A developer who sends an email to a customer to elucidate some details of proposed solution. He is a salesman.

A project manager who goes on biweekly status meeting. She is a saleswoman too.

A support engineer who answer for ticket submitted by one of clients. Guess what, he’s a salesman.

A manager of software development team who receives escalation call from disappointed customer. Surprise, surprise, she’s a saleswoman.

It doesn’t really sound as they all were salespeople but they are. Whenever we contact current or potential customers we all play role of salespeople at least a bit. It doesn’t mean we all should wear suits and have this marketing blah-blah talk ready to fire at the customer. It doesn’t mean we should all have minds set for thinking what product we could up-sell there. But it does mean people on the other side will evaluate our work as the part of current and future sale process.

“We’ve done a project with them and we won’t do another.” Odds are that’s not the fault of sales representative alone, but developers or support engineers or project managers or all of them screwed their work. They failed at up-selling anything more, no matter how great their product could be.

“We considered them as a company suitable for small projects only but they’ve proven their worth and now they’re one of our important vendors.” Oh, that wasn’t only the effort of key account manager responsible for that customer. Or was it?

Even when our work isn’t seen directly by the customer it works that way. If a quality engineer does a perfectly good job hunting all the glitches it will be appreciated as an effort invested into high-quality. The company will be considered as one of these which delivers quality solutions (even when they aren’t always on time) and that’s pretty important factor when customer chooses a vendor. Or at least it should be.

In this way or another we all help in selling our products. Most of the time we do that unconsciously but it doesn’t change our influence on setting new deals. We all are salespeople.