It had been a few weeks into my new job in blockchain infrastructure in July 2021 and I was feeling great. Life was good, summer days are amazing in NYC where sunlight is plentiful from before 6am and well into the evening. The city tends to empty out during this time as everyone rushes “out East” or down the Shore but with Covid panic in the rear-view mirror, and networking events back in fashion, it was an incredible time to have made the move into crypto. Many people who had left the city for warmer climates during the pandemic moved back and I quickly found myself meeting all kinds of folks in the industry, from college dropouts who were now founders of new protocols, to other reformed TradFi folks putting their experience to better use helping build a new financial system.

Those that know me personally can attest that I am incredibly extroverted, so y’all can imagine how much fun I have at social events. Given I didn’t really know a lot of people in the industry yet, I decided to sign up for as many networking events as I could last summer. It was awesome to meet so many new folks, especially since a lot of us where new to the industry and yearning to get out of the house after the pandemic! I also immediately came across two realizations after the first couple of events I attended: 1) Fireblocks had an incredible brand, and 2) Crypto is extremely collaborative. Previous to that I honestly had no idea of how much both would help my transition into my new role.

Working as a sales person for a market leader is a double-edged sword. On one hand you get exposed to some of the best products and aspects of one industry. By definition that’s what catapults companies like Goldman into the top spot. However, being in a sales seat at such place also means there is a high degree of correlation between production and natural selection. What I mean is that say a Rates salesperson on the Hedge Funds desk at GS will most likely have to do less to get the phone to ring than his competitors at lower-profile banks, given the Goldman brand. Clients pretty much have to call you, either because they know you have the best traders (and possibly the best prices) or because they want to continue to get access to your resources (research, events, etc). This can lead to complacency, and that is where the other side of that double-edged sword comes about.

I grew up selling stuff without ever really thinking about it. Like most kids, I was always very grateful for the allowance my parents gave me but it was never enough to fund the lifestyle that I wanted, so I often found myself figuring out ways to make more money. Hot Wheel cars and Pokemon cards weren’t going to buy themselves! I used to sell water bottles and sodas at different local events and once managed to buy myself a mountain bike from these efforts. However, my favorite selling memory comes from middle school when I would have my grandmother buy cartoon and sports posters from wholesale printers in Mexico City and ship them to me at the border. I would then sell these during recess in school, an enterprise that netted me enough money to buy a Play Station (but also got me very close to being suspended). Turns out, hardcore capitalism doesn’t really fly in schools. Later in High School, my dad ran a used car lot and I would spend my weekends with him trying to flip cars. I wasn’t really good at it to be honest but it certainly taught me a lot. All those years though, I never really thought of myself as a sales person, doing business was always a way to a mean.

I never intended to become a salesperson when I interned at Goldman and I focused all my efforts on landing a much sexier trading job. To me, traders were the real brains behind the operation and I saw little appeal in managing relationships with clients in a Sales role. It was very frustrating that HR would constantly push me towards networking more with Sales teams, though I managed to get my way and got an offer from the Synthetics trading desk at the end of the summer. That was 2008 and by the time I graduated the following May the world was upside due to the Global Financial Crisis. While Goldman was honoring our job offers, a lot of the desks did not have staffing needs so given my language skills and internship feedback I was placed on the Latin American Macro Sales Desk. I had been so adamtnant to be in that role that I actually never visited the team during my internship so they didn’t really know me but needed someone who could speak Spanish and had to take me. From my side there wasn’t much I could do, I was just happy to have a seat given everything that was going on and so I put on my best Zara suit and reported for my first ever professional job in Sales in June of 2009.

The Latam Sales Team at GS back then was an eclectic hopscotch of lateral hires, a marked difference versus most desks at the firm where 80-90% of people were “born and raised” Goldman. While we all constantly drank the cultural Kool Aid, working with such a different team certainly had an impact on how I developed professionally. Our team also found itself in the middle of a meaningful market change as Pension Funds in Latin America had begun to trade currencies and rates directly instead of investing in global macro funds, and while my senior colleagues all had impeccable client relationships and structured product sales skills, they lacked experience dealing with “flow” products. This is where I got lucky as I was tasked with managing the daily flow for Chile, Colombia, and Peru and thus took on a high level of responsibility early on. However, even though I was the one handling the daily operations, it always dawned on me how clients would rather talk to my VPs, so I paid close attention to try and learn why.

 That’s when I first realize that the best sales people tell the best stories. Selling is all about storytelling. I would posit that the best sales people in the world are not occupying the offices of Global VP of Sales at Fortune 500 companies, rather they are probably those people you see going to Hawaii twice a year as part of their performance bonus at companies such as Mary Kay. There are obviously different kinds of sales, but in my humble opinion real sales people are those who are able to get their clients to give them money for something they don’t really need.

The majority of professional sales people are really good at managing processes and following sales methodologies, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense that anyone with some smarts and discipline can eventually become good at these kinds of sales. It’s not much different from my first years at GS where I was really good at quoting trades and “winning” business but in reality I was just following a script. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of value to this and you can make a great living if you work at the right place. However, as I look back at thirteen years of selling I really cannot stop thinking about those colleagues who were actually good at sales and could sell anything to anyone, and they always did that by telling the best stories.

Now, being a good story teller makes you a good sales person but excellent sales people are also very knowledgeable about the product they sell. This is really my main takeaway. You can spin a good spiel but if you lack the knowledge and substance behind it then you’re still falling quite short of your potential. No wonder a lot of the sales stereotypes can carry such a negative connotation, from snake oil to used car sales people. Taking advantage of your ability to sell with just revenue maximization in mind might be good for a company’s top line but could eventually damage a brand’s reputation in the long term. That is why combining natural sales skills with product and market knowledge makes for the best kinds of sales people. This combination also usually helps you capture mind share, and that’s what this is all about.

Earning mind share leads to winning market share. That’s what excellent sales people do.

Looking back at my early GS days, the senior guys on the desk were really good at becoming clients’ “go-to” guys. By combining excellent product and market knowledge with their ability to communicate complex topics in simple terms (storytelling) they tended to be the first call PMs and Head Traders made when they needed to get up to speed on something. The best sales people at GS were as valuable resources to the firm as they were to their clients and that is what made them stand out. They constantly shared their ideas and views in concise, yet effective ways. There wasn’t one standard format as everyone had their own style, but clients always saw them as almost an extension of their own teams. From a distance it never looked like my colleagues were trying to sell anything, they were working to solve the clients’ problems instead. The even better salespeople were those who anticipated which solutions our clients would need and presented them ahead of time. This is something that I have always strived to do since then.

—

Fast forward to 2021, applying the lessons I learned on the Street to my year as a technology sales person was very interesting. At first I was a bit worried that my limited experience interacting with DeFi and trading NFTs for a few months would not be enough to perform well as a salesman in the industry. However, I quickly learned that most people onboarding to crypto were also recent transplants, and that quickly subdued my impostor syndrome. Additionally, the more I learned about our business the more I was able to go and try different things that our clients would also be doing given the very open-source nature of blockchain technology. This allowed me to better explain to clients why we were the best solution for their needs, as well as compare and contrast our tools versus those available in the market. Funny enough, having a CryptoPunk as my Zoom, Slack, and Gmail profile picture also made people think that I had much more experience in crypto than I did, something we will dive deeper into on my next piece.

At the end of the day, as I look back at the last thirteen months, I am grateful that I was able to experience selling in a very different setting from the one I was used to and that I was able to apply some of the lessons that I had learned in my previous jobs. Having clicked countless times on my hardware wallets and understanding how painful it is to chase DAO members to execute transactions on a multisig helped me better speak my clients’ “language”. Turns out it is a lot easier to sell something if you’re passionate about it and can convey personal experience dealing with the same issues that your clients are dealing with. If you were on the other side of those sales I hope I wasn’t too painful to deal with! But if I was, please let me buy you a beer next time you’re in town. I don’t know if I was good at selling, but for now to Sales I say good bye.