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I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer co

I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer could achieve their goals, even if that meant sending money to a competitor. A pretty typical example would be Cognito, which is just mismatched with a lot of use cases. Referring someone to Auth0 just made sense a lot of the time. The view of marketing internally was also not great.

wpietri 4y ago
Sure, not all sales is the manipulative kind. What you're describing sounds like the nice part of the "consultative selling" end of sales. And I'm sure it works well for a market leader with a huge brand. But it has that name to distinguish it from the more common sort. The used car salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross side of things. Long ago a friend told me about a meeting with a very successful serial CEO where the topic was hiring ad sales reps. The famous guy said that they needed to find people with a lot of personal debt, because salespeople needed to be absolutely desperate for the commission checks to really go out and sell. I suspect that sort of thinking underlies a lot of the problematic sales behaviors: desperate people do desperate things.