[gizi]

The less the product matters, the more the salesman does. So, yes, in order to sell something that the other side has no interest in buying, you should go face-to-face. Google, on the other hand, has never sent out even a single salesman to talk people into using their search engine or to bid for ads on it.

Therefore, for me, it works the other way around. If a company has salesmen, their product must be totally unimportant. They are probably competing on cost with China, and busy going under, because anybody who could innovate their way out of that trouble, has left already, or never came over in the first place.

[georgerobinson]

Can someone explain why this comment is being down voted? I think the author makes a valid point.

When I choose my iPhone, my MacBook Air, my Martin acoustic guitar, etc, I didn't need a salesman to explain to me how great these products were. I went into the store and tried them out for myself. No one ever had to convince me to purchase the product. The product did that by itself.

On the other hand, if someone has to convince me to purchase a product I was never looking to purchase, or over a competitors, the product probably wasn't that great in the first place.

[S4M]

I think gizi's point is pretty good (I upvoted it), but he misses the case where a company has to do some heavily customization on its product to satisfy the customer's needs, which is often the case in enterprise sales. In this case, especially if the user is not technical, it's better to have face to face meetings to understand what the customer needs.