I Was Making Life Hard - Part 1 ⇒

This will be a multi-parter, part 2 & part 3

History

I got interested in computers in 1986 (I was 12); I used to sit beside my dad and watch him code (quite the wild child, eh?). Eventually I started to code on my own, first in Logo, then in Pascal. I ended up getting a Computer Science degree from the University of Victoria and began my career as a developer.

The Transition

It was at Orbital that I began my transition away from development. I realized that I really enjoyed the customer interactions, especially working with them to figure out the best way to solve their problems. That’s when I decided I wanted to spend more time talking & helping customers/prospects.

Going from development to sales however, was very hard for me, as I didn’t really have any deep sales knowledge. In hindsight, I should have started my career again, and taken a junior sales role. Instead I found a “half-way” role as a Sales Engineer at Epic Data . A Sales Engineer guides the prospect to the correct solution and helps the sales people win the business. They often do demos, presentations & proposals.

I loved my time at Epic Data doing this role, I was disappointed when it ended (that’s another whole story), so I did it again at ACL (now Galvanize). It was at ACL that I decided I really wanted to do front line sales.

Sales Career

I began my tech sales career in 2008, 3 months before The Crash. An ominous start (queue doom-like music).

At InTouch Technology I helped grow the business 10-fold and learned a lot about sales. So when that ended (yet another story) I went to another start up, EDP to hopefully repeat the process.

For the first few years, I had a great time. I loved talking to prospects, creating the sales process, and helping customers create a safer and more productive work environment.

In my last year there we hit “the wall,” and had found many of the “easy” customers. We now needed a scaleable sales process, which I didn’t understand at the time. This led to missed expectations and a parting of ways.

At the time, I believed I wanted a more mature organization, where I could better leverage my technical background. Which is how I ended up working for an Epic Data colleague over at ZE. That didn’t last long, for a myriad of reasons, but I still thought I wanted to sell, so off I went (yet again) in search of the “perfect” place.

I thought Keboola had it all, a highly technical solution, super smart people, and a desire to do sales “the right way”. It was here however, that I began to question my career path.

Part 2…