The Skill Nobody Taught Us: Why Everyone Needs Sales

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I learned sales too late. Nobody taught it to me: not school, not university, not any job. It took a decade to realize that sales is the life skill every profession quietly runs on, from engineers to doctors to teachers. The best one-page distillation I have found is a Hacker News comment by goatherders on how to do sales. Every point in it is true, and I have the failed experiments to prove it.

  1. Sales is like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible, or you can walk up and hit the ball. Twenty years of running sales orgs and goatherders says to hit the ball. Most people never swing, so merely attempting outsells most of the field.

  2. Sales is about people and problem solving, not products. Not technology, not chemicals, not lines of code. The buyer does not care about your solution. They care about their problem.

  3. People buy four things and four things only: time, money, sex, and approval or peace of mind. Try selling anything else and you fail. This is the filter I now run every idea through before talking about it.

  4. People buy aspirin always and vitamins occasionally. Aspirin is the urgent problem, the headache that has to stop today. Vitamins are the nice-to-have that gets postponed forever. Sell aspirin.

  5. All things being equal, people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal, then go make a lot of friends. This is the line I repeat in every conversation about pricing or positioning.

  6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people, send interesting posts, write birthday cards, share ideas for their business, introduce people who should know each other, then get out of the way and expect nothing. Do it consistently and authentically and people find ways to give you money. He promises. I can confirm the mechanism works, just slower than the internet promises.

  7. Nobody cares about your quota, your payroll, your burn rate. They care about the problem you are solving for them. The internal metrics that fill your head are invisible to everyone else, and mentioning them is the fastest way to lose a room.

You might read this and think it sounds cynical, that this is the manipulator’s creed. It is not, and that is the surprising part. The distillation is the opposite of manipulation. It is radically other-focused: their problem, their headache, their four needs, their friendship. Selling well turns out to be the same thing as being genuinely useful to someone.

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