My first job ever I befriended one of the senior sales guys at an after work drinking event. We built software that integrated into and with a range of embedded devices of which many were medical. He was one of the guys that worked closely with our EMEA customers who were notoriously slow to sign.
Three years later he drove in to the office lot with a brand new Porsche 911 which was a portion of his commission for closing the deal after something insane like 33 months.
I’m two years into brokering a deal between a client and two blue-chip behemoths. It has been endless cycles of documentation, specification, certification, auditing, horse-trading, rescoping, consulting, wargaming, ratifying, and many of the faces have changed over the last two years.
It’ll be a big deal for all of them, but just getting everything in place for them to all agree and sign is just insane - my longest sales process before this was maybe 4 months, 400 hours - this has easily eaten tens of thousands of man hours so far.
One thing I’ve observed is that the deal almost becomes secondary - by this point, there’s an entire self-sustaining bureaucracy around the deal, many of the deliverables the deal specified are already in place and money has changed hands, hires have been made, everything has essentially happened as though the deal has gone ahead - yet I’m spending this afternoon rejigging information security roles and responsibilities to make the interfaces more on parity with the security team of one of the blue chips, because until the contract is signed, the deal isn’t done, and all parties are just merrily swimming out into deeper waters together, growing technical and operational dependencies around each other with no legal agreement. At this point, the businesses are just getting on with stuff as though the deal is done, the counsels are screaming because nobody is interested in moving the boring paperwork forwards, and I’m charging by the hour. Buys a lot of popcorn.
Sales is weird.
Edit: just realised we might be talking about the same healthcare customers.
Three years later he drove in to the office lot with a brand new Porsche 911 which was a portion of his commission for closing the deal after something insane like 33 months.
He was happy to have that deal done.