Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

SALES IS HIDDEN
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That’s why the
word “salesman” can be a slur and the used car dealer is our archetype of
shadiness. But we only react negatively to awkward, obvious salesmen—that is,
the bad ones. There’s a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations
between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you
don’t know any grandmasters, it’s not because you haven’t encountered them,
but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight. Tom Sawyer managed to
persuade his neighborhood friends to whitewash the fence for him—a masterful
move. But convincing them to actually pay him for the privilege of doing his
chores was the move of a grandmaster, and his friends were none the wiser. Not
much has changed since Twain wrote in 1876.
Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost
everyone whose job involves distribution—whether they’re in sales, marketing,
or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People
who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers
work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment
bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.” There’s a
reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re
being sold.
Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans. On
Wall Street, a new hire starts as an “analyst” wielding technical expertise, but his
goal is to become a dealmaker. A lawyer prides himself on professional
credentials, but law firms are led by the rainmakers who bring in big clients.
Even university professors, who claim authority from scholarly achievement, are
envious of the self-promoters who define their fields. Academic ideas about
history or English don’t just sell themselves on their intellectual merits. Even the
agenda of fundamental physics and the future path of cancer research are results
of persuasion. The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople
underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every
level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.” But anyone
who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s
delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting