Oh, one more thing, this is the exact reason I left my last job -- we were in a place where it took us a whole year to sign a customer up for a free trial...

Oh, one more thing, this is the exact reason I left my last job -- we were in a place where it took us a whole year to sign a customer up for a free trial... We set the system up for them in October, and they didn't even look at it until February. I learned at this point to see long sales processes as a "bad smell." Now maybe there are some things that really take a long time to sell (Nuclear power plants, for instance.) but personally I think salespeople are the most hated people on the planet and that they're going to be first ones to go as we approach the singularity. If your product is hard to sell, you should be selling a different product. I've seen so many enterprise products go by that cost, say $30K, and the sales process is so extensive that it costs them $15K worth of salesperson time to sell the product and it costs the customer another $30K worth of their own time to make a decision. The product is worth $15K, but sales overhead puffs up the cost to $60K to the customer. This has just got to stop.