1. Does your firm have full-time dedicated to sales/business development    professionals?

or

2. Does your firm utilize the "seller doer" model (use a senior member, partner, project manager, etc..)to sell when they are not managing projects or the business?

What are the reasons your firm use the sales model above or another method?

Very interesting question. In most engineering firms, we don't "sell", we "market" or we "develop business." We don't use the word "sell." But that's another topic...

W. Edwards Demming, the quality guru, said "If you can't explain what you do as a process, you really don't know what you're doing." I find that, if I ask an engineer, for example, "How do you design a waster water treatment plant?" they can tell me in great excrutiating detail. But if I ask the question: "How do you sell a wastewater treatment plant?" they are at a loss to explain the process. We don't really know what we're doing!

Why is it that, as engineers and scientists, we forget everything we learned in school about process, systems, and methodologies, when it comes to selling our services?

Selling is a process. It has inputs, outputs, subprocesses, and results. If we want to improve the consistency of our success, we need to view selling as a process.



Rick