Influences — Sell … Sell … Sell …

Recently, I posted a status update with this group of words … and in short I wanted to highlight some of the influences that currently drive me and linkages back to some of the great work that people are doing. The order isn’t important because each of these are (I’ve got to start somewhere) …
Over the next little while, I’ll post a few different articles that relate to these individual influences are why these are important to consider … I won’t go into much detail about what selling is or how to do enterprise selling — there are plenty of good people helping in that space. The importance of this is that there is a network of people out there and that it’s important to look at what people are doing to do better yourself.
The first one here is … Sales …
I also link commercialisation and investments to this concept. The main thing that the financial side of what we are doing is important. Ultimately, there is a monetary side to everything that we do — even just paying for pizzas and drinks at a hackathon (like #GovHack and #HealthHack) has a commercial conversation.
There are many different ways that selling comes into what we are doing — whether it be for investments, sponsorship, market validation, grants, applications for accelerators or different programs, customers, partnerships, brand, etc. There is an element of always selling.
There are definitely different perspectives that I’m coming across however it comes down to the difference between selling to make a transaction vs selling to make an investment. Another difference is how we want to sell or want to buy and the methods that we deal with risk, innovation, procurement — the whole way we deal with governance.
What this also is driving is a community-based approach where everyone involved gets something from it — commercially.
As part of this series — I want to also acknowledge a few different people as well — not to segregate and not to put them on a pedestal but to acknowledge some of the discussions that we’ve had and some of the learnings that I’ve had that have influenced.
Thanks to Nathan Bush around some of the selling strategies. It’s been really interesting discussions and thoughts around some of methods to engagement. I still come back to Andy Farquharson around some of the selling strategies where selling is a long game not a short one. I also look internally within Oracle in terms of the fantastic people that are selling in some of the most complex organisations with layers of different influence maps and governance processes.