Your gut reaction is something salespeople play off of. I've been in the sales position before, handling the people in charge of making the purchasing decision, selling them bells and whistles they absolutely didn't need, but giving them the emotional satisfaction of a "successful" transaction, leaving with a sense of victory, that translated into a strong relationship and many years of repeat sales, with incremental upselling over time.
Good sales, ethical sales, aren't parasitic. A vast majority of sales in todays markets, especially in enterprise markets, are parasitic. The salespeople are interchangeable. The ones that make the most money are the ones most willing to be parasitic. The sales script is targeted and tailored to the intended audience, which in most large companies, is several degrees of separation from the eventual user of the product. You don't need to know what the end user needs. You need to know what the person in charge of buying wants, and that's ultimately emotional validation, hope, a sense of "innovating", a feeling of victory in pricing negotiations, being respected and treated well, and so forth. You can run them through the wringer with sales engineers and migrations after the contract is signed, and even if the end user and the product engineers recognize that your product is the wrong tool for the job, that won't matter if the buying manager is emotionally satisfied with the transaction. People will bend over backwards to justify what they know is "right."
A salesperson CEO will make more money, but will make the world a shittier place, because they're the cotton candy of management. They'll burn credibility and reputation in exchange for profit, kick the can down the road for someone else to clean up the mess later.
Sure, in a healthy, respectable, ethical, functional company, you'd be right, and the CEO would also be the best salesperson for the product, because they'd know it, and the customers, inside and out, and be able to explain and demonstrate exactly what was necessary and why, and justify all the costs and benefits.
This is a world that has Goodharted the measure of success - profit - and empowered people in the execution of shitty behavior. The market rewards higher profits and punishes "failures," often completely out of sync with quality and merit.
We don't live in a good world - companies that behave like you describe would be wonderful. We live in a thoroughly enshittified world, and a whole lot of people "earning" a whole lot of money are in between you and any meaningful change.
From Apple and Microsoft on down, companies want endless, infinitely increasing returns year over year, and they will do anything that isn't explicitly illegal to get it. They'll also do illegal things if the cost of getting caught is less than the profit earned. Alignment with end user needs, benefit to the consumer - these are far down the list of things meaningful to the systems and people making decisions on how money is spent. The job of a salesperson is to understand that system, and exploit it for the benefit of their company.
Good sales, ethical sales, aren't parasitic. A vast majority of sales in todays markets, especially in enterprise markets, are parasitic. The salespeople are interchangeable. The ones that make the most money are the ones most willing to be parasitic. The sales script is targeted and tailored to the intended audience, which in most large companies, is several degrees of separation from the eventual user of the product. You don't need to know what the end user needs. You need to know what the person in charge of buying wants, and that's ultimately emotional validation, hope, a sense of "innovating", a feeling of victory in pricing negotiations, being respected and treated well, and so forth. You can run them through the wringer with sales engineers and migrations after the contract is signed, and even if the end user and the product engineers recognize that your product is the wrong tool for the job, that won't matter if the buying manager is emotionally satisfied with the transaction. People will bend over backwards to justify what they know is "right."
A salesperson CEO will make more money, but will make the world a shittier place, because they're the cotton candy of management. They'll burn credibility and reputation in exchange for profit, kick the can down the road for someone else to clean up the mess later.
Sure, in a healthy, respectable, ethical, functional company, you'd be right, and the CEO would also be the best salesperson for the product, because they'd know it, and the customers, inside and out, and be able to explain and demonstrate exactly what was necessary and why, and justify all the costs and benefits.
This is a world that has Goodharted the measure of success - profit - and empowered people in the execution of shitty behavior. The market rewards higher profits and punishes "failures," often completely out of sync with quality and merit.
We don't live in a good world - companies that behave like you describe would be wonderful. We live in a thoroughly enshittified world, and a whole lot of people "earning" a whole lot of money are in between you and any meaningful change.
From Apple and Microsoft on down, companies want endless, infinitely increasing returns year over year, and they will do anything that isn't explicitly illegal to get it. They'll also do illegal things if the cost of getting caught is less than the profit earned. Alignment with end user needs, benefit to the consumer - these are far down the list of things meaningful to the systems and people making decisions on how money is spent. The job of a salesperson is to understand that system, and exploit it for the benefit of their company.