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Comment by eldavido | Hacker News Reader

Good salespeople help customers by thoroughly understanding their needs, matching what the company sells to the customer, and explaining why the thing being sold is the best in terms the customer cares about.

Don't hate salespeople. Hate the fact that certain companies insist on employing armies of minimally-trained, low-skill, low-dollar lackeys running around who offer little benefit to anyone, especially high-information buyers, which you seem to be (which, keep in mind, not everyone will be).

FWIW I love good salespeople but also hate "being sold" in the way OP describes.

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I deal with salespeople on a regular basis for industrial automation components. I'm an engineer and would consider myself a very high-information buyer, and I spend a lot of time with the products after purchasing and hear about any reliability or performance issues that crop up in the machine for years after it ships, so I know what I've been sold.

In that line of work, I'd say that there are 3 in 10 that drop by the office who are worth many times their commission - it's amazing to be able to describe your needs, and hear which of their products match those specifications plus considerations of requirements I hadn't realized, how their other customers are using the devices, know which are stocked/standard and when you've generated a parametric part number that's never been written before. But some of them are not really much more useful than the parametric catalog, and a couple of them just need to give up the engineering sales and switch to a car dealership or multi-level marketing scam.

I'd almost call that style of salesmanship as something like an "account representative" or perhaps there's a better word for it.

But it's someone with intimate knowledge of the industry, of the other customers, and works closely with the customer and even educates the customer.

I've heard them called Sales Engineers before. They're usually technical employees or engineers before they get into sales, and carry their technical knowledge and industry expertise into a sales role.

I've read many books on "selling" and I've also been a business owner for 12-years and dealt with salesmen quite heavily during this period. I know all the tactics, in other words. And I've never met a single sales person within those 12-years that did not resort to dirty tricks.

Not. A. Single. One.

Could you share most common dirty tricks for ones who have little experience?

Sure can, sonny Jim! And if you sign up to my newsletter and pay the minimal cost for my free ebook you too can know all the secrets to sales.

This book lists a lot of them: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Power-Negotiating-15th-Annive...

I encourage every entrepeneur to read this, because you'll see them time-and-time again. Most of the tactics are used to "get what you want", as they say, but also making the other side convinved they "won". Where they presumably come back and do it again to you. It relies on cheap psychological tactics. As a business-owner, 100% of the salesmen I dealt with used these same tactics. Identifying the tactic and calling it out usually neutralizes the tactic with the salesmen.

But as an arbitrary example, anchoring numbers. They'll show you an insanely expensive first solution. And then later lead you to a merely overpriced-solution. But the second ones seems "cheap" because they are judging it from perspective of the first price solution.

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