If you have a vendetta against sales people you can just say that. We are talking about a completely hypothetical situation here, I don't see how you're now implying that the lead generation isn't good enough.
On HN, people hate cold emails. In real life, I've found that most people will respond or ignore. Like a tiny minority will act like you killed their mother, but that's life.
I know you know this, if you're in sales, but I, like many other engineers who read this forum was overly cautious when I first started speaking to people because I anticipated that 99/100 would be upset at having to talk to me.
The truth was that 99/100 were willing to speak to me and listening to HN and Reddit set me back farther than I expected until I unlearned that lesson.
So I'm saying this for the benefit of all those other engineers like me.
People hating spam will complain about it, people not hating it will not bother with commenting.
And HN may have higher share of people more affected by spam (surveys send to emails scrapped from github and so on) and more likely to be able to find needed services - what makes beneficial cold calling even more rare.
And I guess that my reaction is unusual. I moved to another phone service after previous one cold called me offering a loan on bank service operating under their brand - and that was a sole reason.
I don't have a vendetta. I used to work in sales. My first job out of school was cold-calling and I saw first hand what types of people tend to rise to the top in that environment.
I quit that job as soon as I could because I was sick of manipulating people or pressuring them into buying something they didn't want. At the end of the day that's all sales is. If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.
That makes a lot of sense then honestly. "Boiler rooms" are definitely not good environments.
>If your customer wants your product then by definition you don't have to sell them.
That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially. Will their business implode if they don't buy your product? No, almost certainly not. But, they might derive a massive cost savings, time savings, increased employee satisfaction, or other efficiencies by using whatever you're selling and your job in sales is to get them to listen which is the hard part.
>That's a misnomer, what if they don't know you exist? That's what sales and marketing are for, to inform people that could benefit from your product that it exists, essentially.
This is a fiction that salespeople tell themselves to help them sleep at night. I use twitter not because someone from Twitter Sales sold it to me but because I sought it out of my own volition.
Only bad products need sales. Good products can thrive on marketing alone because people want good products.
