The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual.
I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS
I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS
We'd hire a new manager from outside the company. This new manager would go around and meet some sales teams, meet some customers, then a month or two in, end up at a meeting where they gave a speech. At this speech, they would opine that customers loved our product, that it "practically sold itself" and our job was at least 90% execution.
Translation: a trained circus monkey could do your job. Just show up, answer your emails, and the product will do all the heavy lifting. Don't come complaining to me about how your quota is too high, product isn't taking your feature requests seriously, etc. Those are just excuses for poor performance.
I saw this happen a half dozen times, at least. In every case -- every case -- those people were singing a very different tune after they had been around for six months and saw what the job was really like.
Now, having good traction in the market, and analysts saying good things about you, and customers excited to be references? All that is really important. But in large enterprise sales, nothing "sells itself." And, for the record, we had plenty of people who weren't idiots, who nonetheless couldn't sell a product that was in very high demand. At least, not enough to keep their job.
But I do believe that the job is fundamentally different when it's about selling a product that's needed compared to selling worthless crap.
Definitely. Another big driver is recurring relationships, either with customers or a larger peer selling community[0]. Most people won't buy more than once from someone unreliable, and ethical people generally don't want to work alongside or be associated with unethical people. Sales people that have options will gravitate towards products/companies they think they can sell more of and most won't consider working for companies that make useless crap or companies that can't or won't support what they make.
0 - think multi-tier tech sales, where you might have an OEM that makes a product, a distributor that either holds stock on the product or handles receivables for the OEM, and a VAR who might directly sell the product to an end-user, all with sales reps that work together on most (or all) deals.
Or just a regular crook.
Also the inverse is true. A great sales team can disguise a mediocre product team.
Every year or so top performing sales and marketing folks from the dominant countries would be tapped on the shoulder and tasked with growing the company in our less dominant markets. Everyone failed.
Even well-known product lead companies like Atlassian employ sales reps, especially at the enterprise and strategic levels, because demonstrating value to the end user is only a part of the sales process. There's lots of additional work that's closer to project management that's required to close a deal. It's identifying and aligning stakeholders, helping to justify budget by putting together a business case for leadership and finance teams who won't directly interface with the product and need to be sold on it's value. This is the sort of thing high level business to business sales reps spend a ton of time doing.