WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT SILVERDALE—Less not forget “SALES” is everywhere, most people underrate its importance. Silicon Valley underrates it the most. The geek classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy even explains the founding of our planet as a reaction against sales assistants. When an imminent catastrophe requires the evacuation of humanity’s original home, the population escapes on three giant ships—the thinkers, leaders, and achievers.

Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in ours. We underestimate—because we share the same bias the A Ship and C Ship people had: salespeople and other “middlemen” supposedly get in the way, and distribution should flow magically from the creation of a good product, The Field of dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s more complicated than it looks.

NERDS VS. SALESMEN

The U.S. advertising industry collects annual revenues of $150 billion and employs more than 600,000 people. At $450 billion annually, the U.S. sales industry is even more significant. When they hear that 3.2 million Americans work in sales, seasoned executives will suspect the number is low, but engineers may sigh in bewilderment. What could that many salespeople possibly be doing?

In Silicon Valley, nerds are sceptical of advertising, marketing, and sales because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works. It works on nerds, and it works on you. You may think that you’re an exception, that your preferences are authentic, and that advertising only works on other people.

It’s easy to resist the most prominent sales pitches, so we entertain false confidence in our independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.

Nerds are used for transparency. They add value by becoming experts at technical skills like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works, or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with active ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales are the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality.

This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their jobs are challenging, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

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, prominent sales assistants—that is, the bad ones. There’s a comprehensive 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 neighbourhood friends to whitewash the fence for him–—a masterful move. But convincing them to 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, 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.

Theoretical 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 basic 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 say this about a genuine product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself), or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself). The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.” Economists attribute this to “path dependence”: specific historical circumstances independent of objective quality can determine which products enjoy widespread adoption.

That’s true, but it doesn’t mean the operating systems we use today and the keyboard layouts on which we type were imposed by mere chance. It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new, but you haven’t developed an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

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