Being a SaaS or enterprise technology sales professional isn’t easy.

It’s hard to get meetings. It’s hard to understand the industry, business challenges, the full breadth of technology capabilities of the products or services being sold, and the competitive landscape. It’s hard developing meaningful relationships with technology and digital executives. It’s extraordinarily hard to close sales.

When a sales professional does win business, it’s even more important for them to stay involved and make sure the buyer has a good experience, gets what they paid for, and achieves business value from their investment.

Sales Professionals: The good, the bad, the ugly

CIOs and IT leaders know a good partner almost instantly.

When a sales professional meets an experienced IT leader, they have less than five minutes to make a good impression. No, not an elevator pitch – that would be a losing approach. In that first five minutes, the IT leader wants to know they can have a meaningful dialog with the sales professional, that they are knowledgeable, that they are easy to talk to, and that they are someone they can partner with and learn from.

We all know what bad and ugly looks like. Aggressive sales professionals that don’t know the industry, business, and challenges facing IT. Or ones that don’t know their product well enough to explain it beyond the canned PowerPoint.

Top Sales Professional Love Driving Digital

I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that many sales professionals found a lot of value in my book, Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology.

The book is largely written for leaders that want to run successful transformation programs. It turns out that the book is also a great primer for the sales professional that wants to better understand the world, challenges, and opportunities for IT and digital leaders.

Here’s what some tome sales executives shared with me

“One cannot ignore the speed and possibilities of an evolving digital landscape today, especially if you are a future-proofed sales professional aspiring to be super-effective. “Driving Digital” provides a well-rounded perspective and inter-correlations within and across multiple industry verticals, that sales professionals can leverage to align their offerings and value proposition accordingly. It teaches you, as a sales professional, tricks to swim (and survive) in this ocean of digital tides” – Sandeep Arora Executive Vice President & Head – Consulting and Advisory Practice Datamatics Global Services

“Today’s enterprise sellers must be value creators. This is a mantra that is being shouted from the mountain tops by trainers, bloggers, sales leaders and customers who demand more from the relationship than just a golf game or a dinner.  Businesses the world over find themselves confronted with and sometimes confounded by, the massive amount of change going on in the world of all things data. Manual processes and business models are giving way to frictionless, automated and highly scalable alternatives.

Professional salespeople are challenged more than ever to truly understand the challenges and pains and pitfalls that their customers and prospects could experience or are experiencing – in order to best understand how or IF the solution they sell can solve a key problem or set of problems.

While the book may be somewhat dry towards the middle and the end, for a “salesperson” – It is critical knowledge and context to digest in order to make yourself not only relevant, but credible. I highly encourage those who want to be credible and respected in the profession of enterprise selling, to read this book if digital transformation is touching any aspect of their customers lives.” – John Jensen Regional Vice President, Enterprise South, Alteryx, Inc.

“Business and IT leadership are facing an ongoing challenge in addressing digital transformation amidst legacy technologies while trying to introduce modern disruptive technology solutions. Just a few years ago we were selling mobile and social solutions while today’s focus is nearly entirely surrounded by Cloud, AI/ML, IoT, and the ever present issues of how to leverage blockchain all while running agile IT teams. Driving Digital is a must read for sales professionals to better understand the opportunities and challenges facing CIOs and technology leaders who are focused on driving agility, automating operations, leveraging analytics, all while changing the culture to adopt more modern technology platforms.” – Larry Rolnik, Area Vice President, Lucidworks