
It made me conscious of how we were going to make money. I was of the belief that if we made a great product, the users would just come. Sadly, I started out a novice in B2B (I was in enterprise B2B!), and didn’t know better. I then painfully learned that you needed to go out there and show yourself to decision makers, rather than just market and advertise to everyone. Suddenly, I cared about what we were showing and promising. What we could push down and move up the roadmap.
It changed my beliefs about sales. They’re not just a slimy bunch of smooth-talkers. Sales is very important to Product. Without them, we don’t scale the revenue generation. It’s not all salespeople that caused my scars; it’s bad salespeople.
I have been blessed to work with a great sales team at STORM — my favourite pitches have been when I was with our Sales Head and she would bluntly tell our potential clients if their problems would be addressable by our products or not, or if we had a better way to solve what they were trying to do.
In one meeting, the potential clients were trying to get us to customise our platform for their needs. Knowing that we couldn’t and knowing it was a bad idea, she bluntly said, “If you need that, we’d just recommend you use an existing product, like Viber.”
I was blown away — and that’s a learning I’m carrying with me as I move on to my next product adventure.
