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by rpeden
1815 days ago
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It's worth noting this can vary a lot depending on target market and deal size. I've had the fortune of being in a tech role where I got to join plenty of sales calls. And I've observed that when selling large deal to large companies, selling is both a skill and a process and the difference between a good salesperson and a mediocre one is literally millions of dollars a year. If you're looking to close large deals with good clients who you aren't currently in contact with (but who really, truly have a need for what you offer), it's worth looking at selling as a discrete set of skills including prospecting, nurturing leads, getting meetings, and closing deals. Closing can be an adventure even after a prospect said they want to buy. Shepherding a deal through an enterprise onboarding and procurement process is no walk in the park. A lot of people see this kind of formal selling process as distasteful. I used to feel that way, too. But when I observed it in action it didn't seem like enterprise decision makers viewed the process negatively. They expected to be sold to and were generally receptive to it because the product met a need. So as I mentioned, it's highly dependent on what you sell and who you're selling it to, but I think a wholesale dismissal of selling as a useful skill would be a mistake. |
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I'd go so far as to say that once you hit a certain deal size, it's impossible to compete without treating sales as its own specialized field just like you would management in a large organization. The number of independent variables and people involved grows superlinearly with the amount of money involved and managing that process is its own skill, one that's extremely valuable because it can only learned in a trial by fire. As they grow bigger, they get even more specialized - a friend of mine who was the rockstar salesman at a big CRO that made 8-9 figure deals to run clinical trials for pharma had a lot of trouble moving into commercial jet sales, for example, which might see 10-11 figure deals delivered over a decade.