I worked (in sales engineering) at such a company with a market-leading product. For a few years there, at the height of the market/mindshare dominance for their main product, I observed a recurring theme:
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.
That's fair. I should amend my comment. Even stuff that's highly in demand often has competitors with equivalent products, and often the products are complex and business relationships need to be maintained and there are a thousand and one complexities to understanding and executing the business. I apologize for the "any idiot" line.
But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
> But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
Definitely. Another big driver is recurring relationships, either with customers or a larger peer selling community[0]. Most people won't buy more than once from someone unreliable, and ethical people generally don't want to work alongside or be associated with unethical people. Sales people that have options will gravitate towards products/companies they think they can sell more of and most won't consider working for companies that make useless crap or companies that can't or won't support what they make.
0 - think multi-tier tech sales, where you might have an OEM that makes a product, a distributor that either holds stock on the product or handles receivables for the OEM, and a VAR who might directly sell the product to an end-user, all with sales reps that work together on most (or all) deals.
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.