Elite Sales
The best sales people I’ve worked with were incredible strategic thinkers and not really sales people at all.
They did three main things:
- Built an intimate knowledge of their customer and their industry
- Built strong connections with the top brass of their customer organization by delivering exceptional work that got those clients promoted
- Built autonomous teams that could get the (exceptional) work done with their guidance on the customer/industry/client. \
These folks would often deliver very difficult messages to their clients, which resulted in more business not less. They didn’t chase deals as much as the deals came to them.
The stereotypical sleazy sales person can build decent pipelines/sales numbers but they are not what I would ever label as ‘elite’ as they are constantly chasing the next $ and often have no idea what they are selling or why.
Inspired by a great convo on HN
