Sales Experiences

For 14+ years Dan worked in corporate sales support or field sales and primarily or exclusively with large customers, most of them being Fortune 100 and Fortune 50 clients.

After moving into a field sales role as an account presales engineer, Dan covered the engineering division and some of the manufacturing division for a Fortune 100 global semiconductor account. After a few years he swapped that responsibility with another team member and took primary responsibility for technical sales on a Fortune 100 apparel sector acount with global operations.

During his nearly ten years of direct selling in the field sales organization, Dan was in a role where he owned the technical side of selling. He honed and refined his interpersonal skills and leadership skills while using his foundation of technical skills in a challenging quota-carrying role. Among other things not mentioned here, he accomplished the following in support of both his client and his company:

- built and maintained client relationships
- worked with a diverse array of specialty sales teams to find and present solutions
- collaborated with teams from sister companies and product partners
- worked with resellers when client chose to use resellers
- assessed client needs and worked to find solutions within budget
- proposed solutions
- worked directly with implementation leaders to ensure success solutions deployed
- assessed business and political climate within account in conjunction with his account rep
- in major incidences observed or stepped directly into client escalations
- advocated on behalf of clients and client needs.

Before moving into a field sales role, he had many varied sales-focused responsibilities on the corporate product side, including:

- direct support (as a lisason) of assigned customer accounts for a product, including customers in aerospace, defense, finance, energy, semiconductor, education, government, and other verticals
- managing technical messaging and content for multiple products at the annual company customer conference
- driving feature scoping and product enhancement needs of clients
- assisting field technical sales teams with sales, and working with corporate to meet their collateral needs
- producing technical collateral aimed at helping clients more fully utilize the products

Dan's approach to client relationships is to work to build deep relationships within the client organization, up and down the ladder. His relational focus was from the Senior Director to the Engineer, and his selling responsibility was to support sales relationships at all levels. Most deals did not require selling higher than VP or Senior VP, and many were accomplished at the Senior Director level and below.

Entertaining the client was one of Dan's responsibilities. If you're thinking of asking him to join for an entertaining role, know that he is very good with people but he will not take a role where he is expected to drink. Understanding that alcohol is something many people consume without issue and in moderation, Dan has no problem being around it when people consume in moderation and stay in control of themselves... but he does not drink any longer and is not a good fit for a role that requires a "drinker".

While Dan's sales experience largely (not exclusively) pertains to very large accounts, people are still people and his relational skills can apply to SMB accounts as well. At the end of the day it is the people Dan prefers to focus on: the people he serves as clients, and the people he serves on his team. 

Dan's approach to selling has a few principles:

- think about the people first - their needs, families, career interests, etc
- then think about the needs and objectives of the client and the vendor
- then identify and pitch solutions to real problems that support real business objectives
- focus on solutions that help make the lives of clients easier and the operations of the clients simpler
- never pitch something as more than you know it to be (i.e., don't lie!)
- sell for the long-term success of both parties... avoid short-term focus

Selling in today's technology and business world is more complex than ever. Today clients can get more information on their own and likely have done research before they talk to you. Mess-ups can tarnish reputations faster than ever before.  Relational focus is as imperative as technical acumen, because it is the relational focus that gives insight into the true needs of the client business and the clients as people. Dan is someone who demonstrates an impressive balance between both relational skills and technical acumen.

In his experience, Dan has found that most deals in large companies take time to develop and happen by selling at multiple levels to multiple people. It's the key influencers of those decisions who need to be identified and assured of what they are buying. 

Competition is real, and companies who fail to focus on client relationships may win one-off deals based on curiosity, and they may experience some long-term business if they uniquely have a solution that is uncontested in the marketplace. Eventually, though, the weaknesses of the solution (and every solution or product has them) will manifest and the business will slip to competitors as they become available.

Bottom line: selling over the long-term requires both a good (not perfect) product / solution and deep relatioinships between vendor and client.

Over the years Dan has encountered challenges selling. Here are insights from his experience.

Fixing mess-ups. Not one single person is perfect and that includes Dan. There have been a few times where Dan missed something or wasn't aware of something that resulted in the need to "make it right" later.

Scoping
Proper scoping in very large, complex environments can be challenging. One example is not having all the details of what the client expects/wants, and not being aware that some of the details are missing... In one of the biggest single deals Dan ever participated in, Dan experienced the pain of being unaware that the security and network teams were at odds with one another in how they wanted to implement... truly at odds to the point of each wanting to utilize different technologies. This was not just Dan's "miss", it was missed or ignored by the partner driving the deal and by many people at his client as well. Yet it was very costly in terms of customer impressions for the solution, as the argument between the two teams within the client drastically slowed implementation. Ultimately, the timeline promised by the client to their internal stakeholders could not be achieved. It wasn't a problem with the technology per se - it was infighting within the client that might have been prevented if the differences had been known and a decision had been ironed out prior to the client publishing timelines.

Entrenched or Wiley Competition
Another example of a challenge is having competitors who use established presence, profits, or even potentially improper means to gain or keep business. This is why it can take years to displace a deeply established vendor. One of the last deals Dan and his team worked on (for roughly two+) years ended in a competitor seemingly buying the business by shifting margin from one product to subsidize another. That's a difficult thing to prevent or overcome unless you want to "buy" the business with little or no profit or even a loss, which Dan's team did not believe was right to do. His team didn't give up after that, of course, but it was a disappointment felt by the team when they thought they had a very good chance of winning new business.

Escalations
Client escalations are a huge challenge. When you're a liaison between the client and your company, sometimes it requires getting involved with major support (or even "political") escalations. That can be difficult. That can mean staying up all night on the phone with the client unexpectedly. That can mean people calling you and texting you often trying to get a read on the situation. That can mean facing the prospect that a less-than-satisfactory resolution could impact business with the client, yet the resolution is beyond your control. As the point technical liaison within sales to his clients, Dan had his share of these experiences. He is grateful that most often the root cause of issues was not a problem with things he had sold but often fell either in the client's domain or in other technology products and software. In such situations there is a management of expectations on both the client's side and the internal side that is required, and sometimes the internal side of the incident requires a "push" to get things rolling in the correct way.

Building Relational Equity
Building relational equity takes time, effort, and persistence. People are busy. People are focused on getting their job done and getting home to their families. People can be focused on growing their careers. People can be focused on moving up the chain. People can be focused on minimizing the amount of work they actually have to do. People can be focused on covering their mistakes. People have preferences opinions that influence who they like and who they don't. Building relational equity is difficult, and honestly requires grace and favor. Dan once covered a mid-sized banking client who was very difficult to build relationships with. Dan overall has had success in befriending people because his approach is to love them not to use them, but there were still people who were simply not interested in investing the time in relationship for whatever reason. Especially when trying to penetrate a new account (or a new part of a client's organization) by building relational equity, this part of the job can be very difficult and slow, although Dan also experienced times where it was by grace accelerated and even seemed easy.

One's Own Team / Organization
On a different note, the challenge of working within your own team or organization can at times be difficult. Dan had to manage teams - teams who did not directly report to him. Dan owned the solution and selling it to the client, and the details of each component of the solution were typically looked after by dedicated sales teams for those components. Often the teams were awesome... they were responsive and supportive and did overall a great job. They often worked well together. Yet there were a few instances where the teams provided - frankly - substandard service for Dan's account and Dan was left to try to pick up the slack until a remedy was identified. There also were times where bureaucracy or competing interests internally presented obstacles to Dan's customer advocacy within his own organization.

While there are many other examples of challenges he could tell you about, this gives you an idea of some of the biggest and most common. It hopefully demonstrates to you that Dan has been through stuff, so he's matured to be able to handle the reality that stuff happens and you simply have to persist while giving it your best.

Dan loves to have fun, and sales can be fun!

One of his biggest joys in his sales role was to do things with clients and team members... whether going to lunch, enjoying a basketball game, hiking, driving cars really fast around a track (legally, of course), or even going to a "hot sauce festival" (yes, this really happened and Dan likes it hot!)

Remove the people from sales and there's no fun in it. For Dan, sales is about people. He loves people, and the joy of a sales role is the ability to connect with, know, and honor people.