To someone who has done a lot of sales this all seems obvious, which concerns me. I think the reason it took a few quarters to figure this out, and why most fol

To someone who has done a lot of sales this all seems obvious, which concerns me. I think the reason it took a few quarters to figure this out, and why most folks are bad at sales is that they don’t know what sales is. They don’t really know. Sales is the very intimate act of getting a stranger to reach into their pocket and give you their money. To do that the customer has to balance their priorities and desires and make a difficult personal decision. This might mean having less money to feed themselves with (figuratively or literally). There are a number of ways you can go about this but in the end it’s very personal to the buyer, whether it is in-fact their money or not. Corporate software sales are just as personal, if not more. So how do you get a stranger to give you their money? You can hustle them, fool them, pressure them, befriend them, help them, be a human vending machine for what you both know they already want, you can help them find what they want, you can do so many things, but just showing off how great you are isn’t likely to work very often. Showing off how great you are is called marketing and that’s a whole other discussion.