Country Sales

Different departments across the business have been doing presentations to give other departments visibility of what they do. I think it’s a good idea, because as a Software Developer, I only hear the likes of Support and Deployment mentioned occasionally, but there are other departments like Sales, Marketing, Finance and sometimes it’s difficult to know where the responsibility lies with some aspects, especially when there’s teams within those departments with different responsibilities.

A recent presentation was by “Country Sales” and I still don’t know much about them.

Q Why is the team called “Country Sales”? I assume it doesn’t mean you’re all in waxed jackets, tweed flat caps and wellies.

A: “I think it’s just that we cover the whole country (we used to be North and South). We now cover England, Wales & Northern Ireland.“

The thing is, we also do business in Scotland, and islands like Isle of Man and Jersey, so not sure who covers them then.

Even more confusion arose when someone said “we have an allocated area of the country where we work closely with customers“. So that sounds like they are assigned to a region, like a county, and not a country. Big difference there.

So now we have determined that Country Sales is just a fancy, and confusing name for a Sales, let’s attempt to understand what job roles are involved.

It seemed most people had a job role of Account Director. Director sounds like some massively important job, but then there were Junior Account Directors too so I imagine it’s just a standard job with a very pretentious title.

“we work with both current and non-customers and offer a range of solutions to fulfil their needs”

Is that another pretentious statement? What’s a non-customer? Surely if they engage in a sale then they are instantly a customer?

What skills are involved in the Account Director role?

• build and maintain a rapport, and to understand roadmaps
• self confidence in the product and yourself
• active listening to understand customer needs
• wealth of knowledge of the solutions
• point of contact for queries and customer escalations

“You do not need a sales background for this role”

Account Director

Surely you do need a sales background, or you will start as a Junior. So this sounds like a pointless statement, unless you really can go in on a bigger wage without knowing how to sell?

“anyone with a role within the company can potentially sell the solutions. The majority of staff are more able than me in terms of solution knowledge”

Technical Architect for Sales

That’s going on his end of year review. Weird how you’d think it would be a skilled role and require charisma, and then he reckons anyone can do his job, and do it better than he can. It sounds like you can even become an Architect without actually knowing how to sell.

One of the questions at the end from the audience was:

Q: What are the reasons for losing business?

“I have my own suggestions, but I’ll pass this over to John. As someone who is new in the role, do you have a different viewpoint on this?”

Surely the experienced person should be able to give a detailed answer, and he never even told us what his “suggestion” was after John had given his opinion.

“Despite my haggard appearance, I am the baby of the group”

John

The new guy, John said this:

1. When the software doesn’t do what they need it to do.
2. They are currently on a different “sales framework” (whatever that means)
3. Pricing – but he made out it was if it costs us too much to deploy it to them rather than our software being overpriced to them

My suggestion: what about bugs in software, our reputation etc. Surely these aspects would cause potential customers to look elsewhere, or existing customers leave. Conversely a very positive reputation would naturally draw in customers and make sales easier.