The Cranky Sales Engineer has been reading Paco’s musings on moving into sales with some interest. Having been laid off four times, and having made the transition between marketing and sales and back and back again, and having been a manager of sales engineers, he offers the following suggestions:
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers—The Cranky Sales Engineer is not interested in generic tasks that stink of pointless meetings. The Cranky Sales Engineer is impressed by numbers. A resume entry that says, “Led a cross-functional team responsible for…” is headed for the trash. A resume that says, “Grew product from $5M to $15M in revenue in 5-years” will get an interview.
Customers, Customers, Customers—The field is not interested in your ability to run a meeting or set a direction. The field is interested in your ability to please a customer. The Cranky Sales Engineer and his cohorts view customer satisfaction as the most important thing in the world. Specific entries on satisfying specific customers are key. “Conducted a customer satisfaction survey” is bad. “Increased customer satisfaction from 50% to 90% at Big-Company through a user council meeting” is good.
Sales, Sales, Sales—The Cranky Sales Engineer has reservations about misrepresenting one’s title on a resume. In the CSE’s organization, such a deception will get the applicant a quick visit to the exit. That said, highlighting one’s sales experience in explicit terms is good. If you were part of a $10M deal, say, “Worked with field to drive closure of a $10M deal” or better yet, “Instrumental in closing $10M deal at Big-Company” or better yet, “Instrumental in driving $12M in business in 2008.”
The Cranky Sales Engineer’s parting advice: “Numbers talk, bullshit walks.” Find out the real numbers behind the value you created. If you don’t have any real numbers this time, make sure you have them for the next time.
{ 6 comments }
“Show me the money!!!” That’s all that counts in this economy. But even with stellar performance numbers, getting past the morass of hiring freezes is near impossible. I’ve gotten to the offer stage with three major software vendors and been blocked by Mr. Freeze.
For me, as a hiring manager, I would be skeptical of any numerical claims. Exactly how much influence did they have? How is the revenue attributable to their contribution? How did they measure customer satisfaction? What was the contribution? Seems to me this adds more questions than answers. Are you really going to ignore good candidates because they didn’t quote bogus numbers?
Good rules. With numerical claims, never say responsibility limited to $XX M. No. With inflation, there must always be an upside. Say managed $XX M. Don’t tell me that another dollar would have you in the mental ward, limited?
BillG – Your skepticism sounds like it’ll lead to an interview just so you can ask the candidate for more details. If that’s the case, then the #’s did their job.
I violently agree with the CSE on this one. (I’m just waiting for the chance to be violently neutral on something.) Besides deal sizes, I’ve found it effective to name-drop big customers. And when I worked for a big internet advertising platform, I made sure I kept track of numbers so I can say things like “the XYZ module I delivered handled 1.2M unique visitors in 2006″.
BTW – For those of you who are still employed, consider whether you’ve sufficiently instrumented your software/services. E.g. can you tell how many people are using them and how often? Could you? For shrink-wrap commercial software, this isn’t practical for privacy reasons. But for internal systems (like a project to implement ERP suites or custom apps) and for hosted services, you sure as hell had better have some instrumentation, and you’d better be collecting those numbers on a regular basis. Don’t wait until after you’re kicked out the door – it’s too late to find out then :D
BTW – Collecting stats on individual users, even for internal corporate software, can violate laws. Generally not a big deal in the US, but I know Germany has laws that explicitly prohibit monitoring individual employee productivity in certain ways.
What if you bullshit the numbers? Not like anyone can really diligence them. Kind of like MBA’s in the ’90’s – no one really checked to see if you really got one. “Hell yeah I’m Harvard ‘93 – Go Cardinal!”
If a candidate can _prove_ the numbers he/she is quoting, you’ve got a good chance that this is someone to take a close look at. Realize that appearance, empathy and buzzwords are the stock-in-trade of any salesperson (or conman) and come with no guarantee of good performance in the job.
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