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- Why does being in "sales" get so much heat?
Why does being in "sales" get so much heat?
Eventually, most jobs become sales jobs
One of the biggest reasons we started GTMBA is that Julian and I saw how much shame sales careers received in elite academic circles (we saw it first-hand at Columbia, Yale, and Northwestern).
It was a total misunderstanding of the profession; I wish they would think more from first principles.
Students at these schools look at the prestigious path of getting into finance or consulting, only to go there for 1-2 years, hate it (this was the case for ~90% of my friends), and want to pivot to investing or tech anyway. But they're doing it because "that's the path" society or their parent says to take. It's riddled with pure dogma.
Sales is an amazing career. You can learn important transferable skills for any business and make a lot of money doing so. It's also thrilling AF.
Let me touch on that first point again.
Sales is the most important skill in business (it is the lifeblood of a company) and life (it makes you a better negotiator, gets you your way more, attracts more mates, makes you more charismatic, etc.), yet it can sometimes be looked down upon as a profession.
It's what Alex Lieberman calls an unwarranted low "important-to-respect" rating:
I think there are a few reasons for this:
There are a lot of sleazy sales organizations that create a sub-par buying experience (see Oracle and the likes)
Some sales jobs are grueling because the company doesn't value them, and thus, they are not set up for success—these are environments that I wouldn't want to join myself
They're viewed as a low barrier to entry, and thus elite circles don't show as much respect. 99% percent of the reason why it's prestigious to go to Harvard or get a job at McKinsey/Goldman is because of the high barrier to entry and not the learning/job itself (which as Scott Galloway calls it, a career with the intersection of being both incredibly boring and highly stressful)
I think some of this is warranted, but for really innovative companies (which are most of the AI startups) looking to build a thoughtful GTM motion, sales is the best job in the world.
It's also the most needed - eventually, every job becomes a sales job.
As I wrote in my first article in GTMBA:
One of the biggest misconceptions I've seen in my 33 years is how negatively sales jobs are viewed, especially in what would be called "elite" circles. I wish high-performing people would stop looking at them so negatively, and I am starting to see the trend that they are.
Ironically, in many "elite" roles, your job becomes sales once you reach a senior level. Partner at a law, consulting, or financial firm? Sales. Entrepreneur? Sales. You're always convincing people to give you money, sharing your vision, or recruiting others—it's all sales.
It's wild to me that these elite circles still laud banking and consulting careers. I did it for over a year and sprinted back to startup land; you play around in PowerPoint and Excel all day and talk in business jargon ("don't boil the ocean" - good god).
Why do we keep promoting these boring and unfulfilling career paths?
Another signal that we keep hearing as we have more convos with folks in the GTMBA community is that more and more college seniors want to break into tech and are starting to realize that the "old way" of just going into banking and consulting isn't for them. We live in a different world. See below for Romeen Sheth’s (Duke ‘11) observation:
Now that startups are the trend, what role should you take?
If you're competitive, extroverted, and like a thrill, you should go into sales. More to come there in future posts.
I am happy to be back in sales; it's my IKIGAI—something I'm decent at, can get paid to do, and, as I hopefully explained in this article, is super important.
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