We spend a tremendous amount of time and effort on the sales process. I picked out my two favorite definitions of sales: “persuade someone of the merits of” and “cause someone to become enthusiastic.” There is sure a lot of persuasion and enthusiasm in most sales processes.

At the conclusion of a successful sales process, we pass into another realm called “implementation” and it's like the joy has been sucked out of the room. There is no expectation of persuasion or enthusiasm in the implementation process. Just the other day, I was on a call with a printer who is beginning their implementation of a web-to-print solution. In this situation, we required people from all the primary functional areas that would be impacted by the solution to attend the launch meeting. So we had a group that included sales, customer service, prepress, and leadership.

I started the call by asking the group what they hoped to solve with this software. After listing a few challenges, I described how the solution would solve these specific challenges. After that interchange, one of the leaders said in a joking manner, “You know we’ve already purchased the solution.” I found this very interesting. He was part of the purchasing decision, yet nobody else on the call was. So from his perspective, he had already been “sold” and he had context over why the purchasing decision was made. He was set. He was not who I was selling to; I was selling the context and big picture to all the individual contributors on the phone who were going to be directly impacted during the implementation.