Software Business in the Middle East

It’s interesting to see how my respect to the salesmen has been changing over the passed years. It seems it really depends a lot on what position you are working on at the moment.

Salesmen are Losers

Working in the development team on a large project, you will most likely never meet any of the customers, as there are other people responsible for this, for example salesmen. In our large project at Siemens we had a team whose main task was to meet with customers and get the requirements for the new versions. Sometimes it happened so that our requirements were changed very often – literally, on Friday our list of requirements might look different then last Monday. It made all of us sick as it’s clear it’s almost impossible to work productively when your spec is getting changed all the time. The developers were not very happy about it and I couldn’t tell we liked our sales guys very much.

Salesmen are Wizards

After some experience trying to sell our software, I started to think that making sales was some kind of miracle, and you need to be a wizard to make it. Having technical background it was not very easy for me in the beginning to start making cold calls and then later on the meeting trying to convince people to buy our software.

Salesmen are Just Normal People

Finally, I’ve learned that sales are as important as development – but not the most important thing. You cannot make good sales with bad software, and you cannot survive having good product with bad sales either (well, I guess there are people who can make good sales of bad software). In our experience we had situations several times when we sold pretty large amount of licenses because customers liked certain features on the demo. But the fact was that those features were not yet done in the production version, so we forced ourselves to cut our plans off and implement the sold features first. Basically it means that we sold something that was not ready yet. It’s probably good for salesman, but bad for developer because all the development plans are simply thrown away since we got customer who wanted the features originally planned to be done later.

From another hand, implementing some of the features opens new opportunities for the sales – like implementation of the API for our product for internal use made it possible to sell the product to the organizations that would like to integrate our product into their existing systems instead of using it as Desktop application.

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