It's A Privilege To Be An Order Taker In Sales

Back to a regular article today on the concept of order taking in sales (and why, paradoxically, you should strive for it), but before I do, wanted to give some updates on vibescaling:

Now, onto the article 👇🏻

Harry Stebbings threw a jab at OpenAI and Cursor AEs a few months ago when on with Gong's CEO, Amit (episode here): "they're just order takers, what do they know?"

Disagree. They're smart for knowing how to play the game.

There's a common phrase thrown around in GTM: "they're just an order taker."

What they're referring to is that the product is so easy to sell, anyone can sell it. Literally like a cashier at Shake Shack where someone tells them what they want and their job is just to ring it up.

Here's something I don't think I've said before: in my ~6 years of enterprise sales before starting vibescaling, I've really never been in an org that had high quota attainment (never above 20%).

Big company (Salesforce), scaling company (Celonis as the ~50th AE, got there at their C, left at their D), early stage (Metronome as their 4th seller).

I’ve never really been at a “ripping” org. So take this as an article of "do what I say, not as I did."

The people I know who are the most financially successful, my happiest friends in sales, the thing they cracked is product-market fit. Market pull. Healthy inbound lead flow.

We wrote more about this in our article titled 11 traits that make a hot sales job - so will touch on #2 on that list a little deeper in this article, market pull.

It's this funny concept. As I started to develop in sales, everybody would say "oh, they're just an order taker."

But funny enough, everybody at least starts interviewing at the roles where you are essentially an order taker. It’s the preference, as it should be.

The people who have really gamed this system, who really know what to look out for, have understood that market pull (aka order taking) is so much of your success in this job. It creates a tailwind for you and increases the chances you’ll be fully happy in this job.

There's quite the paradox I've written about before:

Choosing the right ship matters 10x more than your skillset in sales. As much as Chris Orlob wants to disagree with me here, it’s a hill I’ll die on.

That's not to say you shouldn't perfect your craft. You absolutely should. But you should always strive to join a company where the product practically sells itself.

Rarely do you get bonus points for grinding to sell the #3 or #4 product in the market (even though you should).

Because when you don’t nail this, you get this scenario below:

What's funny is when people don't get into these "order taker" roles they were dying to get into, they then rip on the reps there.

Candidly, I've done it before myself too. It came from jealousy.

I would say "oh, they're just an order taker," and really deep down I was just pissed that I wasn't at Stripe (still bitter they dinged me in 2019 😤 - jk, huge fans of y’all).

It's this cycle: we start by trying to get into those roles, then we don't get in, we make fun of the people who did. Almost out of jealousy.

You know that classic saying: easy times create weak people, weak people create hard times, hard times create strong people, strong people create easy times.

There's a sales version of this that I’m sure happens:

Order-taking roles create "soft" sellers → "Soft" sellers eventually find themselves in harder environments (out of their control) and struggle → Struggle creates skilled sellers → Skilled sellers earn their way back to order-taking roles (and most likely stay there as long as they can to not repeat the cycle)

Harry asks "aren't they just order takers?" about Cursor and OpenAI reps.

But paradoxically, everybody says that, yet in two to four years everybody's going to be wanting to hire from Cursor and Anthropic and OpenAI. Because they know the talent bar is so high. These companies can literally hire whoever they want.

The assumption is that they've done a pretty extensive process, and these reps are actually good, even though they're going into an environment that doesn't necessarily breed adversity.

Same reason why you just assume someone who went to Harvard or got into McKinsey/Goldman is smart - a pre-screen has been done for you, and our reptilian brains are lazy.

Same thing we saw with early Stripe GTM hires in the mid-2010s. People said "oh, they’re just order takers." But guess what? Everyone (still) wants to hire Stripe alums. The talent density signal was too strong to ignore.

The takeaway: go snatch that order taker role, and when you are one, take stock of your blessings.

Thanks for reading and being a supporter of what we’re building.

For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, partner @ vibescaling - a GTM advisory, recruiting, media, and investing firm.

Where to find VibeScaling:

We work with most of the hottest AI-native startups in different capacities, and for those who are interested in chatting (whether to join one of them or to work together), shoot me an email at [email protected] or a DM on LI.

🫡 cheers,

Chris