Does sales in S&T require a quant background or programming skills?
I understand why for trading there is a big push for people with quant backgrounds and programming skills. What about sales? Sales seems to be much more reliant on social skills and emotional intelligence. Also most sales people at BBs are intelligent and can probably pick up enough knowledge to sell this stuff successfully even without a quant background or programming skills.
Don’t get me wrong it definitely won’t hurt and will raise some eyebrows in a good way. If I had to estimate how “much” it increases your chances of an offer though, I’d say at most 10% (obviously generalizing). 60% like ability, 25% work product, 10% intangibles (like coding), 5% luck.
Yes there is a very wide variation, but not really that product dependent I am working in exotics so supposedly ""complex"". Some of these sales sell structured notes like they are bananas or carpets. Apart from the payout they literally don't understand anything. They can't figure out Cash ref from Future execution and basis. If a Zbond price is 95% and their client wants 90% capital protection they can't figure out that means 95% x 90% bond. I am not making this stuff up i have countless examples. Some sales team are also very political and territorial. As soon as you have a """stupid""" boss, he hires only dumb people that he can control without getting any complaints why he gets to parade as the "boss of Region X". They know that if they weren't at that role they would be selling phones for 30% of the pay. Some sales literally have no added value whatsoever, they don't even make an effort to show that they are not copy pasting back and forth from client chat. And when they trade they ask structuring to do the termsheet because they are deemed too thick to write a simple formula.
I am not trying to just throw shit at salespeople, some of them are very good. Some of them have very high level of understanding, but they often get depressed by the intrasales politics and leave, unless they are lucky enough to get a "break" and then build their own team. And some of them are actually amazing even with very low technical ability, seeing them speaking to clients is a show in itself, it's an art, and i can see for myself that i couldn't do what this guy/girl does which is the point of having different people in different roles. But a lot of them are just drones copy pasting shit and bringing in trading/structuring whenever there is a question. Rest of the time they focus on BS office politics and backstabbing among themselves, who to cc on which email chain and so on.