My boss asked me to interview someone he'd worked with before. He liked and trusted him, and wanted to see if I could find him a seat in my team.
After sitting with him for an hour, I knew I couldn't hire him.
He had a great attitude. Was friendly, enthusiastic, humble, and eager to learn.
But something was missing.
Our team handled complex sales — six- and seven-figure ARR deals. The chap I was interviewing had missed one critical thing.
Craft.
You see, at the most basic level a great enterprise salesperson needs two things: craft and graft.
Graft is the horsepower — the commitment, the effort you put into everything you do. It's hugely important and it can't be taught.
But it's not the only thing that matters. Not in enterprise sales.
Don't get me wrong. If you're doing 10K deals, I'll take graft over anything else, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. For high-velocity, lower-value work, graft can carry someone a long way.
But in enterprise? It's more complicated.
Three or four six-figure deals a year is no environment for an enthusiastic but unfinished salesperson to hone their craft through trial and error.
One easy-to-miss mistake costs the business hundreds of thousands in revenue. There are dozens of hazards an untrained eye won't see, and a narrow path through them.
Enterprise sales is like chess.
It's not enough to know how the pieces move. You need to know the strategies. How to develop a strong position. The different phases from opening to endgame.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Lots of meetings and the prospect's excited. Demos and deep-dives. Pricing submitted and the champion is keen.
The Grafter was playing a great game in isolation, but didn't understand what was going on across the rest of the business.
Didn't know the CFO had killed two similar projects in the last 18 months. Didn't know the IT Director was quietly lobbying for a competitor.
Didn't read the terrain.
That's the craft.
The good thing? Craft, unlike attitude, can be taught.
The bad thing? VERY few businesses actually teach it.
It's a massive gap in most software vendors. Especially scale-ups. Sales is treated as a universal skillset.
Having done around $100m of closed enterprise revenue, I can tell you it's not.
Big-ticket complex sales is a specialist niche. Different game. Different tools.
If you want to be in the game to close 7-figure tech sales, you need to hire or develop genuine sales craft in your business.
Because enthusiasm and 'graft' alone won't get you there.