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

Selling is a critical skill for those in professional services careers—more so with advancing career levels. Yet, most consultants are uncomfortable in selling situations and few consulting firms provide sales training that helps build this skill. Certain consultants identify themselves as effective salespeople over the course of a career, and they are the ones who seem to go the farthest.

Because of the differences between selling products and services, consultants must not only sell well, but also manage the selling process in a way that minimizes risk and enables them to delight their clients with outstanding results.

How I Joined a World-Class Software Sales Organization

The first twelve years of my consulting career were typical according to a certain path. I spent five years with a global systems integrator, and once I had accumulated enough depth in a certain subject area I left to join an emerging startup in that area. I performed well, and two years later I held the Managing Director position for that company, with P&L responsibility for its $32 million annual operation.

This was a company full of young energetic consultants with more ambition than experience operating consulting firms. We had no considerable sales experience or training as a group, to be sure. But, it was the "roaring 90s," and we all enjoyed an environment that forgave inexperience in large order. It went well for a long time.
And then it didn't. In 2006, after a series of events both unforeseen and unfortunate, I found myself contemplating career options.

I thought about joining another large consulting firm, which would have felt like a defeat after I had run a company for years. I considered founding another startup, but I couldn't afford to. In the end, I appraised the strong and weak points in my skillset and decided to play my next move towards a weakness rather than a strength. I decided it was time that I learned how to properly, effectively, and aggressively, sell.

Because of my experience working within a certain client industry, I was able to land a job with one of the largest software companies in the world. I was not initially a salesperson, but revenues were growing and so was the sales team. Within a year I held a Sales Vice President position, responsible for a software sales team covering a large part of the United States. I spent more than three years in this role, where my contribution, compensation, and value to the company were all solely determined by one simple, incontrovertible metric: revenue.

Three Things I Learned As a Software Salesperson

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.

2. A Successful Sales Career Is Built On Process and Discipline
I had a certain expectation about the lifestyle of a salesperson. Flexible hours, a sense of independence, and a commitment to work "smart" but not always "hard" were all part of the mythos.

None of the successful salespeople on my team worked that way. These people always had something happening. If they weren't working directly with a client to close a transaction, they may have been "whitespacing" (identifying products not yet sold to a customer) their territory.

If they weren't doing that, they may have been arranging a customer education event to build interest for future business. If they weren't doing that, they may have been cold calling new customers in their territory. And if they weren't doing any of those things, we made sure they had plenty of administrative work to fill the rest of their time.
Successful sales professionals maintain a cadence of dozens of activities, ranging from urgent to mid-term to long-term, any of which, left unattended, degrades their revenue performance. Salespeople that understand their cadence and maintain it with discipline are among the top earners in any profession in the world.

3. Being Smart Doesn't Make You a Good Salesperson
Successful salespeople are smart in a completely different way than successful consultants are. When I meet a consulting professional who has experienced sustained success, I often observe similar characteristics. They:

• Are impressive people who exude credibility and confidence.
• Learn quickly, and can become experts in new areas overnight.
• Operate well as part of a team, and inspire each other to perform.

Successful software salespeople aren't like that at all. In fact, most of them know relatively little about the software they sell. They are slaves to their habits, don't adapt well to changes in their environment, and generally prefer to work alone.

They are smart in different ways. They:

• Immediately sense when a story is breaking down, like detectives. They spot risk in their sales processes immediately and focus all their energy on removing that risk.
• Are adept at eliminating non-useful information from their desks, their minds, and their jobs. Good salespeople know what matters, focus on that, and ignore everything else.
• Understand politics intimately and can size up a customer's influence level in minutes.

Integrating Sales into Consulting

I've returned to consulting after five years in the software world, having replaced a thin spot in my skillset with a competitive advantage. What I'm especially interested in now is modeling the skills, processes, and disciplines I learned as a sales VP in a way that best serves a consulting career.

Success in software sales can't directly translate into success in services sales; there are fundamental differences. First, in services, we sell with opportunity cost—we must be careful not to commit a consulting team to an engagement less profitable or otherwise beneficial to our firm than one that may come along shortly thereafter.

Second, as consultants, our work is just beginning when we make the sale—then we have to deliver against whatever we sold.

Third, as consultants our knowledge is our product, and the cumulative "product" of any consulting organization is always evolving and requires careful development to remain relevant and competitive.

On the other hand, I have a different perspective on understanding client process, maintaining a proper selling cadence, and developing "selling intelligence" in addition to "consulting intelligence"—all of which are crucial to effective selling, and none of which I would have developed had I not written a few chapters of my career in the software sales field.

In short, I am no longer only a professional and not only a salesperson either. Now I am a Selling Professional.

Will Greer is a business leader, author and public speaker based in Denver. He is the Managing Principal of Antero Peak Innovations, an advisory firm providing strategy for analytics, business intelligence and mobility technologies. Hi blog, at www.thesellingprofessional.com, provides sales coaching to professionals whose knowlege is their product. He can be reached at will.greer@anteropeak.com .