Ben's 1x1x1 - 7 pieces of sales gold - August 14, 2026 🚀
For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
One thought from my week. One interesting find/tool from my week. One image from my life.
Let’s dive in 👇
Thought from the week
7 pieces of sales gold
Sales. Love it or hate it, good sales is kinda everything.
It basically is business.
I’ve had some great sales mentors over the years, but I recently found advice from an anonymous sales leader on Hacker News that had me silently shouting “YES” at my screen and considering a standing ovation in my office.
A shout out to goatherders
Yes, Hacker News.
Usually a beautiful gathering of engineering people debating whether the correct answer is CLI, API, or “actually I built my own operating system in Rust.”
But buried in the comments was a sales leader with 20 years of wisdom.
His words:
Yes, there are tons of resources but I’ll try to offer some simple tips.
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Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I’ve been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
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Sales is about people and it’s about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It’s about people and it’s about solving problems.
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People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
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People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occassionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
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I say in every talk I give: “all things being equal people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends.”
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Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
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No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.
There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in.
Good luck.
Image from my life
Random Monday evening adventures (this one a little hotter, smokier, and sweatier than expected).