Why Everyone is in Sales

http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/why-everyone-is-in-sales/

by sahillavingia • 15 years ago

44 18 15 years ago

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

As much as I kind of despise sales and salesmanship, I'm slowly realizing that it's an essential skill to getting the things you want in life.

A friend of mind helped me rework my resume recently, and the fundamental point she finally got through my skull after a few hours was that the point of the resume is to demonstrate my potential value to the prospective employer. Which is part of what patio11 is saying on here all the time (in addition to: find the place where you can provide the most value).

It's something I've always sucked at, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's something a lot of nerds hold in common.

Partly it's modesty. I don't like to self-promote (to use the term in a neutral way, including a simple demonstration of potential value), because I just don't like to talk about myself.

Partly it's humility. The more I learn, the more I learn how much I don't know. The more people I meet, the more I realize how awesome people are. Self-promotion in this context feels false.

Partly it's some weird version of misplaced pride. I don't feel like I should have to self-promote. My actions, ideas, and accomplishments should speak for themselves. Similarly, I feel like I shouldn't have to find a place where I can provide value; it should find me. These are both wrong and stupid sentiments, of course.

I think this is really hard for some of us. These feelings make us allergic to sales, in both directions. But it seems like people like patio11 have found a sort of middle path between unrewarded toil and shameless blow-hardiness. This post feels a bit to me like someone on the other side of the divide trying to reach out to me, and while I appreciate the effort, I still feel instinctively suspicious. I think what I need is more from people who started on my side of the divide and found a good place in the middle about how they got there.

ulisesrmzroche• 15 years ago

It comes from not having much experience with haggling and having a good and instinctual distrust of people who use the terms "rockstar" (still lol) or write blogs about ass-kicking.

Best way to get started is to watch "Real Deal" on the History Channel and then try selling your old junk on craigslist.

jasonshen4• 15 years ago

Hey joebadmo - thanks for your thoughtful comment! I realize that I have skipped some of that backstory and it makes people read my thoughts on selling/self-promotion with more wariness.

I hope to write more about this in my next post in the series (Why Smart People Suck at Selling) but basically I was a nice, energetic and shy child to the point of being bullied. Part of my shift in thinking was learning to stand up for myself and realizing that I was responsible for getting what I wanted out of life -- and that the best way to do that was to help other people get what THEY want.

Anyways, more on that later. Thanks for your thoughts.

davidhansen• 15 years ago

and that the best way to do that was to help other people get what THEY want.

Would be interesting to see how you back this up. My experience has invariably been that no good deed goes unpunished.

jonnathanson• 15 years ago

As a fellow smart, hard-working, nerdy introvert, let me add another bullet point (or perhaps a sub-point under "humility"): personal ethics.

I grew up with a serious aversion to bullshit in all of its forms. Especially when it verged on outright lying. All too often, I'd seen hucksterish, self-promoting coworkers tell bald-faced lies about their work, their accomplishments, their positions, etc., and get massively rewarded for doing so. I couldn't bring myself to do it. Consciously, I knew that bullshitting about myself -- even just a tiny bit -- was a successful career ascension tactic. And I knew that not doing so was, perhaps, actively slowing me down. But damn it, it just felt so fake and slimy and wrong.

Eventually -- and it's taken me more years to learn this fact than I feel comfortable admitting -- I realized that bullshit is not binary. There isn't some black-or-white dichotomy between "lying" and "telling the truth." In between lies an entire spectrum, and some of that spectrum is safe to play in. Even encouraged.

It's possible to sell yourself with only a drop of bullshit. Sort of like a fine layer of rhetorical polish. It's not about fabricating accomplishments out of whole cloth, but rather, about talking your real accomplishments up, and describing them in just the right way. For a lot of people, finding that level of just-the-right-amount-of-bullshit comes very naturally. For others, like myself, it's a skill that needs to be learned.

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

Great point, and as an illustration of the same mentality, I find something inside myself recoil at the thought of compromising even a little on bullshit.

And I totally agree with you that it often seems like bullshitting talent and skills get people a lot farther in any field than actual value. Which is infuriatingly unfair.

I think the struggle is to figure out how to hit the same pschological targets that bullshitters do, without bullshitting. And the answer I'm sort of converging on is, again, to demonstrate your true value.

Even this, I think, is something that comes naturally to some and not others. I keep bringing up patio11 because he in no way sets of my bullshit detectors, but manages to demonstrate his value. The feeling I get is that it's something he has a talent for.

itmag3• 15 years ago

It's not like the bullshitters think they are telling the truth either. They've just accepted a toxic environment and decided to become callous and hard.

I don't this is always a clear-cut choice. Sure, one can decice to say "fuck 'em" and just lie like the rest to game a corrupt system.

But, one almost inevitably one becomes cynic and bitter and hardened.

I think this is fundamental a choice one needs to make in life. If one wants to feel full feeling, then this goes for both pain and pleasure. And that just may not be conducive to being effective in a corporate environment.

eric-hu• 15 years ago

I really liked your comment and I'd like to add my own perspective, which is similar.

My ideal as a developer is to project the same attitude to clients and bosses that I would like to have. It's not exactly my current attitude, but it would go something like this:

If I know how to do something "Yes, I can do that, I've done that before and I'm familiar with the steps."

If I don't "Yes, I can do that, I just need enough time to figure out how."

Abstracted to general product marketing "Yes, we can meet your needs with our current product or figure out a way to do so at a cost of x to you"

Any time that last statement turns out to be false in retrospect beyond some threshold (lets say 10% of the time), that's a sign of overselling. I guess the threshold is where some subjective fuzz comes into play. Likewise, the cost accuracy is important too (time also matters, but I'm rolling that into cost).

Integrity is about avoiding such statements when impossible or when needs are extremely high. They can still be said with large costs (I can build you Google maps, but it would take over ten years). A lot of this derives from Patio11's comment collection.

jasonshen: if you read this, thank you for the post. I really enjoyed it and admire the rejection therapy you've done in the past

jasonshen4• 15 years ago

Eric: I did read this and I'm glad you liked the post.

itmag3• 15 years ago

I think it's a mistake to despise (although I of course know what you mean).

In the abstract sense, everything is always tied to a narrative. Rhetorics is the art of juxtaposing different narratives and getting others to join yours. Sales would be a subset of that.

itmag3• 15 years ago

Partly it's humility. The more I learn, the more I learn how much I don't know. The more people I meet, the more I realize how awesome people are. Self-promotion in this context feels false.

Heh, as long as you think this, you paradoxically should give yourself carte blance to go for what you want with confidence. Why? Because there isn't some perfect confidence level waiting beyond where you are at now; acceptance that one doesn't know everything is actually the highest possible position, confidence-wise, because at that point you have seen the truth of things and decided to become self-correcting.

People who feel that they are confident to do/know anything are actually one rung lower than true humility (although it's easy for a humble person to think those people have found some truth that we have yet to find, and give the cocksure more credit than they deserve).

It's when one loses true humility that one should watch out (Dunning-Kruger effect and all that).

Life is a balancing act between being too certain and being not enough certain. The holy grail of confidence is to become so without also becoming delusional and leaving oneself open to mistake.

I hope I made my point clear enough :) I spend a lot of time thinking about confidence vs delusion, and how to attain true confidence, but it's not always easy to unpack my thoughts for someone else's benefit.

nathanlrivera• 15 years ago

A recent article in the New York Times called "Generation Sell" also talks about this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...

"Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted."

Lambent_Cactus• 15 years ago

Relevant and prescient: http://xkcd.com/137/

Lost_BiomedE• 15 years ago

I tend to think it is part of the business cycle as much as anything. Trends and viewpoints on this change, and we are currently in an extreme. In other periods, it may be looked down upon unless you are both very good at it and have substance backing it up. Essentially, the other party can't realize the extent that you are doing it.

Why Everyone is in Sales

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