Flibbertigibbet

Larval Stages of Demonic Apotheosis

I have an announcement that may cause me to immediately lose the better part of my readership.

I am becoming a sales person.

I know. I started in business as an entry-level production simple code monkey. I built websites. Then I quickly became a manager of my team and then the entire development staff. I organized and established the inital iterations of what is now our QA department and processes. I started the project that enabled my company to bill for support requests and gain an additional half million in revenue a year. And then I my fatal error: I established product-specific sales engineering.

These days I don't manage people or write code or even troubleshoot technical issues. I use all of what I've learned for my nefarious purpose.

In the past, I've had a rather prickely relationship with our sales force. Classically, sales teams do not get on with with operations teams. The sales reps are always shovelling manure to get a signature on the bottom line. Then they are no where to be found when the ops team realizes that they're expected to deliver the impossible. Sales representatives (and I do feel I'm qualified to stay this at this point) think that operations teams are holding out on them and charging way too much money for the easiest things.

Let's all be honest: at some point or another both the ops folks and the sales folks are right.

The sales crowd really is a blessed bunch. Touched, really. But, I promise, not all sales people are bad.

I know. Can you see? I've been infected with their evil. I'm defending them!

And to make matters worse, I'm looking for jobs as a sales engineer. I'm going to be one of them!

With that in mind, I've been focusing on my presentation and speaking skills to improve my product demos and conference calls. Today was a fairly intense day; I had about 3 and a half hours of calls and all but 30 minutes of that was contiguous.

And I TOOOOOTALLY rocked it out.

I'm not even kidding. At the end of two of my calls today, I had customers thanking me for helping them spend their money. I even had to tell them things they really didn't like hearing, like that their project would take two months longer than they were planning. But they worked it out.

So, yeah. I'm totally going ot the dark side. It's kind of scarey.

But at the same time... where's my commission, yo?