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Many practicing Project Managers haven’t had much experience at the other side of the table. By that I mean the viewpoint of seeing the technology selection and procurement project as a selling opportunity. It looks different from the other side.

First there is the concept of the sales funnel. The sales funnel is a conceptual model of a pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Leads flow in to the top, and are moved down through the sales process until deals are closed at the bottom. It is narrower at the bottom because the vast majority of leads don’t turn into sales.

The sales reps job is two-fold: first, to move your project down through the stages of the sales process until a contract is signed and a deal is made at the bottom. Second, and just as important, the rep’s job is to disqualify opportunities that aren’t going to close, and not to spend more sales time and resources on them. As discussed last week, you want to keep the interest of the vendors that you favor until far along in the process.

The second sales concept to be aware of is forecasting. Whether you know it or not, your vendor account reps are constantly evaluating their possibility of making a sale to your project, and just as importantly, when. How sales reps forecast then a sale will happen in a big complex situation is beyond me, but they do. The best sales organizations combine a mix of forecasting and sales force rewards, and consistently are able to closely forecast their overall sales even several quarters out. It must be a statistical effect of hundreds of salespeople in Brownian motion, but it works, at least for some organizations.

This is why what seems like an unavoidable delay in the evaluation process to you is a crushing blow to a Vendor sales rep. Even if he gets the sale, it pushes the sale out from this quarter to next, screwing up his forecast, and forcing him to not make “his numbers”, which may cause his boss not to make “her numbers” et cetera ad infinitum.

So, have some sympathy for the sales rep when you share the news of the latest delay.