The Belief
There's a belief that circulates among people who hire salespeople for a living- a great salesperson can sell anything.
I understand why the belief persists. It flatters the person saying it, a little, because it implies that sales is a pure skill, transferable, independent of context, and that a good enough hiring manager can spot it regardless of what the person has actually sold before. I've heard two hiring managers, in two very different narrow businesses, describe the exact same failure this belief produces. They both just described watching someone talented fail, slowly, painfully almost not noticeable at first then suddenly undeniable
The Software Company
The first ran a small B2B software company built for a specific, unglamorous slice of a specific industry — the kind of product where the buyer has to already understand a set of operational problems most outsiders have never had reason to think about. He'd hired a rep who was, by every ordinary measure, excellent. Good on calls, quick on his feet, closed deals in his previous role at a rate the founder envied out loud. Six months in, the pipeline was thin and getting thinner, and the founder couldn't figure out why, because the rep was doing everything right. All the activities were done daily, weekly. What he wasn't doing was talking to the right people. Not because he lacked the skill to find them, but because he didn't have the years of adjacent conversations that tell you which conference hallway to stand in, which trade association mailing list actually gets read, which former colleague of a prospect is worth a warm introduction and which isn't. That kind of knowledge that takes years in an industry to build. Not that he could not build it. He just had not… yet.
The Creative Agency
The second ran a small creative and agency business, a category where the buying decision runs almost entirely on taste and reputation rather than anything you could put in a deck. She'd made a similar hire, someone with a strong generalist sales background, articulate, well-liked in the room. He kept losing deals at the exact same point — the moment a prospect wanted to talk shop, wanted to see that the person selling the work actually understood the work, could speak about it the way someone inside the field speaks about it, with the specific vocabulary and specific reference points that signal you belong. He couldn't fake that fluency convincingly enough, and prospects in that world are unusually good at detecting when it's faked, because detecting exactly that is most of what they do professionally.
What Doesn't Transfer
In both conversations the founder did not blame the person they'd hired. They talked instead about the two things that don't transfer even when raw sales ability does: the professional network, built over years, that tells you who to call and how to get past the first no; and the fluency in a specific world's own language, which can't really be taught in an onboarding week because it wasn't learned that way by anyone else either.
I don't think either of them concluded that raw sales skill doesn't matter. It clearly does — it's just not sufficient on its own, and the gap it leaves behind is exactly the part that's hardest to see from the outside during an interview, when everything sounds fluent and everyone sounds capable. It only becomes visible later,slowly at first and then all of a sudden.