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Sales Is a Smell

There’s a hidden signal in every business: how hard they have to sell it.

The best products in the world don’t need to be pushed. They pull. Customers talk about them. Teams adopt them without meetings. Executives ask why they weren’t using it already.

When you need sales teams to move your core product, it often means your product doesn’t sell itself.

1. Pull > Push​

Push = persuasion. Pull = magnetism.

Products with strong pull:

  • Solve obvious problems
  • Deliver fast value
  • Spread through word of mouth or internal adoption

Products that require push:

  • Aren’t differentiated
  • Are priced wrong
  • Require a salesperson to explain why they’re worth it

2. Sales as a Compensation Layer​

Sales isn’t evil. But it’s often a compensation mechanism — a way to patch over the fact that:

  • The product is hard to try
  • The onboarding is confusing
  • The pricing is opaque
  • The use case isn’t compelling enough

If your users can’t explain your value in 1 minute, your sales team has to work overtime.

3. When Sales Makes Sense​

There are cases where "sales" is less about persuasion and more about consulting — selling the competency of your people to help customers implement, integrate, or extract full value from your product.

This is especially relevant when:

  • The customer lacks in-house expertise
  • Implementation is complex or domain-specific
  • Success depends on tailoring workflows or education

In these cases, it's not about convincing someone to buy — they already bought. You're delivering trust, competence, and domain knowledge. This is post-sale value delivery, not lead conversion.

There’s one scenario where sales makes sense: at the very beginning of a venture. When the product is new, the brand is unknown, and there’s no marketing budget — founders may need to hit the pavement, run demos, and talk directly to prospects. This isn't scalable, but it’s often the only way to generate those first few reference customers and feedback loops.

It’s still “sales” in some org charts — but it’s still really a form of hands-on enablement or survival-stage outreach.

4. Marketing ≠ Sales​

Marketing and sales often get lumped together, but they serve very different purposes.

  • Marketing is a one-to-many activity. It creates awareness, builds reputation, and attracts the right kind of customer.
  • Sales is one-to-one. It exists to close a deal, navigate procurement, or clarify edge cases.

Marketing is essential. It's how people learn you exist. Great marketing makes sales almost unnecessary — because users already know, already want, already trust.

5. Metrics That Matter More​

Instead of:

  • “How many deals did we close this month?”

Ask:

  • “How many users activated without assistance?”
  • “How many customers upgraded themselves?”
  • “How often are we getting shared or recommended?”

Sales is short-term fuel. Product pull is a flywheel.

6. If You Must Have Sales...​

Make sure your sales team:

  • Exists to accelerate value, not convince skeptics
  • Surfaces feedback to improve product-market fit
  • Only sells what the product can truly deliver

7. Final Thought​

If your product doesn’t move without salespeople, you have a product market fit problem disguised as a distribution plan.

Rebuild until you’re solving a problem that’s painful, obvious, and contagious.

Then the sales will happen without you needing a team for it.