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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 I'm still in development, but since '99 my programming tasks have been replaced by project management, some customer-facing work (technical-ish presentations, demonstrations, training, and the like), helping our marketing people position my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.
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.
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.
Like Bill Gates. Or Darth Vader.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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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