Sales

About 9pm last nite, i got a call from a vendor asking whether we wanted to participate in a regional CRM rollout. 5,000 user licence! Problem is.. RFP is due on Monday. I go "niama.. how the hell can we do that?"

As tempting as it is, because I work in a big firm, things like that will never pass our QA. Yes.. this is probably some multi million dollar deal.. but those dumb QA partners will ask shit like whether we have a relationship with the client (we do), whether the estimates have been QAed, have we implemented the software before... etc etc... and this is likely to be done with some kwai low QA partner who doesn't know the local climate so we'll probably fail...

Talking about multi million dollar deals.. Someone asked me before what does it take to make partner in our firm. Honestly, it's just luck. It's just you being at the rite place at the rite time.

2 years ago, I was chasing this large SGD74M custom building of a life insurance system J2EE .. job which at the last minute, the CEO said "I like you guys, but I got to give it to the incumbent because if I don't, they will pull out from their current project". Damn.. If I had sold that piece of work, I'll be a partner now.

At that very same time, because I was anchoring that project, my firm asked one of my colleagues to anchor an outsourcing bid. If I wasn't stuck in Singapore chasing that above project, I would have probably gone over to that outsourcing bid because I actually had a lot of relationships with many of the CIOs of that client. So, there I was, kicking my own butt when I lost that SGD74M job, and I saw how lucky my colleague was.. cause that outsourcing job was a sure win one!

Ha ha.. but latest turn of events make us even further away from winning that outsourcing job. So my colleague is also lamenting the fact that to make partner, it actually takes luck!

Then down south, another of my colleagues took a bet, went after Singapore's largest bank, and he secured the deal there. I bet he's making partner this year.

So in short, it's all luck. If you compare the 3 of us, there's really no difference in terms of skill sets (except one is balder, one is fatter etc).

Thus, the advise for all you aspiring consultants who wanna make it big... Sell Sell Sell...