How would you assess the significance of sales skills to a project manager? Are they, increasing or decreasing in your view, significance? Why do you think there is this change occurs? Is this more significant to understand selling or buying?

Opportunities occur all of the time for project managers to ‘sell’. It might be winning some modern business for that the client will pay along with ‘real’ money or along with an internal cross charge to the IS department. This might not be recent business at all but the constant sale of consumer satisfaction during the project. Either this is, it’s valuable. To put this in perspective though, it’s not the project manager’s major task; being a good salesman although a poor deliverer ‘on time, onto budget and to quality’ is not a high-quality solution.

Being capable to take a commercial view is gradually more important. Selling is part of that. Technology is gradually more taken for granted and the capability to sell solutions frequently distinguishes well from average performance.

Such are the two faces of the commercial coin. This is not realistic to suppose to sell unless you identify why and how people buy.