Thanks for this! I think this kind of post is hugely valuable! If you (yes you the reader!) know someone who has skills/interest in this area, consider them sending this post! I've done the same for a friend who I'd previously assumed was "lost" to the corporate ladder. They've seen this post and they're now excited to chat to you Patrick :).
If you need extra convincing that reaching out to your sales friends with this post is a good idea, (or maybe you should write your own post along these lines):
- As a movement we're currently bottle necked by experienced professionals and this kind of post seems hugely valuable to encourage sales people to use their skills for good.
- I also think most cause areas would benefit from a more diverse set of backgrounds, skills and mindsets, and as the top cause areas mature this can happen!
I actually considered moving from technical support to sales in the same company, thinking of the earning to give approach. I imagined I would develop skills that can transfer to other industries, and gradually lead to marketing, or UX for product landing pages, product management... (these might not be better paid, depending on the product, most definitely not better paid).
The personal fit bit stopped me. I am a problem solver and prefer projects (even if short term). I can't read people's moods well and being a good salesperson would take me too long and too much effort. For "naturally" persuasive people, I think ths is perfect (keeping in mind the temptations and trying to stay away from selling harmful products). I can think of very good options in machinery, logistics solutions, transportation, agriculture. Not only software.
For industries with a handful of well known competitors, there's another way to keep your salary high even if you don't hit the targets always. Your ex-employee won't like you moving to another provider and explaining potential buyers the weaknesses of their products, which you know very well. I see this at work, we have ex-sales reps from competitors. Before you smell that they might fire you, or change your position to a less lucrative one, you can point to the possibility of quitting and this changes the power dynamics.
Another plus for this option is that it can easily be remote, and include loads of travelling to conferences, fairs and events. Plus there's no need for a degree. It's a very low risk career change or career path. Plenty of companies offer sales jobs and many train you very well. I can't be sure but I don't think AI will wipe out salespeople. When it comes to money, you want someone to blame and point with your finger when a sales promise wasn't fulfilled. Especially with expensive services and products, personal trust is crucial. You can't afford failing in the first impressions.
It's true that it rarely comes as a prestigious career but we can always change the game rules. Recently, I read and listened to ferry operators who felt super accomplished for bringing staples to the island where otherwise how would people live and buy groceries? And the truck driver feeling that her job was super important because all the people who go to the shop and can find the goddies that wouldn't be there otherwise. (Yes some of those goodies are probably causing teeth to rot and obesity but you have the veggies and grains as well).
And if one day you can retire and be a full time EA, sales skills are perfect for finding donors, lobbying... !
Thanks Patrick!
Should more EAs become technical sales professionals? — EA Forum
Should more EAs become technical sales professionals?
Sales is rarely discussed as a career path in EA. This post explores whether technical sales roles — especially B2B Sales Engineering — might be a fast, high-leverage path for building career capital. It compares sales to other roles, and makes the case that sales deserves more serious attention from EA students and professionals.
Depth: Medium. I am just a college student but I believe this could provide significant value. (I completed a sales bootcamp a month ago, and spent good time reflecting and connecting to SEs on LinkedIn. I'll try not to let recency/optimism bias hit me but it inevitably will).
I'll use "sales engineer" and "technical sales" interchangeably. Companies have a lot of names for sales roles, but fundamentally they do the same thing: bring in revenue.
Introduction
Imagine you asked high school and university students what they wish to do with their careers. Maybe they want to become a doctor to save many lives (which unfortunately is not the case). Maybe they want to become a lawyer or engineer or researcher. Maybe the more ambitious want to become entrepreneurs or AI safety researchers. I can guarantee that nobody wants to go into sales.
The reason is understandable: we imagine sleezy car salesmen that are trying to steal your money and push you around. They try to be manipulative and exaggerate their claims. For example, Trevor Field, a salesperson, pushed Playpumps and caused massive counterfactual harm.
This post is going to discuss whether one should pursue sales for career capital, specifically Business-to-Business (B2B) sales. This includes Sales Engineers, Account Executives, Sales Development Representative, Solutions Architect, Customer Success Managers, and many more.
What is B2B Sales?
We must clarify what we mean by sales. There is a significant difference between marketing, business-to-customer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales.
Marketing
B2C Sales
B2B sales
Audience
Everyone
Consumers
Institutions
Scale
1-to-many
1-to-1
1-to-1
Goal
Create awareness
Close the deal, transactional decisions
Build trust, solve problems, close large complex deals
Cycle Time
Instant to Weeks
Minutes to Days
Weeks to Years
Emotions
Eye-catching
Urgency
Deeply Relational and Rational
EA Example
EA group flyers
AMF donation page
Convincing a billionaire donor
Skillset
Branding, content strategy
Persuasion, hustle
Relationship management
Leverage
Medium: generating leads
Low: items aren’t that valuable
Very High: leverage over people
Marketing
Marketing is all about spreading awareness of an idea or a product. Rather than creating buy-in, marketing allows people to learn that a product exists. For example, a Super Bowl advertisement is an example of marketing. So are online advertisement.
Marketing is usually a passive process and is often not targeted. Sometimes marketing targets a specific audience (such as personalized online advertisements) but usually marketing tries to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible, especially in TV commercials where personalization is impossible.
The primary benefit of marketing is generating leads and interest. It is quite scalable (just spend more money), but it doesn't get someone to buy or take action. For example, a person might know about EA, but doesn't take any career shifts.
Learn more about marketing. 80k combines both marketing and sales together, which I think is a huge mistake.
B2C Sales
Business-to-Customer sales is about getting a person to buy a product. However, this product is often low-value and retail (i.e. in a store). For example, a person might try to sell iPhones in a mall, so they would hunt customers down and ask them to buy an iPhone. Door-to-door salespeople are also B2C. Their strategies are often untargeted and one-size-fit-all.
B2C salespeople may sell more expensive products, such as a car dealership (trying to convince people to buy this car over another). Real estate is also B2C when selling single-family homes, though in practice real estate is between B2C and B2B.
B2C sales is where we have our negative impression of salespeople. This is because these salespeople often won't see a customer again, meaning they have to do the entire sales loop all in one go. They are thus transactional and these types of salespeople are aiming to hit their quota.
B2B Sales
Business-to-Business sales is where salespeople shine. It is where one company sells products, services, ideas, or literally anything to another company. B2B sales is more strategic, more complex, higher stakes, and much more relevant for high-impact careers.
For example, let's say a startup is building a narrow AI tool to either the government, a research lab, or of course another company like Google. That is B2B sales, and it requires:
B2B sales is consultative. Some questions that come up are:
"What’s the biggest bottleneck in your current process?" (the situation)
"Have you tried X? Why didn’t it work?" (the problem)
"If this problem went away next quarter, how would that change your metrics?" (the implication)
"Would you be open to trying this product which can solve X?" (Need Payoff)
B2B sales is often called technical sales because the problem often requires a technical solution. This often means understanding the technology behind the product and how it helps solve a person's or business's problems. Thus, we will call technical salespeople as Sales Engineers.
I believe B2B sales could actually be a great option for many EAs early in their career, if they have personal fit. This probably applies more to people who do not want to go into research, though most people could benefit from sales.
Building Career Capital
Sales skills are pretty valuable because they encompass a whole slew of skills. Especially technical sales, which requires explaining very technical topics in the way that the other client understands.
Let's look into some of the important skill categories, especially the ones sales can train significantly more than other jobs.
Time Management & Prioritization
One of the big question is "What do salespeople do?" and "What does a regular day in a life look like?" This question is difficult to answer because salespeople set their own agendas.
For example, a typical week might look like this (from a schedule planning activity):
Time
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8am
Doctor Visit
Proposal 2
Legal Training
Meet with Contractor company: their PM, issues, analysts
Importantly, schedules change week-to-week, and an emergency client meeting could derail the entire week. Nonetheless, we should apply Pareto's 80/20 principle: 20% of the business clients bring in 80% of the revenue. This means 20% of a salesperson's job drive 80% of their results.
There's also a reputation of getting stuff done: sales is a very performance-based culture. If you miss your quota enough times, you will be get PIP, which is a fancy term for losing your job. On the other hand, performing well quickly accelerates one's career, and you become someone known for kicking ass.
Communication
Communication is another important skill which I would let 80k speak on own.
Just as important as communication is technical communication: explaining technical problems and solutions to a client. Since B2B problems are very complex, this means a sales rep has to distill a problem, understand the most important parts of a problem, find a solution, and present that solution in an accessible language. This is why Sales Engineers are often named "Solutions Architect" or "Solutions Engineer."
Also, many problems in EA such as AI x-risk face communication problems.
Relationship Building
A good sales engineer must build relationships with their clients. This is because people buy from those that they trust. Consumers don't buy the "best" product but the most trustworthy one.
I would argue trust is more important since the FTX collapse, which left a huge stain on Effective Altruism as a whole. One should justify trust on virtuous grounds; trust itself is an intrinsic good. For example, the most upvoted forum post made it clear that we EAs value trust as it facilitates easier coordination.
Networking
The entire job of a sales representative is basically networking. This means connecting clients to solutions and providing value to others. Networking goes hand-in-hand with relationship building, but I believe sales is a great opportunity to "get outside" of EA. Besides, we would become more powerful the more diverse networking we have.
For example, certain key demographics (older people, non-elite universities, conservatives, religious people) are pretty underrepresented in EA. It would be awesome if we can reach out to them: they likely got some insights we haven't considered, and many of them hold important government positions.
The median Sales engineer make $120k/year according to BLS, which is less money than SWE ($130k) and CompE ($155k). Nonetheless, these numbers might not exactly be what they seem:
Essentially all B2B industries need sales to survive. This means geographically the sales engineering locations are more diverse, while software engineers tend to be located in higher cost of living cities (San Francisco, New York, etc.).
Salary data is asked from HR, not from the employees. Commissions determine a huge part of a salesperson's salary, but this is proprietary data. While BLS tries to include commissions into their methodology, this is likely underestimated.
Anecdotally, commissions can be ridiculously large for a well-performing sales engineers, often exceeding $300,000 or more in total compensation.
If I would put a rule of thumb, expect about $100,000/year salary, with heavy tails upside, assuming you can perform above the median. This is significant money which is useful for earning-to-give, but I would personally invest in my financial runaway.
Pivoting Potential
Sales engineering also have a good amount of exit opportunities, since sales is so transferrable, especially if it requires technical communication. Note: These are some potential ideas; we encourage you to look deeper or generate your own pivoting plan.
Sales Leader/Manager
Probably the most direct path. Could climb the corporate ladder
Is technical sales the best method to get career capital? Only you can answer, but I see B2B sales as the lower risk version of tech entrepreneurship, and in some cases more accessible. For example, you might not live in NYC or Boston or San Francisco or Washington D.C. and moving there would mean losing your entire network and getting crushed by high costs of living (this is why we need land use reform).
Another way sales could be a good option is if you come from a non-elite university where prestigious career paths are intractable, there are no strong VC ecosystems, and your town doesn't have a local EA group.
We strongly suggest that if you do join a sales team, you join one with a lot of coaching. Try to get as much coaching as possible, as we will see performance is paramount in sales.
Why not do B2B Sales?
You might not perform well.
Let me repeat: sales is extremely performance-dependent. If you are a 90th percentile salesperson, you would quickly move up as you hit 150%+ of quotas and get paid ridiculous commissions. If you are a 10th percentile salesperson, you lose your job.
Even then, joining a sales team would vastly improve your sales skills. This is because we are all focused on performance, and if we all hit our quotas then we will all win. Try to go into sales with the mindset of training, not with the mindset of making a lot of money.
EAs often tend to underestimate themselves, but they have strengths they can leverage. They are often analytical and future-oriented, and will do anything they can do to have a greater impact, whether that is learning sales. As long as you are coachable, you should be good., but really evaluate personal fit. You might not like being monitored for performance all the time. Alternatively, maybe you really dislike talking to people, though many introverts still perform well in sales. It is more important for you to understand and leverage your own strengths than to try to be someone else.
You could sell for a bad industry.
Being a salesperson would have positive impact for the company because it directly makes the company money. Moreover, you are counterfactually responsible for the deals that you close; without you the company would likely not close those deals.
Thus, whatever you are selling, it would make your company more powerful. We think if you are selling in an industry that does a lot of harm, you should not sell in that industry. Below is a list of some examples, but typically every industry requires sales so you can very easily pivot to a better option.
One thing is later on you might hit credibility issues if you try to pivot into EA. First of all, people might view you as a "salesperson" rather than an engineer or a researcher. Another thing is entering sales could isolate you from the EA community (as far as I can tell, technical sales is neglected within EA).
This means one has to build their EA network outside of sales, but using sales skills. The same networking and relationship-building skills transfer over, and one should retain an online presence (such as posting reports on the EA Forum, cold calling those at EA and non-EA organizations, and attending EAGs).
In terms of the technical credibility side, this is why I suggested Sales Engineering or Technical Sales instead of generic B2B sales. Sales Engineering requires understanding the company's product, their technical features, and the various technical industries. This means instead of programming AI in Python, one explain how the AI Python program can solve the client's problems.
Learning Sales Engineering is best combined with a technical major. I am personally studying Electrical Engineering, but Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and even Industrial Distribution works too. If you are a college student, try to generalize as much as you can in engineering. Degrees are mostly signaling anyways.
You could be locked into golden handcuffs
This is a very real risk if you overperform in sales, which is getting trapped into golden handcuffs. This comes from your income being so high you might not want to pivot. This issue is probably smaller than at AI companies because compensation is dependent on performance (commission), which is paid out immediately.
To mitigate this, one should take the 10% GWWC pledge, or alternatively pre-set a timeline (I will work at this company for 2 years, then re-evaluate). Better yet, take the FIRE route and keep your costs constant while investing >50% of your income into your financial runaway (usually index funds).
Just ignore the "retire early" part of FIRE, since you're probably going to be working in your next role. This means instead of needing to save 30 years worth of income, you only need to save maybe ~3 years.
Want to get AI labs to do safety deployment? Sales.
Want your company to generate revenue? Sales.
Want your nonprofit to raise more money or grow your team? Sales.
Want to get Elon Musk to donate half of his wealth to effective causes? Sales.
Want to do 1:1 in your organization to increase efficiency? Sales.
Want to recruit people to join EA orgs? Sales.
Want to reduce the negative perception of FTX on EA among skeptics? Sales.
Want to expand EA to people in key demographics that are usually not in EA? Sales.
Want to convince a person that sales is great for building career capital? Sales.
Want to motivate yourself to keep going when it is hard and lonely? Sales.
Learning More & Next Steps
This section will all be about whether you should or should not go into sales, and how to continue.
Testing your fit (Fast, low-risk)
Here are some ways to see if technical sales is right for you:
Cold message 4-5 sales engineers or EA fundraisers on LinkedIn. Ask them about their paths.
Try to aim to find sales engineers that go to the same university as you. If that fails, try to find those with the same nationality. A single point of connection can really bond two people together.
Do a discovery call: understand the salesperson's likes and pain points which could become your future self's pain points. Ask more about what the job is like.
Pitch an EA idea to a smart or skeptical friend, but doing in a way that is consultative. Notice how it feels.
Simulate a sales call with ChatGPT or a friend, explaining a complex topic (EA, engineering, math, anything) clearly and concisely.
See if you have similar personal fits with a tech entrepreneur, but do know technical sales is often lower risk and more structured than entrepreneurship.
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman
If you want to skip straight to the video, here it is!
AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI...
Thanks for this! I think this kind of post is hugely valuable! If you (yes you the reader!) know someone who has skills/interest in this area, consider them sending this post! I've done the same for a friend who I'd previously assumed was "lost" to the corporate ladder. They've seen this post and they're now excited to chat to you Patrick :).
If you need extra convincing that reaching out to your sales friends with this post is a good idea, (or maybe you should write your own post along these lines):
- As a movement we're currently bottle necked by experienced professionals and this kind of post seems hugely valuable to encourage sales people to use their skills for good.
- I also think most cause areas would benefit from a more diverse set of backgrounds, skills and mindsets, and as the top cause areas mature this can happen!