I used to think of salespeople as slimeballs who would lie, cheat and steal to push something over on you. Any time anyone would try to sell me anything, I'd immediately become defensive and just get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

Then I became an enterprise SaaS PM and started working on the other side of things with some really fantastic sales reps. I came to understand that, as with all jobs, there's a tremendous amount of variance in the quality of sales reps, and the good ones are actually really good. A great sales rep is an expert on her market and has a breadth of knowledge about the problems people face related to the product she's selling. She's not trying to push something you don't need; rather, she's trying to understand exactly what your problem is and help to resolve it. Obviously she's being compensated in the process, but a great sales rep selling a good product isn't going to waste time trying to foist that product on people who don't need it when she could spend her time much more productively.

A recent example of a time I really appreciated being sold to: I was looking for someone with conversion rate optimization expertise to redesign my ecommerce site, and I posted a job on Upwork. I got a lot of quotes and spoke to a few of the ones that sounded the best, and the third guy I spoke to really took the time to understand my goals, my company and my financial situation. Instead of trying to sell me a $5000 redesign of the site, he said for $350 he would review my analytics, ads and site itself and offer feedback on how to improve it from a CRO perspective. That was exactly what I wanted, but I just didn't know it was a thing. I didn't need to pay someone $5k to do a redesign - I just got a premium Shopify template and implemented it myself, and it looks great. I was really just looking for CRO advice, and because he had the domain expertise and took the time to understand my business, he was able to offer the right solution. That's what a great sales rep does.

Marketing is very much the same. A lot of it sucks because people take the shotgun approach of spamming everyone everywhere all the time and hoping a few people buy what they're selling. That doesn't mean marketing is bad, though. Once I was trying to figure out what to buy my girlfriend for Christmas, and an ad appeared on Facebook for a behind the scenes tour of the red panda exhibit at the SF Zoo. Unfortunately we broke up right before Christmas, so I ended up going with one of my buddies, but it would've been the perfect gift! That's what good marketing is - finding the right person at the right time and solving a problem.

So yeah, a lot of marketing sucks, but that doesn't mean you have to do sucky marketing. Instead of trying to play SEO games, you can just write really high quality content on relevant topics that will actually help people and make them see you as an expert. You can use influencers as a channel to reach the appropriate set of folks for your product, who will be happy to have it. There's lots of ways to market well, and I encourage you to figure out the ones that work for you before dismissing the whole concept.

Seriously, I do hope you figure it out. If you have a great product that will help people, it deserves to be marketed.