Vercel COO Jean Grosser's litmus test for a great salesperson is that engineers shouldn't be able to tell they aren't a PM for at least 10 minutes. This requires deep product knowledge, enabling sales to act as an R&D function by translating customer feedback into valuable product signals.

A sales background teaches more than customer centricity. It instills resilience and the fearlessness to approach anyone in an organization to get things done, a vital skill for navigating the cross-functional demands of product management.

In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.

Before scaling a sales organization, founders must personally learn how to sell the product, even if they do it poorly. This hands-on experience provides an invaluable, holistic understanding of the full customer journey, which is critical context that cannot be outsourced or delegated when building a GTM engine.

PMs who transition from other professions bring life skills that help them understand diverse perspectives. This real-world experience builds more empathy than academic product management programs, which primarily teach frameworks and a common language.

A commission-based sales job, even if dreaded, provides foundational career skills. It forces you to become comfortable with discomfort and rejection, while teaching the universal skill of persuasion—whether you're selling a product, an internal idea, or your own capabilities to an employer.

To create successful products, designers must understand the entire go-to-market process. Direct sales experience reveals how decisions on pricing and packaging impact retailers and customers, preventing the creation of great products that never reach their audience due to commercial roadblocks.

Unlike corporate roles where activity can be mistaken for success, sales provides direct, visceral feedback. This "winning" mentality, born from the pain of losing a customer, keeps product leaders grounded in the ultimate goal: winning the customer, not just executing processes.

The ideal sales hire changes dramatically across scaling stages. Initially, you need a "product manager" type who can handle ambiguity and provide product feedback. A top rep from a large company would fail because they rely on established processes and support systems that don't yet exist.