> I don't want to talk to salespeople, only product designers, developers, executives, and support staff. They are the people who make the stuff
Designers and devs and makers too busy doing their jobs to bother with your arcane requirements and need to do an 'apples-to-apples' comparison on every bid, respond to hundred-page RFPs in nitnoid detail, buy you drinks so they can suss out why you don't actually know your own requirements, navigate your own effed up procurement process, your politics, your internal power struggles, and your primadonna self-belief that you are special.
Buyers are in the power position for sure; you write the checks!
But just know that there's a whole layer of people out there who end up in sales who have to clench their teeth and endure the bullshit of dozens of companies in their portfolio – in the same way you might feel like you have to endure theirs.
Be a qualified lead. Show you have your shit together, and then yeah we can start bringing sales engineers and devs and designers into the conversation so you're not wasting their time.
If you want an easy procurement process and no regrets, follow best practices: come to the table with your internal and external research done, with a clear list of requirements, an executive sponsor with actual decision-making power. Understand that if you change your requirements midstream the budget will change. Pad your budget so I don't have to pad my estimate.
Sales guys can be douchey for sure, but that doesn't mean they're trying to scam you. Their incentives are more closely aligned with yours than anyone else's.
I work as an application engineer in the semiconductor industry; basically tech support for engineers. I get customers from "We're going to build a product" to "Design is finished and we're ready to sell our system". As such, I work daily with the field team who are out there winning business. I can say without a doubt that whatever a buyer's perception of their sales rep, that person is the best internal advocate they're ever going to get.
The salesperson has a vested interest in getting the customer everything they need to win business so they get their commission. A good one is an utter pain in the ass internally because servicing them and the customer is quite often at the expense of everything else. 1:1 sales tactics don't scale unless the customer is huge. It's a classic 80:20 rule - 20% of customers normally drive 80% of revenue, so it's only sensible to focus on certain customers and ignore others - but obviously that only makes sense in a vacuum where businesses don't rise and fall, and suppliers alongside them, so you need to toe the value threshold when it comes to exposing customers to engineering - which is where a good salesperson is gold.
Product designers, developers, executives, and support staff - all of them have better things to do than service a single customer most of the time. Building features, marketing, hiring staff, documentation, validation, and making new products. All these things are 1:N activities. If they're sucked up talking to one customer, they're not doing 1:N. It quite often feels like the salesperson works for the customer, not us, because it's clear to everyone that the demands are hurting the product in the long run by sapping everyone's time doing servicing when the opportunity:cost ratio isn't there.
To your point, it feels great when a customer follows the expected flow. Planning/marketing/engineering/executives can be brought in as and when needed, rather than when they're demanded of. Almost all customers demand the time and attention of everyone but the sales team, but I've often found that the ones who provide all the info and jump through all the hoops get what they want much faster.
I was going to write a response and you wrote it all. Especially in SAAS companies, a "strong" sales team in my experience was an hidden fast-track to becoming an integrations company.
At the point where you need a sales team to sell the product, ie your product is expensive, and complicated enough, then you had better integrate with everything.
Apart from anything else, commoditizing your complement is good business strategy.
Customers are not looking g
For silo systems. They're looking for things that play nice with sll the systems they currently have.
I agree to some degree, it’s a question of extent. If you sell a very specific feature that no one else will use for a 20K annual revenue customer, then it’s not obvious at all it’s beneficial to the company at large. Personally I’ve seen too many cases here where individual sales people still campaign for the sale internally, supposedly for the commission.
Can vouch that sales team is an immense advocate for customer and frequently pain in the kiester for people who are trying to do stuff.
Mind you, you absolutely Can get into a negative loop - needy customer with unrealistic expectations who over pressures the sales person, who then over pressures the pm, who then over pressures the team and you end up with unfeasible expectations and conittments. But sanity needs to prevail everywhere, it cannot be focused on the "good kind of salesperson"
(I will never ever ever be a sales person; and I share most people's frustrations, but I've also seen what the good ones do for the customer and teams so am slowly starting to understand both the value and necessity :-/)
Absolutely. I work with salespeople I despise; ones who actively hamper the company's success because of their demands in pursuit of commission. Trying to explain to them that you're working on a problem faced by a 100M/yr account so don't have time to service their 1M/yr customer doesn't fly, so they jump over everyone's head shouting so loudly that a director or executive tells you to reprioritise to get them off their back. 1:N activities get sidelined, the high revenue but quiet customers get ignored and upset, but sales reach their design-win targets. It's incredibly frustrating and I think if they continue that behaviour despite warnings then they're not a team player and should be replaced.
Equally though, the old phrase "we all work for sales" always rings as true now as it ever did. The best engineer with the best product will make diddly squat if they can't sell the product. The best salesperson could sell rocks off the roadside if they're good enough - the product is often irrelevant. Personally, I wish more engineers went into sales because the best salespeople have deep product knowledge and are way more empathetic because we've gone through trials and tribulations.
> come to the table with your internal and external research done, with a clear list of requirements, an executive sponsor with actual decision-making power
Putting an executive on the phone is not going to happen that early. A lot of vendors don't seem to accommodate research starting with a demo set up by one engineer on a small team in the org who might have a corporate credit card for the search.
Designers and devs and makers too busy doing their jobs to bother with your arcane requirements and need to do an 'apples-to-apples' comparison on every bid, respond to hundred-page RFPs in nitnoid detail, buy you drinks so they can suss out why you don't actually know your own requirements, navigate your own effed up procurement process, your politics, your internal power struggles, and your primadonna self-belief that you are special.
Buyers are in the power position for sure; you write the checks!
But just know that there's a whole layer of people out there who end up in sales who have to clench their teeth and endure the bullshit of dozens of companies in their portfolio – in the same way you might feel like you have to endure theirs.
Be a qualified lead. Show you have your shit together, and then yeah we can start bringing sales engineers and devs and designers into the conversation so you're not wasting their time.
If you want an easy procurement process and no regrets, follow best practices: come to the table with your internal and external research done, with a clear list of requirements, an executive sponsor with actual decision-making power. Understand that if you change your requirements midstream the budget will change. Pad your budget so I don't have to pad my estimate.
Sales guys can be douchey for sure, but that doesn't mean they're trying to scam you. Their incentives are more closely aligned with yours than anyone else's.