IT Sales Teams Are the Innovation Warriors of Our Time...

Working at Delphix here in the heart of Silicon Valley I’ve been learning a lot about enterprise software markets and I’m astounded at how many people are needed to sell innovative software to large enterprises. And how long it can take.

I have a new respect for enterprise IT sales teams and all their pre-sales and post-sales support teams.

It seems that without the patience and dogged diligence of all these people nothing innovative would ever get into these large corporations. They have an astounding number of barriers to adopting anything new. Yet these big businesses have the most to win because they can scale productivity gains across their global platforms.

Getting through the many corporate barriers to innovation is a feat that Ulysses might flinch at and choose to wrestle with a Hydra instead. But the sales teams get on with it and somehow do it.

A sale is not the end...

Even when the sale is done there's still more to be done. That's when customer education and customer success teams get to work to make sure that the user has installed the software right, and is able to get the best out of it. It must not sit unused — it must show its value as quickly as possible.

Selling education...

Pre-sale and post-sale there is a tremendous amount of education that these teams must do before they can sell something that's truly innovative, that doesn't have a handy label and a budget assigned to it.

Sales teams are often the first to start the education of IT and business execs about what is possible with new IT technologies. A roster of stellar reference customers is essential. IT is changing fast, IT matters once more.