There are many, many theories on what it takes to be a great salesperson.
When I started my career in sales back in the day, Harvard Business Review had considered Empathy and Ego Drive to be the two key drivers of a great salesperson.
While none of them is wrong or irrelevant, many of these theories have become a bit crusty for the modern world where a lot of action is driven by technology, innovation, startups, venture capital, and so on.
I found the following take by Matt Levine on billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya to resonate very well with the modern zeitgeist. (This appeared in the Money Stuff newsletter dated 3 June 2021).
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I enjoyed this New Yorker profile of serial SPAC sponsor Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire venture capitalist who nonetheless says mean things about billionaires and venture capitalists. One important theme of the profile, I think, is that the essential skill in finance is not really predicting the future or evaluating business plans but salesmanship, and that if you are an enormously talented salesperson you will go far.
Another important theme is that sales is a deeply humanistic and all-encompassing endeavor: Great salespeople are not in the business of pushing products but of making people love them as people; once you can do that, selling products is easy. The article makes it clear that Palihapitiya is a great salesperson. So for instance he was an early Facebook Inc. employee:
The C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, asked him to oversee efforts to grow the social network’s audience. Given that Facebook was expanding with little effort, this task, as one of Palihapitiya’s former colleagues put it to me, “wasn’t sexy,” and few colleagues wanted to join his team.
To recruit co-workers, Palihapitiya promised them the most important project of their lives. Facebook would perish if it didn’t defeat MySpace and other social-media rivals. His team members would be underdogs fighting for a brighter future.
To emphasize his point, Palihapitiya sometimes recalled a time he’d won fifty thousand dollars playing poker and then had gone to a BMW dealership. The salesman – eying Palihapitiya’s rumpled clothes and brown skin – refused him a test drive. Palihapitiya walked across the street to Mercedes-Benz, bought a car, and then drove it into the BMW parking lot to taunt the guy who’d rebuffed him.
Palihapitiya assured Facebook colleagues that, if they joined him, they were showing up every bully -landing a blow for people who looked different and had unfamiliar pedigrees. Soon, many top employees were clamoring to join Palihapitiya’s group. One told me, “It’s intoxicating to hear someone describe your work like it’s this noble calling.” Within four years, Facebook was closing in on a billion users. Today, four of Facebook’s top executives are alumni of Palihapitiya’s team.
In hindsight, it seems unlikely that growing Facebook’s audience was the most important project of their lives, or that it created a brighter future, or that it struck a blow against bullying. But that’s not the point, and there’s not even a real https://xanaxlife.com argument for those claims. Instead the argument was Palihapitiya’s personal appeal, a story about himself that somehow became a vague metaphor for his Facebook team.
But a third theme is that, to be a truly great salesperson, you don’t need everyone to love you, you just need the right people to love you, and sometimes the way to do that is to have the wrong people hate you:
Other Palihapitiya stories go viral because they capture how delectably outrageous he can be. In 2019, when he was trying to persuade investors to support his first SPAC—for the space-tourism company Virgin Galactic—he met in New York with a group of mutual-fund managers and gave a dazzling speech about helping mankind reach for the heavens. …
One listener—an older gentleman, conservatively dressed—began interrupting Palihapitiya to question both his track record and his projections.
Palihapitiya let the man spout off for a bit, and then replied, “You’re a complete … idiot.” The older man looked as if someone had just punched him. “Have you even looked at the prospectus? Did you even … Google me before you came in here?”
All the eyes in the room went wide.
“How lazy are you?” Palihapitiya said. “I don’t even want your … money.”
Silence. Then one of the younger listeners started chuckling. Everyone under the age of fifty began grinning uncontrollably: now they had a Palihapitiya story of their own.
“It was brilliant,” an attendee told me. “It was completely calculated. That old guy wasn’t ever gonna invest in space tourism. But the other people in the room—they loved it!” About half of the investors called Palihapitiya’s office afterward to say that they wanted in on the deal.
“People either love Chamath or they hate him, and that’s fantastic, because polarization gets attention,” the attendee said. “Polarization gets you on CNBC, it gets you Twitter followers, it gets you a megaphone. If you believe that Chamath can get an hour on CNBC to explain Virgin Galactic, then you want to buy into this deal, because attention is money.”
I have bleeped some swears there; one way to be polarizing is by swearing a lot. “Everybody wants in on this deal” is a good way to sell a deal, but “all the young cool forward-thinking people want in on this deal and all the stuck-in-the-past losers don’t” is somehow even better.
In investing — particularly in tech investing — the main goal is to be contrarian; if everyone loves you then you are not contrarian enough. You have to cultivate the right friends and also the right enemies.
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tl;dr: Most essential skill is salesmanship. If you are an enormously talented salesperson you will go far. To be a great salesperson, you must be loved by some people – but you must also be hated by some others. Polarization is extremely important. One way to be polarizing is by swearing a lot. Polarization gets you a megaphone, Twitter followers and attention. Attention is money.