Good sales takes a powerful instrument, not a push-button tool

Kareem Amin, the co-founder and chief executive of the sales software company Clay, was explaining why he refused to make his product simple. Other companies in the space, he said, assume salespeople want something easy and automatic, and rivals have used the phrase coin-operated to describe them. Amin believes the opposite, because selling is creative work.

"We're not building a microwave," he said. "We're building a guitar."

By microwave, he means a tool that is useful but commoditized. You press a button, you heat food for one minute, and one machine is much like another. By guitar, he means an instrument with a few strings and frets that a person could spend a lifetime getting better at, and still find something new while playing only one style of music.

Amin argues that sales needs the guitar because a salesperson always has to find what he calls go-to-market alpha, a reason to stand out from everyone else contacting the same customer. If the software simply gives an answer and tells the user who to call and what to say, he said, the result is just noise, so Clay left its product open-ended on purpose, a choice he calls counterintuitive.

Instead of delivering the answer, he said, the tool lets a salesperson experiment quickly, try ideas, and see what works.

He applies the same respect for craft to the job itself when he describes the idealized form of sales. It is raining, he brings an umbrella, and the other person is glad to see him. What he means is giving people what they need when they need it, without manufacturing the desire first, by finding the niche customer who happens to need what was made and getting it to them.