"If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort."

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Within a given team, say, sales does seem to depend mostly on effort. If you don't make a sale on Monday, and you do make a sale on Tuesday, then, assuming the sales are of equal difficulty, the largest reasons why you failed on Monday are probably effort and luck.

However, I think there is a critical factor here which pg is overlooking, which you wouldn't see just from lots of experience selling things yourself (or with the same team). Sales, I think, depends primarily on social skill.

Now, by "social skill", I don't mean being a good friend, or trying to help the other person. In sales, actually trying to help people is usually an optional extra. Is a jewelry store salesman really helping someone by selling them a useless $20,000 rock? Not really, but jewelry stores still do fine. It's nice to help people, certainly, but if you're just trying to make money, it's not necessary.

No, by "social skill", what I mean is the ability to manipulate your body in very precise ways, to create feelings of happiness, trust, loyalty, etc. in the other person. Most people don't primarily communicate through words. The real message is in things like their body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice; their words mostly don't mean anything important. And if you send the right nonverbal message, you'll have a much higher chance of making the sale.

I think most, say, car salesmen are familiar with this. It doesn't really matter what you tell the customer, which is why we call it "bullshit" as opposed to "lying". It's not that the salesman is trying to deceive or trick the customer, in most cases, so much as he just doesn't care. What he does want to do is create feelings of friendship, happiness, and so forth which are associated with him, the car, and the dealership, so it would seem like a terrible thing to do to not sign on the dotted line.

I'm not describing all people, certainly. If you're selling to, say, a car geek, who knows all about the eight dozen different features and the engine and the tires and the fuel usage profile and so on, it may be a better idea to focus on those. But most business people, as pg has pointed out, don't really care about the quality or the features of the software they're buying, since they're probably not the ones who're going to use it.