My experience of trying to learn sales

At the beginning of 2024, I decided to make a proper attempt at starting my own consultancy and doing it properly this time. To that end, I set up a website, started writing (as you all know) and have been trying very hard to learn about sales and marketing techniques. I've read a large number of texts on sales and marketing, even more blog posts and such on the subject, and I've done my best to attempt to implement some of the insights in my practice.

The results were not what I expected. A disturbingly large volume of writing and texts on sales encourage you to do things that in the context of personal relationships would be considered coercive or, in an intimate context, sexual assault. You're encouraged to violate consent, be relentlessly pushy and never take no for an answer, and encourage people to act against their best interests in order to make you happy. In a word, many, many hangouts of salespeople become rooms full of the kind of creep that you would do your best to avoid at a party. While it is possible to find texts and resources on sales that don't do this, they're hard to find and even the best ones tend to be less than ideal on many fronts. The worst ones essentially read like pick-up artist manuals: from subtle negging to outright coercion, all the techniques are there.

Of course, few people in sales would outwardly admit to this: in fact, they'd publicly disavow the idea that they could possibly be coercive. Now, taking a wide view this is obviously horseshit: sales is entirely about influencing people to take actions in your benefit, and while it is possible to do this with mutual benefit in mind, way more of such interactions are zero-sum than I think anyone's comfortable admitting. A quick look at the kind of software your average large organisation buys easily confirms this suspicion: the majority of people buying Snowflake derive no benefit from it over simply using PostgreSQL, and instead wind up wasting significant amounts of money on fundamentally unnecessary tooling. ChatGPT and the current wave of AI slop is another example of this: as the use of the tool usually delivers no or negative benefit, the fact that people spend large quantities of money on it is by definition coercive or deceptive. Moreover, the fundamental violation of consent inherent in almost all sales is seldom addressed: the salespeople in question might dress it up in nicer language or try and obfuscate, but they will very seldom be able to give an explanation of why what they're doing isn't coercive. This defence of sales is essentially the "not all men" of the business world: sure, not all salespeople are like this, but way too many of them are, and almost all buyers have been directly harmed by salespeople an awful lot.

In the end, like pick-up artist manuals, I suspect that a large part of why these sales methods work is simply that they encourage people to suppress their natural moral inhibitions and just try to sell/get laid over and over again. After all, both of these things are basically numbers games, and if you seriously try often enough, you will eventually succeed: the sleaze is simply a tool that appeals to a certain kind of person that gets them to get out and try. The question, however, is why this is accepted. After all, decent people get caught up in this style of sales and marketing as well, and given how prevalent it is, not everyone responsible can be directly evil and depraved. Given that the world would generally be a better place if we didn't do sales and marketing in this way, you would think this wouldn't fly. To explain why it does, I think we need to look to Search Engine Optimisation.

The SEO-Industrial Complex

As a part of marketing my consultancy and my blog, I've recently put a considerable amount of effort into researching search engine optimisation techniques. This has involved reading an awful lot of SEO slop, much of it AI generated, as SEO goons seem incapable of not drinking their own Kool-aid. And while reading all of these articles has done significant damage to my mental health, the SEO industry is an excellent model for how these fundamentally creepy business practices propagate and become culturally ingrained despite public disavowal.

There are fundamentally only a few things you can do in order to influence your search rankings positively in an above-board way. There are the technical elements: uploading a sitemap, making sure your site is well structured and that you have a decent volume of internal links and suchlike. Then there are the social elements: making friends with other people working in your field and having back-alley connections (a large part of this blog's early success was because I made friends with Ludicity and he shared some of the early posts through his channels). Beyond that, you just have to write a good website, with useful and insightful things, post it on social media and hope for the best.

This means that Search Engine Optimisation as a field shouldn't really exist. The technical details are something that a decent web dev should understand, the social elements really have nothing to do with search and everything to do with being friendly and capable, and as for writing... well, that's skill, practice and knowing your audience. In effect, precisely none of these things are actually useful for doing what the SEO people purport to do, which means that the only real way of winning at SEO is so-called black hat techniques: keyword stuffing, link-buying, AI slop and all of the things that Google supposedly penalises. Most of you are probably aware that Google has disintegrated into serving up mostly SEO slop, which is largely the product of these black hat techniques, which in turn means that SEO professionals are overwhelmingly engaging in this shit.

However, working in a field where you and everyone around you know that you're engaging in sleaze and making life worse for everyone is profoundly damaging to your psyche, especially if you have the kind of dark triad personality traits that might draw you in to that kind of career. The way the SEO profession squares this circle is to outwardly write about technical SEO and high-quality "content" (a word which I hate - if you're writing content rather than articles, books or whatever, you are by definition making slop) and to very loudly write about how much black-hat techniques don't work, how they're a bad idea and how they'll get you punished. Of course, in order to do so, they talk about these techniques and exactly what they are an awful lot. The underlying message for people lacking in morals is "be subtle about it and don't get caught". And so we find ourselves wading through massive quantities of deeply corrosive SEO slop, unable to get the information we actually want, all while all the professionals are supposedly disavowing what happened to get us to this point.

Sales and marketing, in the platonic form, are rather similar. There are a few things you can do: build a strong product, build a good website to promote it, form strong, genuine relationships with people who can help sell your product and just generally get out of the way. Without exception, this is how all the best salespeople I've known function. But there are no quick wins here: you simply have to form genuine relationships, be emotionally responsive and mature, talk to lots of people (or write well, for that matter) and be persistent. You also need to understand your customers so that you can build something they want and that is genuinely good. You can't learn that from a blog post, or even a book. And thus, we find the same pattern: specific training for sales and marketing trends towards creepy, coercive techniques.

It's my contention that the vast bulk of consent-violating business practices function on precisely this logic: outward disavowal coupled with an underlying culture of "actually, do it, just don't get caught". That way, unethical business practices that are nonetheless good for bad actors proliferate uncontrollably, while everyone involved in this maintains plausible deniability. The equivalent in personal relationships is, of course, gaslighting: this is the logical equivalent of coercing a person into doing something they don't want to and then claiming after the fact that they consented. And this, of course, makes it very difficult to dislodge from a society.

Complicity

For much of 2024, I've been a member of the Waikato Chamber of Commerce. While the organisation is, on the whole, full of lovely people, I've struggled to work well with it and integrate well into it: the degree to which I have baseline assumptions that other people there simply don't share makes it hard for me to communicate with people or vibe with them, and I genuinely think that on some level people just pick up subconsciously that I'm an outsider in that space. A large part of that, I think, is because the people there by-and-large take the way business is currently done (with all its ugliness) as a given, and not being willing to maintain complicity with that way of doing business signals, almost by definition, that you're not part of the in-group.

The degree to which you have (or are made to think that you have) to become complicit in coercive behaviour in order to run a business is genuinely distressing. The technical issues are one thing: to an extent, being seen means marketing, and being able to feed yourself and pay rent means doing sales. To an extent, you need to spam people with email, you need to relentlessly harass your readers asking them to share your posts and support your writing (on a completely unrelated note, Liberapay and Patreon links can be found here). You can try and do things as ethically as possible, but without doing some distasteful shit means that you just won't be seen or heard, people won't take the actions you want them to take and you will just generally have real trouble cutting through the sheer mass of shit that all of our communication channels are full of these days. Even for me as a writer, I consistently feel the pressure to write deliberately inflammatory pieces in order to gain audience (this, oddly enough, wasn't one of them). As much as you might try to avoid it, if you don't do any of the things you find even remotely sketchy, you will fail.

But, as bad as the technical issues are, they're nowhere nearly as bad as the consequences of refusing to assimilate culturally. Between the sheer ubiquity of the practices and the effort put into suppressing cognitive dissonance described above, people functioning in these environments wind up believing that this is simply how business is: the deeply coercive, consent-violating and harassing nature of these practices fade away and become invisible. And at that point, we have a problem, because participating in this culture becomes key to being accepted by the business community, and thus, for anyone working primarily business-to-business, to winning clients. You have to post constantly on LinkedIn aggrandising yourself. You have to have a large email list which you consistently spam. You have to use socially comprehensible sales tactics to sell, no matter how toxic and obnoxious they are, because they're part of the social script. And if you refuse to use these tactics, you will, as sure as night follows day, wind up marginalised and not allowed into the business world.

This is, of course, identical to the primary way in which patriarchy¹ functions, and the way in which it acculturates and ultimately damages men. Being accepted as a man overwhelmingly requires you to adopt a very particular set of cultural and behavioural mannerisms, and very many of them require that you become complicit in violence towards women. At the extreme end, this can even be men being seen as unmanly because they don't hit their partners or sexually assault women, and even the mildest forms of this culture involves the denigration of certain activities or modes of thought as being unmanly or feminine (in New Zealand, for some ungodly reason, this includes education and being able to write well). Even the mildest forms of patriarchy also require a level of complicity and turning a blind eye to violence and consent violation by other men: the saying "bros before hoes" comes to mind. And again, refusing to take part in this will inevitably get you labelled as marginal: if the situation's bad enough, it can even interfere with your ability to form relationships with women because of the degree to which this patriarchal behaviour forms strong social scripts. In so many ways, modern business culture is nothing more or less than patriarchy as applied to the modern economy.

Now, if you're a sufficiently stubborn person, you can refuse to be complicit and still succeed. The issue here is that it takes a particularly bloody-minded person to do that, and most people aren't the kind of people who'll take on risk and suffering in order to prove a point. And so, like as not, we wind up with another generation of men who uphold patriarchy, or another generation of people who see their customers fundamentally as cattle to be marketed and sold to with no thought to their consent or well-being.

Technologically-enabled abuse

Now, back in the day this was bad enough. Unfortunately for us, technology has massively increased the rate at which this happens. First off, the increasing prevalence of technology in our lives has massively increased the boundary surface that we need to protect. It used to be that the major ways you could get in touch with people were in person, by calling them or by mail: all of these are fundamentally analogue technologies that it's difficult to make scale endlessly and that the recipient has some degree of control over. For marketing channels, you had outdoor marketing, pamphlets, TV and maybe people going door-to-door: again, all these methods are fairly analogue and (to a degree) controllable. These days, by contrast, we almost all carry smartphones, through which a constant stream of push notifications, texts and emails marketing things can be delivered to our eyeballs. The fact that we necessarily interact with the world through the internet means that we can be subjected to massive quantities of algorithmically-tailored advertising using extremely intrusive data gathering. Moreover, all of this can be scaled and twiddled with indefinitely as they're largely immaterial, so the sheer number of assaults on our attention and boundaries has increased staggeringly. The lack of firm social norms around online behaviour also contributes to this: without norms around in-person harassment to restrain people, online conduct can become a lot scummier without anything to stop it.

Secondly, the modern big tech ecosystem with its cult of the founder is basically perfectly designed to foster exploitative, patriarchal and abusive structures. The myth of tech being meritocratic, coupled with the extreme racial and gender bias that it exhibits has created an environment in which a whole lot of wealthy men with a predisposition towards sociopathy largely spend time with each other and with few external influences to prevent them from forming a bubble. It is, in that kind of situation, very easy to develop a habit of seeing people not in your bubble as being less than human: stupid, thoughtless people who can be acceptably manipulated for whatever purposes you see fit. Coupled with the sheer degree of wealth disparity in tech, this was a perfect environment for abusers to shelter in and fester: leave that happening for long enough, and we create an entire cohort of abusers in positions of power who then act to protect themselves and with the characteristic disregard for the basic well-being of other people.

The end result

Unfortunately, the vast majority of us are not the kind of oligarchs that actually have enough money to just avoid this: we are fairly humble people who have to work for a living and have to interact with the systems built for ordinary people. And for us, the way we experience this is as an endless hell of coercion, harassment, boundary violation and complete disregard for consent. Our emails are spammed relentlessly with marketing slop that we can't unsubscribe from (we can try, but somehow it seems to simply not work half the time, or is such a convoluted process that we can't do it), our phones are barraged with pointless notifications, marketing texts and spam calls, our social media fills up more and more with AI bots and our software is increasingly pushing pointless, counterproductive "AI" features on us. When we interact with companies and public services, it's increasingly through truly awful apps that basically don't work half the time, and when things inevitably break it's held to be our fault. We can't opt out of this due to the degree to which everything we do these days seems to be mediated through tech, and an increasing amount of what's being pushed out amounts to attempted fraud. This is a fucking ghastly way to live.

I'll repeat: we didn't choose any of this. We didn't consent to it, and we are being coerced into behaving in ways that benefit others at the expense of ourselves on a daily basis. Our boundaries are consistently violated, people are consistently trying to exploit or defraud us, and we seem to exist primarily as fodder for others. And when we try to opt out, we are consistently punished for it. This is an abusive relationship, and one where the harms are exceedingly real: damage to mental health, billions of dollars in money stolen through fraudulent means, an even larger swathe of money lost to predatory practices, thinly-disguised casinos and products that aren't scams but that may as well be given how shitty they are. And then, despite having to face this dross in our everyday lives, many of us drive to work in the morning switch to our business brains and, willingly or not, continue perpetrating this shit on everyone else. This is ghoulish.

Of course, this world we live in, while it largely arose organically, has been cultivated and defended by a class of affluent men, largely but not entirely white, who hold the vast majority of leadership positions in the business world. This further reinforces the connections between patriarchy and the economy of boundary-violation and coercion that we keep on seeing, and this is a deeply uncomfortable state of affairs that we need to change. Even with all this, however, it's important to remember that these are individually good men, and that it's highly likely that most of them are good partners and good community members and don't behave this way in their personal...

... oh, for FUCK'S SAKE!²

They're actually just rapists

Not all of them, certainly, but a disturbing number of them absolutely are. It's an open secret that a staggering number of venture capitalists, founders and tech leaders engage in rampant sexual harassment, assault and outright rape. And almost every woman has a personal story of a leader or manager being a creep. This is unbelievably prevalent. So it isn't even necessarily that the male dominance of business leadership has led to men unconsciously reproducing patriarchal behaviour in business: rather, we're simply led by rapists and sex pests with way too much money and power, and just as they have no regard for consent or the humanity of those they exploit in their personal lives, so too do they have a complete lack of regard for consent or boundaries in the business world. We live in a world and economy built by these people, with the restraints that kept them to at least a minimally acceptable standard of behaviour having been steadily avoided. These people think they can just take what they want from other people, whether that be money, sex, their work or their dignity, and the other people have no say in this.

This whole rotten thing is built on the back of the worst kinds of abuse and exploitation. The patterns are the same, and the people are the same: in their personal sphere they're sexual abusers, and in the public sphere they do roughly the same thing, but on a massive automated scale. They in both spheres, they cover for other rapists and abusers, and in every way, they are hollow, empty people who can see no way of getting the things they want but to take them from others by force, and then fall apart when that doesn't work. They will never be loved, they will never be admired: all they can do is binge on money, power and sexual gratification in order to try and fill the void, and they'll burn down the world to try and desperately fill that void.

We should not have to tolerate abuse. We do not have to tolerate abuse. So, I ask you: whenever possible, be that person. Be the person who refuses to shut up about abuse of any kind. Refuse to hire creeps, report them and fight to keep them accountable as much as you can, refuse to turn a blind eye to anything that indicates that they behave abusively, no matter how small.

These people are pathetic, they are beneath contempt, and they have far too much power. And they still can't protect their precious image. Let's strip it from them.