I have said for years that the greatest salesperson is not the CEO. I have never expanded on it until now.
The common version of this idea goes like this: the CEO is the ultimate salesperson because they are always the smartest person in the room, always two steps ahead, always persuading with precision. That is not really what people mean, though. What they mean is the CEO is impressive, and impressive maps to salesperson in their heads. That is not a definition. That is an association.
What the CEO actually sells
The CEO is the right salesperson, but for the right reasons. A company is always selling an idea. That is the actual product, at every level. The CEO sells that idea to employees to get buy-in, to the management team to get alignment, to investors to get capital, to friends and family and the market to get belief. They are constantly selling the company — not the product, the company — across multiple fronts simultaneously. That is the job. It is what a salesperson does with greater leverage and a wider stage.
But even with that framing, I still think the greatest salesperson is the politician.
What a salesperson actually is
To see why, you have to first agree on what a salesperson actually is. Strip away the transaction, the quota, the product. At the core, a salesperson is a spokesperson. They are the representative of something — a team, a company, an idea, a country. Their job is to speak on behalf of an entity and move an agenda forward. Whether there is an immediate transaction at the end of the pitch or the outcome is years away, there is always an outcome. There is always something this activity is supposed to push forward.
With that definition, the question becomes: who is doing this at the largest stage, with the highest consequence, while simultaneously working to distance themselves from every association that word carries?
The politician is a salesperson for a country — operating at maximum consequence, on a permanent stage, while making it look like they are not selling anything at all.
The contradiction worth studying
Most people would never describe Obama as a salesperson. The thought feels contradictory, maybe even reductive. But if we accept that spokesperson is the true definition — that the job is to represent an entity, move an agenda, and generate buy-in across many fronts at once — then that is exactly what he was. And the fact that it feels wrong to say it is precisely what makes it worth studying.
Because the politician has figured out something that most salespeople never do: how to carry out the full sales function while being completely disassociated from the label. They do not feel like they are selling anything. The people they are selling to do not feel sold to. The transaction is real, the agenda is real, the persuasion is real — and none of it registers as sales.
That is the thing to understand. Not to philosophize about politics, but to ask: what is in place that makes the contradiction possible? What positioning, what framing, what surface creates that effect? And how much of it can be brought into how we sell, how we market, how we show up as representatives of what we are building?
The answer to that question opens a lot of doors.