Even The Best Salesperson Can’t Save a Poor Product

Updated May 2026

“She could sell icecubes to eskimos!”

Most people who’ve been involved in sales or marketing for any length of time have come across SuperSalesperson™.

SuperSalesperson™ is someone who you feel could sell pretty much anything to just about anyone. They’re usually extremely personable, gregarious, and often the center of attention when in a social gathering. Observing the way they act (and react) in public, it’s almost as though they see their entire life as being one big sales pitch. Psychologists may characterize them as having “alpha” leadership personality traits.

A few years ago, SuperSalesperson™ ruled the sales roost. They steamrollered their way to success. They knocked sales targets out of the ballpark, and ran rings around the competition. They felt that they were the single most important element in driving forward revenue.

And you know what? They probably were. But the reason they were so effective had far less to do with their personality than most of us assumed at the time, and understanding why matters more than ever, because the thing that made them powerful has quietly disappeared.

Knowledge is power: sales holding all the cards

One of the main reasons for the success of SuperSalesperson™ was information. In the majority of customer-facing buying scenarios, it was the salesperson who held all the cards. They knew more than the customer did, and there was no convenient way for the customer to go and check. SuperSalesperson™ was able to control the flow of information to their advantage. Back in the day, much of the product and industry information that customers relied upon came from salespeople. This even included information on the competition, which allowed savvy salespeople to play down, or even quietly bury, any product inferiority. The pitch could lean on the flattering bits while staying quiet on the rest, keeping the conversation a polite distance from the one comparison that might have ended it.

None of this required much in the way of outright dishonesty. It simply required being the only one in the room holding the full picture, which for the best part of a century is exactly what a salesperson was. The information had a cost, and that cost ran almost entirely in the seller’s favor. A buyer couldn’t easily pull an independent review or compare notes with a peer who’d bought the same thing the year before, so they leaned on the person in front of them, which is precisely where that person wanted them.

In other words, in the old days it wasn’t too difficult to sell stuff to people that, to be honest, wasn’t all that good. You didn’t have to have the best product on the shelf. You just had to make sure the buyer never got far enough to work out that you didn’t, and the entire value of SuperSalesperson™ lay in making sure that particular penny never quite dropped.

In today’s connected-customer environment, where that same information is now freely available, the traditional hold of SuperSalesperson™ no longer exists. The sales division can’t cover up product weaknesses the way it used to. The customer now has a far broader knowledge of a product’s good points and its bad ones, as well as how it stands up against the alternatives. Your customer probably knows more about your product and its shortcomings than you do.

And they’ve usually done that homework long before they call, given that B2B buyers now spend only around 17% of the entire buying process actually talking to potential suppliers, with the rest going on independent research and quiet deliberation in rooms the seller is nowhere near. Spread that 17% across the handful of vendors on a shortlist and any single salesperson is getting a sliver of attention, late, after most of the real thinking has been done. The buyer arrives at the meeting already most of the way to a decision, formed on evidence the salesperson never supplied and can’t see.

In situations where the main sales tool is the product itself, the salesperson’s role, and value, becomes incidental. If your product or service is lackluster when compared to everyone else’s, you can no longer rely on SuperSalesperson™ to get you through. The buyer reads the same reviews you do and talks to the same peers you’d point them toward. Those days went out with The A Team.

A great product beats a great salesperson

Business has always needed to tread a fine line between Sales and Product. In the old days Sales led the way, and most of the rest of the organization was there as some kind of sales support role. Thanks to the internet that’s no longer the case, with the pendulum swinging firmly into Product’s favor thanks to the democratization of pertinent information necessary to make the purchase. Today a compelling, innovative product or service matters more than having an army of SuperSalespeople™ figuratively twisting buyers’ arms, because buyers are judging the product directly, through channels that route around the sales team and are seen to be more impartial and valued.

So what does this mean?

It means that if your business is struggling to grow (or even maintain) revenue then, all things being equal, take a long hard look at your product. How has your industry and the commercial landscape changed since its introduction? Is there new competition, better value elsewhere, or has your customer quietly found another way of solving their problem altogether? That last one is the most potentially damaging for a business, because it’s hard to see it coming. The thing that once set you apart from the competition has a habit of transforming into the thing everyone now offers as standard, so what used to be a reason to choose you slowly becomes the mere price of being considered at all. Sometimes the problem you solve so well simply stops being the problem the buyer most wants solved, and you find yourself playing a game where the rules got changed while you weren’t paying attention. Of course, if you’ve worked through all of this already and are still coming up short then, sure, give your sales team a hard time. But my bet’s that you’ll find the real problem is a result of an issue further away from the coal face.

This is rarely where businesses look first, because when revenue goes (ahem) flaccid, the easiest thing to do is reach for the explanation that points somewhere other than the product, because the product is the thing we’ve all worked hardest on and feel most fondly about, right? Sales is visible, it’s measurable this quarter rather than three quarters down the road, and a function the Board can be shown to be doing something about. What often happens is some VP gets replaced and the comp plan gets rebuilt, yet six months later the numbers are sitting roughly where they were, because the reshuffle went after some symptom that any fool could spot (and blame) rather than the underlying root cause.

This cause is sitting way upstream of the people we keep replacing. When a buyer who knows you exist keeps choosing someone else, it’s not because of your reps’ wimpy handshake. They’re performing as well as anyone could on what they’ve been handed, and what they’ve been handed has stopped being a strong enough reason to choose you. Consider that 92% of buyers now walk into the formal process with at least one vendor already in their minds, while over 40% know who they’re going to choose before any evaluation officially begins. By the time it lands on a forecast, the salesperson is just there to confirm a choice made elsewhere, not to win it.

Of course, all this focus on the importance of Product means that Product Development and Product Management, along with parallel business units like Manufacturing and Customer Support, should carry far greater accountability towards company revenue. The documentation a prospect skims at 11pm while comparing you to a rival is selling, or failing to. So is the support reply they find in a forum from two years ago, and so is the language used to describe what the business does, which a buyer reads, mostly without noticing, as a tell about whether you actually understand their problem or are merely hoping you sound like you do. All of it does commercial work before any salesperson opens their mouth. Holding the people who build and support the product more answerable for how it sells, and getting them working directly with the sales team rather than lobbing things over a wall, tends to produce a better product, tighter integration between the two, and ultimately greater revenues.

That’s not to say the sales process, and having top-drawer salespeople, matters any less than before. Sales has a critical role to play, even as that role has fundamentally changed over the past few years. The job used to be controlling what the buyer knew. The job now is closer to helping a buyer who’s already done the legwork think through a decision they’re mostly going to make on their own, which rewards treating them as a specific person with a specific problem rather than the next name on a list to be worked through. What hasn’t changed is that a poor product can no longer be artificially propped up by Sales for long, the way it could in the past. Eventually, you get found out.

If you’re looking at Sales as the primary factor in generating revenue and turning around your bottom line, then you’re probably looking in the wrong place.