> I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains
My experience across a fifteen year business confirms this. Year one I had to sell. As an engineer I was a horrible sales guy. A couple of my dealers took me under their wing and over approximately a year a made notable changes.
Years later, as we grew, I had to hire sales people. That's when I learned the lesson. If someone is good about selling product A it doesn't necessarily mean they can sell product B. I hired around a dozen sales people over the years. Most were collosal failures. Some of the most memorable ones came with huge contact lists and years of selling other products in the industry. Based on the advise of other entrepreneurs I ended-up hiring someone with little sales experience and training them over a year. She was my best sales person, by far.
I agree. Sales is often domain-specific, and this becomes truer the longer you spend in any given domain. And sometimes a long list of great contacts is more of a liability than a benefit. You need someone who can call up anybody you need them to -- not just someone who's going to hit up his list every time. The people on the list might not even be the customers you want or need. Hell, who you need may change in two months. In general, a static and inflexible asset in a variable environment is a bad thing.
[Side note: there are such things as general "salesmanship" skills, like being personable, charismatic, good at articulating value propositions, good at finding ways to get in front of people, and so forth. But these things need not be conflated with capital-S Sales.]
I think he is saying that a CEO can have salesmanship skills like the ones listed in order to "sell" people on the idea of working for the company, but it doesn't mean that he is also able to pick up the phone and do cold calls to sell widgets.
I suspect that there are a lot of stories of salesman candidates coming in the door, saying "I have a huge rolodex, I know a hundred people to whom I can sell this right now," that turned out to be duds. Oh, they spent their time on the phone talking with their old buddies, who occasionally bought one or two as a favor, but it never came through anything close to what you, the non-salesman-founder, were expecting.
Some of the really established guys --20+ year career in the industry-- can come with this "I can walk on water" attitude as they drive their leased Jaguar into their parking slot. Then they cave when they realize this is a new market segment and a new product segment in the industry. They are used to people coming to them to buy the old stuff. Now they actually have to work, learn the new product, learn the new lingo and also identify customers who might be receptive to the message.
Then you have the guy who worked for a rather large company and is used to the fish jumping into the boat. No fishing rod or fish finder required. You don't even have to know how to bait a hook. These guys, amazingly enough, actually think they are selling. When faced with a situation where the phone only rings if they make it ring they don't do very well.
There's the guy who faked it in a good market, got lucky and built a reputation on circumstance rather than skill. When things change (i.e., the economy tanks) the reality of their capabilities comes to the surface.
Then there's the inability to adjust to a change of audience. You don't sell to an engineer the same way you might sell to a manager or the president of a company.
One of the most frustrating things for me has always been the sales person who attempts to take credit for a sale that came in because I spent tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. They think you are stupid. Or at least they act that way. Some of the most memorable moments in my experience have been after major trade-shows. Imagine having a sales person come to you like he just climbed Everest to close a sale after you just spent over $100K to exhibit at a trade-show for a week. You look further and you see the sale was due to a years-long relationship with the customer as well as a meeting at the trade-show where the sales guy didn't even interface with the customer. What did happen is that he got and printed the purchase order because he was in charge with monitoring sales@company.com. In retrospect it is really funny and it also reveals interesting character flaws.
And, of course, there's the mercenary sales person who will hand out discounts like they are candy in order to book sales and look like a genius to anyone except for the person who actually looks at the numbers.
There's more, of course,
The advantage of the motivated newbie is that they can learn the product, the market and the approach. It takes six months to a year of real work to get someone up to speed, but it can really pay off. Most business owners I reached out for advice would roll their eyes when I asked for the secret to hiring good sales people. Everyone had horror stories galore.
One of the toughest skills to learn for in-person sales is to know when to close your mouth and let the process happen. When I started my business I would talk and talk and talk. I probably lost more sales to that than any other blunder. A year later, I'd show up to a call, "read" the room, meet some of the people I didn't know, setup the demo and mostly let the customers sell themselves on the product. Selling by saying less, not more, is a skill that takes time to develop. Most really good sales people are very relaxed and confident during a sales call.
One of my friends put it like this: It's like the hotel business. You can print beautiful brochures; exquisitely redecorate the rooms; have amazing food and all manner of services. You can't force people to take a vacation.
Well, my approach was to hire a small group of people to help out at a trade show, give them a some training and watch how they worked during the show. At the end of the process I offered one of them a permanent job. It worked out very well.
I did this through an ad in Craigs List. I effectively asked for people comfortable with technology, able to learn quickly and with great people skills that could be applied in the context of sales presentations in a trade show environment. I did get quite a variation of responses. I selected a small group I thought would do well.
My experience across a fifteen year business confirms this. Year one I had to sell. As an engineer I was a horrible sales guy. A couple of my dealers took me under their wing and over approximately a year a made notable changes.
Years later, as we grew, I had to hire sales people. That's when I learned the lesson. If someone is good about selling product A it doesn't necessarily mean they can sell product B. I hired around a dozen sales people over the years. Most were collosal failures. Some of the most memorable ones came with huge contact lists and years of selling other products in the industry. Based on the advise of other entrepreneurs I ended-up hiring someone with little sales experience and training them over a year. She was my best sales person, by far.