The best salespeople I know never wanted to be in sales

Selling carries an image. Persuasion, manufactured urgency, telling people what they want to hear. None of that compounds.

I moved into sales from engineering. The assumption was that I would need a new skill set. What I actually needed was to stop hiding the one I had.

An engineer on a customer call brings something no training manufactures. The willingness to say that will not work. Not as a tactic. As a genuine observation. Customers are not used to hearing it. Most salespeople have been trained out of it. The instinct to close overrides the instinct to be straight.

The paradox is that honesty is the fastest path to trust, and trust is the fastest path to a yes. But you have to be willing to lose the deal to get there. Engineers are usually comfortable walking away from a bad solution. That comfort is worth more than any closing technique.

Seventeen years in, the pattern holds. The customers who trust me most are the ones I have told hard things to. The deals that move fastest sit on relationships where both sides know the other will be straight.

Engineers who move into sales worry about what they are losing. The technical identity, the maker credibility. They are worrying about the wrong thing. The technical knowledge is exactly what makes the honesty credible. Without it you are just being difficult. With it, you are being useful.

The transition was not from engineer to salesperson. It was from someone who solved problems to someone who could name them out loud.