IB = Salesman?

IB seems to be a dream job for half of this community, but at the end, isn't quite depressing to think that you've put all your effort just to become a salesman? And on a more senior tone you're skills aren't impressive, your salary is mainly a consequence of the economies of scale.

Not trying to trigger, those things are often pointed by outsiders and I wanted to hear somethings positive about that, an opposite perspective.

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Most roles eventually lead to dealmaker/salesman. I worked in management consulting and the people making 7 figures were the ones getting billions in signings. When you get very senior, relationships with clients becomes key.

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Yeah, it's about making deals. Matt Levine put it this way:

"Investment banking is a business of building long-term relationships. Your job, as an investment banker, is to become close to the people who possess giant piles of money, in the hopes that one day they will do giant deals with their giant piles of money and give you some of it. If you are at the weekly meeting of an investment-banking group and everyone is going around the room talking about what they did last week, and someone says “I did a billion-dollar merger and earned an $8 million fee for the bank,” and you say “I played Settlers of Catan with Mark Zuckerberg,” you win, because the expected value of proximity to a giant pile of money is so much higher than the value of an actual fee from a normal-sized pile of money."

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/matt-levines-money-stuff-bank…

 
neptr

IB seems to be a dream job for half of this community, but at the end, isn't quite depressing to think that you've put all your effort just to become a salesman? And on a more senior tone you're skills aren't impressive, your salary is mainly a consequence of the economies of scale.

Not trying to trigger, those things are often pointed by outsiders and I wanted to hear somethings positive about that, an opposite perspective.

If you are in investment banking, you are a middleman.  All middlemen are salesmen.  You aren't creating a product or offering an expertise, you're just linking the people with those things to the people who want to pay for them, and taking a cut.

 

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