Everyone is in Sales

I received my undergraduate degree in computer science and spent the first 5 years or so of my career as a coder and a technologist. But I fell in love with the idea that technologies don’t succeed on their own merits; they need powerful applications and simple use cases on top of them to truly catch on. And because of that I went to business school to learn about marketing, product delivery, and business. My goal was to start my own company after graduation.

Graduation came quickly and wouldn’t you know, the year 2002 was an awful year to start a tech company. So I found some people I’d worked with previously (relationships are once again important!) and was offered a job as a Sales Engineer.

In fact I was quite apprehensive about moving into “Sales.” I remember quite clearly finding it almost impossible to think about that term without “Slimy Used Car” in front of it (no offense to all the honest, hardworking automotive salespeople out there). The point is, I had a hard time seeing myself in the role of a salesperson.

It was at this point that I was fortunate enough to engage in a transformative discussion with an alumnus I knew. He said “Brian, don’t you realize that you are already in sales? You are selling every day. On your team projects… in your various activities… you are selling your ideas and yourself and that is why people want to work with you.”

As the years have gone by I’ve often thought about this point of view. As a marketing director I had to sell my ideas to the market, sell my tools to the sales teams, and sell my budgets and plans to my managers. As a product manager I had to sell compromises to diverse functional groups, and I sold my vision of the future to the entire production team. As a father I’m always selling my kids on why now is a better time to go to bed than later, or why dinner should come before dessert.

How do you define Sales? Please share your comments below: