[cdf]

I was a sales engineer and I can assure you if your product is sufficiently innovative, nobody will have a budget for it, so this is an expected objection and every sales person would be trained to address it and they either were not paying attention during training or failed to qualify the lead, eg trying to sell Oracle DB to Larry and Sergey while they were still in a garage... of course they have no budget... not yet.

[ralfd]

Sure. But if a manager would go "If you have such a stupid excuse/question again you are out" all they would ensure is that I would dread and avoid communication with them.

[that_guy_iain]

From my experience, sales is reasonably cut throat. These people aren't there to be friends, they are there solely to sell and make money. If you're not selling you're out the door. If you can't ramp up quick enough, you're out the door. Having a slump? Out the door.

Sure there are lots of friendly normal sales people. Especially, on b2b. But there is still a major culture in a lot of places where it's just people trying to sell and if someone is affecting their ability to sell they need to be gone.

[darkerside]

Salesperson's job is to listen. It's like a programmer having trouble reading and applying basic documentation. Huge red flag.