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I think a big question is not how essential it is in a vacuum, but how important sales travel is in a competitive landscape. ie, sales would work equally well
by bpodgursky 6y ago
I think a big question is not how essential it is in a vacuum, but how important sales travel is in a competitive landscape.
ie, sales would work equally well if everyone did it via Zoom calls. But if one competitor is willing to send reps in-house for in-person meetings, and the rest are just scheduling Zooms... I can see the industry quickly collapsing back into constant sales travel, if there's even a small marginal gain from face-to-face meetings
(or dinners, or drinks, or whatever else sales reps do to close a deal)
- guyzero 6y agoI'm sure there's a lot of sales travel at places like G but I feel like G in particular doesn't have a lot of sales travel. A lot of the travel is just employees working together for whatever internal tasks.
- bpodgursky 6y agoMaybe, but we had GCP reps in-house for days when we were figuring out our cloud strategy. So I do think there's some even at G.
- f6v 6y agoIf AWS is coming to my office to do a "free architecture evaluation" and GCP doesn't, guess which one I'll choose.
- mmcconnell1618 6y agoIve worked cloud sales for Azure and GCP. Zoom/Teams/Meet is not a replacement for in-person sales. In large Enterprises, you would be surprised by how much of the outcome is determined by relationship rather than technology decisions. There is no substitute for shared experiences with customers or randomly bumping into a friend as you’re walking the hallways of your customer. Sometimes it just comes down to who they like better and building rapport over video chat is hard.