Hacker News Reader

Comment by JCThoughtscream | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently a salesguy doing door-to-door work for a telecom fiber optic campaign. I wouldn't quite call it a "sunny" attitude, but you definitely get used to it very, very fast.

It's vanishingly rare that rejections are actually personal in any real sense anyhow. At least when business is concerned. Heck, even when they know you, it's rarely personal - personal circumstances and biases are a far greater factor than any real animosity.

Except for a few comical asides, you never remember the no's anyhow.

View on HN

Actually, when you're a developer trying to sell your own creation, you can easily take rejection personally. Maybe this is why hackers hate sales.

This leads me to an idea: What about if a bunch of hacker entrepreneurs got together and agreed to try to sell eachother's products? It could actually be fun to try to pitch something where you have no emotional investment in the product. Naturally you would do your best to succeed and agree to document all the responses from prospective clients.

"Crowdsell" (though not too different from affiliate marketing)

And maybe like, the hacker doing selling part could receive some financial incentive to overcome the wasted time. And that incentive would of course be given by the hacker whose product is sold, because he could make a profit on that experiment. And like, part of it would be fixed, and part of it would depend on the acceptance, which could be called conversion rate?

Congrats, you've just invented the salesman :-) Joke aside, it might be fun to try to do some sales time to time.

Your comment got me thinking about how the rules of this game should perhaps be refined a little to make it more effective.

If the object of the game is to learn how to feel comfortable being rejected by people then perhaps it's better to not include rejections that result from policy in your score.

For example, if you ask for a discount in a store and the clerk rejects you, they are just acting on store policy, not giving a personal reaction.

If you sell door to door the person who tells you to get lost is most likely rejecting what you are selling or rejecting the idea of being harassed by a salesman, rather than rejecting you personally.

I guess psychology doesn't work like this. People can get quite afraid of rejections, even if it's not personal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com