* How do I get promoted?
* How do I get a raise?
* How do I not get fired?
Beyond those common desires are a constellation of more personalized that is specific for each salesperson and the cohort they target (I'm somewhat of an idealist in that I believe people are quite often strongly driven by meaningful non-capitalist, non-realist desires).
In any case, when you're working in enterprise sales, what you have to realize is that, regardless of what the desire is, what your corporate champion is "buying" is a way for them to achieve their goals and only incidentally what is good for the company, where your product is merely a proxy to accomplishing this.
Of course, companies also know this and anyone who has owned a P&L immediately recognizes that the sum of all things everyone wants far exceeds the resources of the balance sheet, thus, some selection process needs to be put in place to allocate scarce resources.
Your corporate champion is ideally far more aligned with you against the company than they are with the company against you and your job is to figure out how to win this selection battle together.
The core insight though, is that people are actually astonishingly bad at performing on this and it's actually quite easy for an outside sales person to become a subject matter expert for 3 core reasons:
1. Any employee usually only ever has a sample size of 1 whereas you have a broader peek into how this has happened across a range of companies industry wide.
2. Any employee, only a minor part of their job involves interfacing with outside parts of the firm responsible for allocating resources whereas you treat this as a core competency.
3. For any person, it's always easier to advise a 3rd party on what to do than to practice the same actions yourself.
What this means though, is that, as an enterprise salesperson, you should understand that your core value comes from developing subject matter expertise in how to help people in your industry get promotions, get raises and avoid getting fired and the product you're representing at the moment is merely the avenue through which you enable that to happen.
The best salespeople I've ever met always share a common core value that they deeply care about making sure everyone around them is getting rich with the faith that some of that money eventually reflects onto them but that's not what drives them. That's why so many immigrants and children of immigrants make such great salespeople, they've seen the material difference wealth has made on their circumstances and they want to spread that opportunity to others.
This is what I advise Founders who start Enterprise focused businesses. Fundamentally, you should be thinking about how do I get someone to VP/Director/Line Manager/Tech Lead 2/3/5 years earlier than if my product doesn't exist and how do you breathe this passion day in day out.
What an LLM cannot do today is almost irrelevant in the tide of change upon the industry. The fact is, with improvements, it doesn't mean an LLM cannot do it tomorrow.
* are many times the size of the occupants, greatly constricting throughput.
* are many times heavier than humans, requiring vastly more energy to move.
* travel at speeds and weights that are danger to humans, thus requiring strictly segregated spaces.
* are only used less than 5% of the day, requiring places to store them when unused.
* require extremely wide turning radiuses when traveling at speed (there’s a viral photo showing the entire historical city of Florence fit inside a single US cloverleaf interchange)
Not only have none of these flaws been fixed, many of them have gotten worse with advancing technology because they’re baked into the nature of cars.
Anyone at the invention of automobiles with sufficient foresight could have seen the intersecting incentives that cars would wreak, same as how many of the future impacts of LLMs are foreseeable today, independent of technical progress.