> when else do you get time to write proposals and draft contracts?
Depending on the industry, sales people aren't the ones to do these tasks. There's other people that do this for them (nor should they, most of the time, based on stories I've heard from my girlfriend, who is a proposal manager. She constantly has to fix and unbreak and un-ugly whatever they do send her).
In fact for the companies she works it sounds like sales people live pretty cushy lives. Although the commissions the salespeople get for winning a single client's business can be as much as half a million dollars (and their bosses would treat them like ambassadors with diplomatic immunity that could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted as long as they got a win every once in awhile. Meanwhile she had a large role in winning the business as well but only got a slightly better than a writer's salary for it.
In smaller companies I don't doubt sales people might have to handle proposals and contracts, but it's not really their core competency.
It's kind of like an engineer that also does graphic design. They exist, but it's not really something most engineers should be doing.
I agree it's industry by industry. Your girlfriend's experience is at another end of the scale from mine. Every enterprise software company I've ever worked at, sales has both written and presented proposals. There's very deep subject matter expertise required to do so and I can't think of any occasion when sales didn't own that entire aspect of work. These were 50-1,000 employee firms selling complex . More established companies had standardized contracts and larger legal teams so less for sales to do; smaller ones were more bespoke and in those cases sales was heavily involved.
(One particularly memorable job had me finding clients, pitching ideas, writing proposals, negotiating and closing the deal, drafting and negotiating contracts, and then managing the actual project itself for $1m+ fixed price bespoke software consulting engagements. I'd have sold organs to have someone like your girlfriend on the team.)
I'm fortunate to have done both engineering and sales in my career. I'd like to say it's given me sympathy for both sides; mostly I've always just wished I was doing the other role at any given time :)
Depending on the industry, sales people aren't the ones to do these tasks. There's other people that do this for them (nor should they, most of the time, based on stories I've heard from my girlfriend, who is a proposal manager. She constantly has to fix and unbreak and un-ugly whatever they do send her).
In fact for the companies she works it sounds like sales people live pretty cushy lives. Although the commissions the salespeople get for winning a single client's business can be as much as half a million dollars (and their bosses would treat them like ambassadors with diplomatic immunity that could do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted as long as they got a win every once in awhile. Meanwhile she had a large role in winning the business as well but only got a slightly better than a writer's salary for it.
In smaller companies I don't doubt sales people might have to handle proposals and contracts, but it's not really their core competency.
It's kind of like an engineer that also does graphic design. They exist, but it's not really something most engineers should be doing.