When is a salesperson too aggressive?
Paul Graham, a noted “hacker” has an essay on his site about how to start a startup company. Always looking for information about the software business, I am reading it. One thing he said, though, just sounds wrong:
Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up.
I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem like the kind of sale I’d want to have. To be successful in software (package apps or consulting, or anywhere in between), it is quite clear that you need to have repeat sales. A salesperson like that might land that sale, but they have pretty much have eliminated any possibility of a repeat sale – the customer will just refuse the phone call.