While doing sales for companies, what do you feel the most challenges?
I have done sales activities for years and a sales person will be the center of 3 important stakeholders: customers, your direct manager / boss, development team. These are my memories that I felt bad while experiencing sales activities with those stakeholders:
- Customers:
- I was once flying to Singapore and before flying there, I had a hope to close the deal of more than 80%. While meeting the purchaser, she had bad experience when she visited HCMC years ago as she lost her wallet. While I was introducing that I am from Danang, Vietnam. She said back "but you are from Vietnam!". The meeting ended up with no-chance-to make a deal with them. I felt very bad and disappointed after the meeting.
- During steering committee meeting, the customer started complaining this and that; while going back to the office; the other team members would prefer to keep their design ideas as they are experts... yes, was challenging.
- Direct manager / boss:
- We had a different / specific business sector. It is not always easy to find customers fitting with our group business strategy. It does not matter of what did I try with my effort to bring 'foods' to the company; the boss was telling this when he had a feeling that this is not aligning with the group business: "hum, we are going to eat sh*t, then?". I replied back "if we dont have this works for the team to get occupied, will we have sh*t to eat?"
- It is always not enough... every year, we had a sales (revenues) target. I always hoped to reach up 80% as I needed to pay also attentions in house. It was not easy to reach to 100% when your target of engineering services is more than 1 mil USD.
- Development team:
- Whatever effort you put in bringing the sales, you can easily hear the feedback from the team "this project is not interesting", "this project technology is not nice".
a sales person needs support, respects and also encouragement.