Bill Gates on the Sales Profession

Recently several of my colleagues (Jim Logan and Lori Richardson) wrote about Bill Gates' comments regarding salespeople.

The heart of the discussion is Mr. Gates' commenting that the job of sales is "boring, repetitive, and mundane". It seems some people take issue with that assessment.

While I respect the opinions of my colleagues, I agree with Mr. Gates. Many aspects of a sales job are boring, repetitive and mundane. Of course, that's true for many occupations, including computer programming. No job is perfect.

Remember, Mr. Gates is speaking from his perspective. He's much more a coder than a salesperson so why wouldn't he feel coding is more interesting than sales?

One lesson to take from this is that we should all spend our time doing what we are meant to do. By this I mean we should do what we're good at, what we enjoy and what we find interesting. Bill Gates has done that and it's worked pretty well for him.

Another lesson might be to remember that we all sell.

Obviously we're all not salespeople nor would many of us want to be. The profession of sales requires a certain set of skills and traits that most people simply do not have. Like any profession, it requires skills, persistence and hard work to be successful.

But, to accomplish anything of value we need to work with others in a cooperative and collaborative way. We need to communicate and persuade people. We need to believe in what we're doing and be skilled at getting others to join in our belief and our passion.

I call that selling. And I thinkg Mr. Gates would agree.