Steve Jobs on Salespeople

Late last year I read Walter Issacson's biography, Steve Jobs.  I loved every page of it!  In fact, I enjoyed it more than any other book I read that year!  I highly recommend it for all salespeople. To me Steve Jobs was a great salesperson and in many ways the preeminent salesperson.  From his "reality distortion field" to his effective product introductions and demos a salesperson can learn a lot from Jobs.  Therefore you can only imagine my incredulity when I reached the end of the book and read this quote from Jobs " I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM and Microsoft.  The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.  The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers or designer. So the salespeople end up running the company, John Akers at IBM was a smart eloquent, fantastic salesperson but he didn't know anything about the product.  The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.  It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.  Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don't think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.."

Wow!  I was shocked. To me salespeople, in general, are real product people.  The better the product the easier it is to sell.  The salespeople I know are real concerned about the product, they fill the front row seats at product road map meetings.  They are staunch supporters of product development and innovation.  To me, it appears that the" bad guys" are the finance guys.  Salespeople want to sell and nothing sells better than a great product.

I still think this book is a must read for salespeople.  Jobs was many things, an inventor/innovator, an engineer, a designer, a marketer and salesperson.  He exemplifies the quality that Daniel Pink identifies in his great book To Sell Is Human: The Art of Moving Others, that he calls "elasticity." The ability to perform many functions.  Today the salesperson must be a "jack of all trades" if he is to create value for the customer.  To me no one mastered the skill of elasticity more than Steve Jobs.  He was the best at so many things!