Software Sales vs. Consulting Sales
No one asked, but here are my thoughts after 10 years of sales experience in software sales and professional/consulting services sales.
Software Sales
My tech sales career started in software sales. I can't explain how valuable the experience was to my professional growth and the amazing people I was able to work with. Despite the fun and learning, software sales was particularly challenging. Your solution does something(s) but you’re trained to make it fit the customer need and often use the "challenger" sales methodology in many cases. Software sales cycles are predictable too; from intro call to demo to free trial to here’s the business case and why you should buy. Everything bespoke to the customer challenge is on the “roadmap” and you do your best to paint the solution as a “platform”, not a piece of software.
Post-sale, you typically offload the customer to Customer Success who has little to no knowledge of who you are, what was (over)-promised, and the feedback loop from customer to new product feature is typically broken.
I’m not downing software sales, because the value can certainly be there. But as a seller, you lose flexibility, at times sincerity, and it's treated as a transaction as opposed to a relationship. You can train your sellers to be more consultative, but you can't give your rep a quota to sell steak knives and be OK with them telling customers they really just need a butter knife and someone else has better ones.
Professional/Consulting Service Sales
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Consultative selling actually has meaning. Pressure shifts significantly from the partner to the customer. Rather than showcase product, you just listen. Funny how sales coaching always simulates the 80/20 rule of listening/talking but now it actually makes sense.
For starters, you don't know if you can help them. And you don't know if they can even afford what they are asking. Your job to is to set the reality of the situation…"here is what you need, this is what it will cost, and here is where I can help and where I can’t".
Different from software sales, the sale consists of multiple conversations to gain an understanding and doesn’t limit other individual ISVs and platforms to achieve the ultimate solution. Further, it isn’t over after the contract signs for Account Executives (AE's) in this space. Most AE's in professional services organizations don’t get paid until the revenue is recognized. Bad projects don’t accrue revenue, poorly sold projects get canceled, and customer relationships are tarnished. AE's in consulting services care about their customers because it matters to their success.?
I wrote this because I thought it would be interesting for certain people:
My biased opinion is that selling services is more enjoyable (if that wasn't clear!). In another post, I'll dive deeper into what’s hard or easy about each!
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2 年Great write up Devin Cassinelli - one thing to consider is the impact of moving the opposite way of what you did. I spent the first 7 years of my career selling services around the Data Center eco system. Then I moved to the product side. To the point you made of truly listening and understanding customer problems - the transition from being forced to really understand what a customer needs in order to come up with a solution, to having a product where your goal is to have the customer realize they DO have the problem your solution solves was actually fairly smooth for me. And, I think both skills are needed to be a truly well rounded seller. And, if you pick the right product company (right Andrew Mallaband) then you can ultimately sell a product that solves a problem that a majority of customer's have and still maintain the same style you did as a services seller.
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2 年Oh the “challenger”, “miller heiman”, “sandler” The list goes on….Thanks for that insight. Well said
Vice Chairman Caylent - AWS Cloud Native Partner
2 年Nice write up Dev, I’d also say that 1) consulting sales makes you start thinking and honing skills outside of sales that are useful as a broader exec 2) selling software when you’re not a top 3 product is brutal whereas services companies can always shift their value prop to use the best technologies
Director, PMO - Professional Services at ETQ, part of Hexagon
2 年Good insight here, thanks Devin Cassinelli
Growth Engineering | Enabling Tech Leaders & Innovators Around The Globe To Achieve Exceptional Results
2 年Following on from my previous comment, as a recruiter you may want to think about how you can find candidates from the services/consulting world and help them move to software companies. Their selling style may prove to be a good fit for many software companies. There is a shortage of talented solution sellers in the industry and they would typically be able to significantly improve their compensation by making the move.