alt Hacker NewsThe article details the seller-push (i.e. bad) theory, but doesn't go very far with the buyer-pull - presumably this is where one would get value out of the coaching sessions offered at the bottom of the piece?
The dichotomy seems real but hard to actually do anything with if you're in sales. I've done some penny-ante sales work in my past life in what I would call buyer-pull situations. It's great! People find you and they want to spend money, so all you have to do is not discourage them.
But once you get past "I'm selling something so manifestly useful that people find me to pay me for it", it sure seems like the things you, the sales rep, have to do to get their dollars skew rapidly toward the "seller-push" side of things. What else works? Folks gotta know about you and they gotta know you can solve their problems, right?
> But once you get past "I'm selling something so manifestly useful that people find me to pay me for it", it sure seems like the things you, the sales rep, have to do to get their dollars skew rapidly toward the "seller-push" side of things. What else works? Folks gotta know about you and they gotta know you can solve their problems, right?
I don't think there's anything else you can do, other than reinterpret 'manifestly useful' more widely as 'desirable'. Other than just having a legitimately useful product, the options I can see are:
- 'Make the product mandatory in some way' (eg. getting on large companies' preferred equipment lists, getting named as required equipment in a standardized testing procedure, providing an accessible interface to an impenetrable government department, etc.)
- 'Make more people aware of the product (in a non-pushy way) so they can choose to buy it' (eg. sponsoring crazy stunts the way Red Bull does, running an F1 team, becoming associated with celebrities etc.)
These still require an actually desirable product, of course.