This was a challenging and instructive career chapter. Everyone should carry a quota at some point in their career. The experience provided me with a totally new set of valuable skills. Here are a few things I learned:

1. Left To Their Own Devices, Nobody Would Ever Buy Anything
The world doesn't appreciate the things a salesperson must do to close a deal. Throughout a lengthy sales process for a complex product like enterprise software, the salesperson serves in all of the following capacities at various points:

Providing information to the customer, so that they may come to a confident decision to make the software purchase.
Building consensus among the various constituencies within the customer's organization that must buy in to the purchase before anyone can pull the trigger.
Exploring, identifying, understanding, and following the customer's necessary process to complete a substantial purchase. This usually includes informal approvals, board meetings, paperwork, procurement policies, signatures, and many other small steps. If something goes wrong in any one step, the timing of the entire transaction faces risk.
Negotiating pricing and terms with the customer.
Arranging approval for the deal inside of the salesperson's own company. This part surprised me the most, and the amount of effort the software companies spend on it would shock you. Since no two software deals contain exactly the same products, nor use exactly the same pricing, each and every sales transaction has to pass multiple levels of scrutiny—sales management, legal, revenue accounting, and more—before the software company will agree to sell its own software.

There is so much to be done in the process of completing a large software purchase transaction, and one single person – the software salesperson – plays quarterback not only for the software company, but also for the customer, holding accountability to get it all done.

Lessons of a Software Salesperson: Why Selling is a Critical Consulting Skill

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