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Sales is NOT a Necessary Evil: 3 Reasons Why Startup Founders Should Embrace Sales
Pushy, sleazy, manipulative… these are all words I’ve heard when talking to tech founders about sales. Many of them believe that if you build a great product, then the sales will just come naturally.
Here are a couple of quotes that showcase this mentality in action:
In 2016, Slack CEO Steward Butterfield stated, “I think we can get away without having a sales team in any kind of traditional way probably forever.”
Same story for Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp. He once said he’d only hire a sales team if investors forced him to. Or if he was “hit by a bus.” Karp continued on to say, “Almost everyone here is an engineer. I’m a Ph.D. in philosophy. We have no salespeople.”
It’s a mentality that I’ve seen far too often with tech founders. They’re clinging to this idea of “us vs. them”, as if the two — technical and sales — can’t be aligned toward the same mission.
I knew a co-founder who said the issue with sales is that they always go out into the market and OVERSELL the product. This creates a situation where the sales team is out writing checks that the company can’t cash, leaving the rest of the company to clean up the mess. From his perspective, sales made it harder to scale with unnecessary obstacles.
