Everything in Life is Sales

Author

Matt Ober
March 21, 2024

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Whether you like it or not, everything is sales. When I hear people say, we will just hire someone for sales, that’s when I get worried.

Every aspect of life comes down to selling. When you interview for a job, you are selling the interviewer on hiring you. When you are a founder raising money, you sell the investors on giving you money. Every aspect of our lives involves selling.

Not everyone has to be a salesman. Not everyone has to go into a sales role. But I think it is more and more important for everyone to realize that sales skills are a must. In all aspects of our lives, we are selling. As I see more and more startups over the years, I realize that as good as a product is, it must have a good salesman. If the founder can’t sell or has trouble communicating, then it’s going to be extremely difficult to sell. Sure you can hire a salesperson, but you have to sell that salesperson to join your team and convince them that the product you have built is sellable. You have to convince the people joining you that you can raise money or you can deliver on your responsibilities.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of poor products and not so great companies that have fantastic sales teams and fantastic sales-focused founders who are successful. I think back to my years buying data and products at hedge funds, and I can recount hundreds of meetings with founders of companies that tried to explain to me why their technology or product was better than something I had. Why they should displace what I currently use or why their technology, NLP approach, or XYZ was better? At the end of the day, many of these companies had poor salespeople, poor communication, and lacked an ability to communicate articulately why I should buy their product or in some cases even take a free trial.

Sales is everything. Sales is like networking, it takes effort and is an art. Learning to be a better salesperson or learning to explain complex products or technology in easy-to-understand ways is such a valuable skill set. Never underestimate the power of sales!

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