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What's It Like For a Developer To Go Into Sales?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've worked for a single, very large technology company since graduating from college in '89. My degree is in Computer Science, and I've written everything from embedded machine code for big iron to applications with Smalltalk. I'm still in development, but since '99 my programming tasks have been replaced by project management, some customer-facing work (technical-ish presentations, demonstrations, training, and the like), helping our marketing people position my team's work, and other things that programmers generally don't like to do. Are you a former developer who went into sales? If so, what were your experiences like from a professional and personal perspective? What advice would you give to a developer considering a new career in sales?"
I find that I enjoy the broad, technical perspective that comes from working in the field, and I'm thinking about moving out of development and into technical sales. Moreover, I've interviewed several techies in my company who are now in sales and all tell them they love it. Several have reported that a techie can make more money in sales. However, I do have several reservations: I am an introvert and a full day of face-time can really sap my energy, many sales people I've worked with are 'sharks' (which I simply cannot be), and I don't like the idea of putting part of my salary at-risk.
In Sales, we constantly have to lie to people, be fake, and manipulative. If you can live with yourself, you should be OK.
There is constant pressure, no matter how hard you're working, to do more, make more calls, etc. If you can live with this, then you might actually enjoy sales.
But I should warn you, the sales managers that I have worked for have been some of the most evil scum I've ever met. They encourage using every tactic to con people into buying the crap we're selling, regardless of whether it is needed or not. Salespeople (including myself) are the most useless people in our economy. We can't get by without doctors, teachers, engineers, construction folks, etc, but if all the (outbound calling) salespeople in the world suddenly disappeared, the world would be a whole lot better off. No pressure calls (just to touch base, yeah right) would mean people would only buy what they needed, not what they were talked into buying.
Shakespeare was close. He should have said: "First thing we do, lets kill all the salespeople."
One of the worst pitfalls of being in sales (with the pressure of actually selling) is becoming a "Yes-man". The kind of sales person who will sell anything, regardless of the actual feasibility of the project.
If you dare to tell a customer "No" some execs might flinch, but in the long run you tend to get a reputation as a person who's honest and actually delivers.
Therefore, unless you can be confident you really can tell the customer what you won't do, don't become a salesman.
.: Max Romantschuk
My conclusion was that Sales can be fun, but ... well a salesman is fundamentally different in outlook to a techy - you're probably used to being well aware of what's wrong with a product, workarounds, hacks, and things that just plain suck
As sales, you _need_ to be focussing on what's great, why it's fantastic, and why this is exactly the thing they need in their business, beyond anything else.
My problem was/is that that's a bit too much like lying. You're telling your customer that yours is absolutely the best for them, and unless you're in a small subset of occurances, this is not the case.
Often, if it's obviously a 'bad idea' you won't get the sale, however you need to be deciding whether you can keep a straight face when you wholeheartedly recommend the product that gives you commission, over the one over there, that you use at home because it is actually better.
Some can, some can't.
Just remember, sales is far nearer to prostitution than to engineering. As a techy, you're looking for the best and most cost effective solution to their problem, out of a portfolio of options. As a salesperson you're aiming to look good, seduce your customers, and screw them for money.
You'll need to be able to run fast, after you tell developers that you've just sold their prototype to a customer.
[Insert pithy quote here]
"...project management, some customer-facing work (technical-ish presentations, demonstrations, training, and the like), helping our marketing people position my team's work, and other things that programmers generally don't like to do."
If you don't like the last two things on your list, you'd be making a big mistake getting into sales. The big question is "Are you a salesman?" That's all that's required to be in sales. I know it sounds simple but it's a very important question. Can you sell the product? Can you go out and find the customers willing to buy the product? It's a hard job and while they may be lazy at other aspects of their job, salesmen work their tails off to sell. I used to train salesmen on the more technical aspects of what my former company sold. As a general rule, salesmen can pick up what they need to know about a product to sell it faster than someone familiar with the product can pick up the sales skills needed to sell it. I'm surprised your company even offers you the opportunity to get into sales.
Face it, you just don't work that way. I was asked to go along with our sales guy to back him up. He was amazingly good at it but weak on the tech side, but no worries that is were I came in and it worked.
Only problem on the ride home I would be knackered, an early meeting would leave me useless for the rest of the day.
HR and Sales people by their nature are not introverts. They LIKE hanging out with people, a good meeting invocorates them, gets them buzzing and eager to make things happen. You will be wanting a siesta.
It is extremely hard for extroverts (the majority of people) to relate to introverts. it is NOT that we are anti-social, or don't enjoy being with people, it just tires us. Extroverts are charged up after a party, intoverts are drained. Typical HR fault when dealing with techies (often introverts) throw an early social meeting and then hope to get some work done. Good luck, all the techies will be drained, do socials ONLY on fridays at the end of the day, to the techie can recharge during the weekend.
Then there is an other aspect. Social skill, not that introverts don't have them, but ask yourselve this, do you have to remember others people birthdays, name of kids, golf score OR does that come natural to you. You don't ask about their family, you WANT to know about their family, it won't be a good day if you don't hear about it. Extroverts really care, they are not being social because they have too, they need too.
Not that introverts don't care, it is just that they don't HAVE to know. If they are told, they will remember and show concern but if you don't tell them that is fine too.
A introvert doesn't get "why did you never ask me about X, you don't care". They care but if you don't tell them they presume it is none of their business.
Sales people HAVE to show they care, that they know the customer, what he likes, what he dislikes. An introvert will find this very taxing.
I did sort of enjoy assisting the sales guy, it was intresting to see what goes on before the spec is drawn that you will have to build. But I also found it to be tiring with lots of senseless talking and not enough getting things done.
it was nice to do as a change of pace, but to do that the whole week, year in year out? Your choice offcourse but don't make the mistake of thinking that something you like doing every now and then makes a good career. You might like sex, but would you enjoy becoming a porn star?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've been a software developer or software developer manager for most of my career. There was one six month stretch, though, where because of some very strange reorganizations in the company I was working for I found myself a sales engineer in a field sales office.
The first problem was that the product I was selling, disk arrays, was so simple at the sales level that I was bored silly. You can only go over the feed and speeds on a disk array so many time before going completely batty. Second, I had no respect from the development team back at headquarters. When I installed the first unit off the assembly line at a customer and ran some benchmarks against it that came back really bad the response from HQ was "you don't know how to run benchmarks." I'd spent the previous 8 years as a supercomputer kernel developer. I knew a couple of things about benchmarking and also about what kind of performance customers were expecting and I turned out to be correct in everything (the company wound up withdrawing the product and upgrading all of the customers who had bought it to a more expensive, truly high performance system). It was very difficult to be put into a role where you can see problems and no one will listen to you or respect your knowledge. Third, salespeople are *BORING*. All they want to talk about around the office is money, leads and occasionally sports. No politics, no technology, no books, no movies, no Monty Python.
I look back on those six months as being very valuable as I learned a lot about sales from a worldclass sales team and I learned a lot about salespeople. But six months was really my limit (afterwards I returned to OS development for a few years). If you want to do it for the money and you think deals and money are exciting you'll enjoy it. Otherwise you'll be bored stiff.
You'll probably find it a bit of a disaster if you are the stereotypical developer. You'll be secretly hacking some personal project instead of making sales calls.
Like Bill Gates. Or Darth Vader.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
To be honest, at a previous company, I think both the customers and the developers would have loved to have had salesmen that actually understood the product they were selling. Given the products that were being sold, that meant you had to at least be conversant in software development, as buying the software was only step one of many that included additional development to actually experience the ROI the software was capable of delivering. Instead we had empty headed fast talking imbeciles without half a clue selling some of the most sophisticated software on the planet to customers that wound up having long discussions with the developers post sale to figure out what they needed to do to realize the promised savings, and what the additional costs were going to be.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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While I wasn't a developer, I made the move full time in 2001 to technical sales from a pure engineering/IT management roles.
The are several issues that arise from this, and they need to be broken out and analyzed separately.
1) If you are talking technical sales, rather than pure sales, those are generally two entirely different beasts. If you look at Cisco, the sales folks are true sales guys, while the technical sales engineers generally spend most of their time working with the technical groups in the company, demoing new products, working in the test labs, and doing presentations as required to higher management. So being a pre-sales engineer can be very technical and hands on, depends on the company.
2) Are you going to have to actually do "Sales"? When I made the switch, I realized that there are certain aspects of sales that I don't have the ability and/or will to do. For instance, I can't cold-call to save my life. In the pre-sales engineering roles I've had, I've made it very clear to employers that I am not the person who will find new customers. I tell them up front that given a qualified lead, I can convert a well-above average number to customers. My current position is the closest I've ever come to sales, as I am building a new practice within my company and therefore have taken over account management. However, I have several sources for leads, and I don't find new customers. I think the bottom line is to be very clear about what sort of sales role you want and make sure that you aren't signing up for something that you can't/won't be able to do.
3) Any salesperson who lies to the customer is a F@#*$-ing idiot. Period. The truth in the IT business is that your best business is repeat customers, and its a lot easier to get more business from a happy customer that it will ever be to find the 60 new prospects that will eventually convert into a few paying customers. At one job, I supported 5 sales guys, three of whom were ex-cell phone sales guys. One was a former field employee, and one was from a technical engineer/development background. For the three cell-phone guys, I had to force them to stop with the lying/exaggerating that they started out doing. It wasn't necessary. We had a great product, and we were competing in a market where our sole true competitor was a company everyone hates. Hell, I'd tell customers we could do some of what they needed and lay out where we wouldn't be a good fit and they'd still sign just because they were sick of our competition. The bottom line is that if you have a decent product, and you target someone with a need for it, lying will simply get you in trouble. I find that telling a customer the truth is a clear differentiator to everyone else, and more often than not, they come to me anyway. A corollary to this is that with many products, there is *NO* single product that does everything the customer needs/wants. Right now, one of my key products is a network management solution. Truth is, there are hundreds of products in that space, and every single one fails in some way for every customer. It might be too expensive, or lack support for a specific protocol, or require a programmer to maintain it, etc. This list goes on. By telling customers the truth you often win their respect and loyalty because most of them aren't stupid enough to actually believe the lies.
4) Being in sales can be fun. I get to take customers to ball-games, strip-clubs, casinos, expensive dinners, and happy hours. I get to travel a bit. There are definitely perks to having an expense account, and to be honest, its fun.
5) I'm an introvert too. I have a wife and kids, and when I travel, it bothers me to not be home with my kids. But generally speaking my interaction with customers is exactly the same as it was when I was an engineer and a technical manager. I spent all day on the road as an SE, going from company to company, interacting with customers. As a manager, I spent a lot of time on the phone with technical support, a
I disagree. Sales is only as you described if you choose to make it so. Granted most sales people are full of shit. For my company my number one goal is honesty first. In fact, we try to undersell our product and support a bit to be certain we exceed our customers expectations.
Sales honesty and integrity is easy. That is of course assuming you have a corporate culture to back it up. The problem is, sales people are treated like restaurant waiters. Here's a place to work, now go hustle for tips. Oh btw you get to essentially work for free for that privilege. Shit jobs motivated me to graduate college, so I do owe them a bit of gratitude.
If people want honest sales they have to make it where the time to do the groundwork isn't spent stressing over commissions. My company gives bonuses for sales but they don't work like commissions. They are spread company wide, so everyone is a part.
I am not a developer, but I am a salesman (of sorts).
My friend, don't listen to any of these guys. They obviously have an axe to grind. There are many types of "salesmen", and many types of products to sell. You wont be an SUV salesmen trying to push ripoff extended warranties, or some pimply faced chump selling cellphones from a booth in the mall.
It sounds like the products you'll be selling aren't commodities, but rather high value "business solutions" (or something) that require a lot of interaction with your customers.
You've worked for this firm for almost 20 years, and you're intimately acquainted with your products, indeed it appears you've been involved in every step of product development. What better person to help broker these deals, than you?
And why would you have to lie or "sell your soul"? As a techie you'll be leveling with your customers and helping them figure out how to interface with your product. Potential stumbling block? Be honest and tell them, then figure out a workaround together. No way to make it work and it's a deal breaker? Then "have a nice day and thank you for your time".
There is such a thing as karma. Take the high road, and it will pay you back in time. The mark of an amature is feeling you have to lie, cheat and steal to get ahead. That's the creed of jealous losers everywhere.
In my business (insurance) they say you should either add value to the transaction, or get out of the way. The poor or unethical salesman only removes value: they lie about product shortcomings, they don't listen to their customer's needs, they sell them the wrong thing, etc. But a person with your background has a lot of value to add for all parties involved.
Finally, this sounds like a tremendous opportunity for professional growth. Some sales skills are just the thing to really boost your career, and potentially push you in new directions. C'mon guys, whatever happened to expanding your comfort zones?
Nobody gets anywhere without eventually learning how to sell.