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Ask Slashdot: Compensating Technical People For Contributing to Sales?
cloud-yay writes "I work for an IT consulting firm and recently I've been tasked with heading up our engineering consulting team — which without the fancy corporate speak means that we're trying to empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people instead of being purely service orientated. To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money! I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission. Has anyone worked in this environment anywhere and what works/doesn't work in your experience?"
Give your outside sales reps something like 20% commission, have a few engineers that work as inside sales reps (ie they are the main point of contact for clients) for like 10-15%, and then give your engineering teams 5% as a whole for all inside sales.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
When you change the incentives of engineers to be the compensate them the same as you would a sales person. The engineers become sales people pretty quickly. It's just human nature.
The opposite is also true by the way, if you change a sales person's salary to the same as engineers they're change into engineers pretty quickly. Incentives matter.
Use the last 10-20% of them to screen for people that will be actually interested in your product so the tech staff time isn't wasted.
I work for an IT consulting firm and recently I've been tasked with heading up our engineering consulting team — which without the fancy corporate speak means that we're trying to empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people instead of being purely service orientated.
Translation: We're asking our developers to wear more and more hats and now we're asking them to sell the product because our customer listens to them.
To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money!
Translation: I hate it when my customer is smart. They're supposed to be stupid and buy whatever we tell them to. Now I've realized that prior deals have built cracks in the trust between our sales team and them so now we have to try to leverage our technical team as salesmen. Sure, it will destroy their credibility after a few deals but we have to make every bit of profit off our customer until we don't have any.
I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission.
Translation: There seems to be some credibility we can capitalize on yet, what's the fastest way to do that?
Has anyone worked in this environment anywhere and what works/doesn't work in your experience?
Your technical team is doing you a favor and they sound like they're managing to stay technical. The phrase "technically correct" might seem foreign to you as you're probably used to dealing with "fiscally correct" more often than not.
My suggestion is to leave your technical team intact and trusted by your customer and don't try to turn your entire company into a sales team like Microsoft. Here's a helpful hint: your technical team will inadvertently become your sales team when what you are leading them to do for your customer is truly innovative and inventive and maybe even a little bit risky. Don't ask how you can turn your technical people into salesmen, ask how you can change yourself and your company's vision so your technical people can't help but logically be salesmen. If your technical team starts sounding like salesmen, your customer will simply stop listening to them and trusting them. You practically answer your own question and would come to the same conclusions were it not for profit margin motivations!
My work here is dung.
Sales comes from a genuine need. Your perspective clearly indicates you think this is product pushing - and value added sales isn't product pushing. If your customer needs an external hard drive RAID array for backups of mission critical data, would benefit from a hosted solution, or would obtain other value from a software upgrade, SELL IT. Your salary doesn't fall from the sky. It takes a team of people bringing customers in and generating revenue to pay you. You should share in the challenge of keeping the enterprise afloat if you expect to be compensated for what you do.
So you want your engineers to stop acting purely as trusted advisors, and start thinking more about how they might push your own companies products. That seems like a good way to have your clients stop trusting your engineers. If your product is the best for the job, they should already be advising the clients to use it.
I mean, it's a tough economy, you gotta do what you gotta do. But still, I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of good advice on here.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
At least senior engineers? And they have less education and get free lunches, drinks, and travel, too? I'm aghast! The world turned upside down!
Nate
The most effective way to incentivize your employees is to have good management which is capable of recognizing not only quantitative contributions to the bottom line, but qualitative contributions, and who consistently rewards such contributions - ideally with a relatively short feedback loop. Companies where the employees can trust management to treat them fairly find the employees pretty well motivated.
Regrettably, many companies don't meet the prerequisite of having good management, so the point may be moot, but when you make something a numbers game, people have a tendency to chase the set of numbers you pick, rather than actually improving the health of the company.
Also of note: stock options work okay, if the company is small enough.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Our entire sales staff consists of engineers. You know the type - got good grades in college, yes, but the social type of engineer, not the introverted perfectionists.
It seems to work. Yes they work on commission, but customers don't see them as know-nothing idiots. They all worked their way to a sales position by going through application support, so every one of them has the ability to help the customers troubleshoot problems, figure out solutions to new applications, and competently demo equipment.
It sounds like your company probably hired extroverted non-technical people for sales and introverted, detail-oriented people for R&D. Now it wants to take those R&D engineers and turn them into half sales people. That's going to fail. Hire the right people from the start and you'll find success.
If you insist on putting the wrong type of people in sales support roles, make sure there is a technically competent person to interface for them. A technical business analyst / technical marketing person can keep your non-social engineers from interacting directly with customers for the social feel-good stuff while allowing communication to flow unhindered for technical matters.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Ok, let's say that by some piece of luck your engineers become sales people. Good sales people, even.
Now they look around and realize something -- they don't need you. In fact, they don't need anyone else, because they can do the R&D *and* the sales.
If they don't have the power to fire all of you, they certainly have the power to take your customer list and leave to start their own company.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You need to form a team of these guys. They're called Sales Engineers. They're hybrids who are extremely technical and knowledgable people who are part of the sales teams.
They often come from engineering backgrounds and cross over to the sales team and are hybrids of the two critters you are discussing.
Maybe you can ask management to tack on "sales engineer" to the titles of some of your engineering guys and have them actively help out in sales (and get appropriately compensated). Their roles are extremely important as sometimes sales/marketing only people are not equipped to handle extremely technical questions about tech products and software solutions.
http://www.object404.com
I think the best way to do this is to give the tech people a small commission of whatever by referral. For example, they find a customer that needs this upgrade or this piece of equipment that you offer, the tech person turns in a referral and a percentage of the sale goes to them. The sales people still are the point of contacts for the customers when managing the deal so they receive the larger commission. I think the partnership works well like this, or get your engineers to be "Sales Engineers" which would understand all of the technology and can relate to customer's true needs without being smooth talking and give off a sleezy talk you out of your money type vibe. These individuals can be kind of a bridge between the sales and the engineering team. As long as you keep the commission to the engineering team worthwhile, and don't take too much from the sales people, everything should be fine. The sales people won't get as much money, but they would be hard pressed to make those sales if the engineers weren't there working with the customers showing them technically this is how this works and doing this would be helpful to your business etc etc. Some commission is always better than none, and to satisfy the sales people's money grubbing needs, they still get the larger part of the commission.
Is to be allowed to work with the technologies that I want and implement all the features that I deem necessary. In essence, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY, allow me to ENJOY DOING MY JOB and I'll make it epic! There's only so much money can buy!
...to get rid of your engineers.
When the engineers start feeling like sales people they feel dirty inside - they're not used to lying to the customer like sales are - they just want to deliver a good service.
When they realize you're pushing them towards sales they'll leave.
All of the big technical companies like HP, IBM, etc do what you are talking about, it's often referred to as "pre-sales technical engineering." It usually consists of engineers who have some development/support duties but are also made available to sales staff to bring in to their clients when the clients have a need but aren't necessarily sure as to what exactly are the technical solutions to that need.
For the most part those guys are salaried, just like all of the other engineers. I bet they get more bonuses though and I am also sure that different corps handle their compensation differently, there probably are some who get commission too. But, in the long-run paying them commission would probably undermine the customer's trust in their impartiality.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If you pay engineers a commission that a salesperson would have otherwise gotten, you have put them in direct competition with each other. That will foster animosity.
If you put in blanket rules like 'all engineers always get 20% commissions of inside sales' the salespeople will feel like someone else is caching in on their hard work, and in cases where the engineer won the sale entirely by himself, he will feel like someone cashed in on 80% of his pay. Neither person will feel like this evens out, even if it does.
Pay engineers to be engineers and pay salespeople to be salespeople. If both do their jobs right, you don't need to blur the distinctions in order to profit.
If you want an edge, here is what you should do: Train your sales people to be (or seem) trustworthy, to be (or seem) technically competent, and above all to regularly put effort into really understanding their clients' needs (or at least seem to). How much the client trusts the salesman is the #1 contributor to a sale. That directly addresses the root cause of the problem you are trying to solve. Also, allow salespeople to recommend engineers for bonuses based on sales assistance, and actually pay attention to the recommendations. That could help a bit too without creating animosity.
It seems to me this is entirely backwards to where you want to go. You want to give your sales staff the cachet that your IT people have, so you want to turn your IT people into salespeople when what you should be really doing is making the salespeople more like the IT guys. It's like trying to make firemen into lawyers. Sure you can, but why in the hell would you want to?
"I work for an IT consulting firm and recently I've been tasked with heading up our engineering consulting team — which without the fancy corporate speak means that we're trying to empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people instead of being purely service orientated.
I'll make a deal with you - when I find a bunch of loudmouthed "geezers" in loud suits who are prepared to listen to my "made as simple as possible for the sales mind" technical explanations as to why what they've sold/promised to the customer WON'T FUCKING WORK, rather than caring more about how big an expense lunch they can have that day, then I'll sit down and learn something from them.
BTW, do you own the latest and most expensive MacBook by any chance?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The poster said this was an I.T. "Consulting" firm. Typically such firms don't have engineers in the back room working on future products, at least not in the same sense that IBM and HP and Oracle do. So to give a good answer we need to know more about how this company is organized and what it means to be an "engineer" at a consulting firm - most consulting firms don't have such positions. Bottom line, the question is a bit weird.
Give the engineers the same cut the sales people get for one time sales. Structure the procedure such that any ongoing or contract sales for services get coordinated with a sales rep to handle the details (after the initial sale is made) and give a split cut between the sales staffer and the engineer (based on time investment).
Also, if this is the kind of sales you are doing, maybe you should look into making your sales people come off more like engineers. Get them some experience with technical matters and some training. It will also help insure they are asking the right questions and getting the right details and most importantly, budgeting properly for projects when sending tasks out to engineers.
If people clam up around their sales reps it's because they put off the slick salesman vibe. Get rid of that. The only people who like that vibe are hip-hop aficionados, drunk guys at the strip club and MBAs. Outside of the whole MBA to MBA community, real people don't like doing business with people like that.
Being at a managed hosting company, I've noticed using the title Account Manager as well as endowing them with the responsibilities of that title reduces the slick sell everything attitude. Your sales people should be focused on long term relationships and the residuals from that powering their paycheck.
This sounds like it has potential for Scott Adams to get a good number of strips out of this.
So your customers think salespeople are there only to sell them things they may not need, and your sales people live and die by commission?
Surely there's your problem.
If you're paying for sales, surely whoever makes the sale should make the money. And if you're paying people to sell, who then cannot sell because they have no neutrality, why not rethink your compensation structure?
At my company we have a small group inside sales that is called 'Sales Engineers'. These are a technical group of sales people who get a cut of the commission for sales they are involved in. Their primary job function includes setting up customer specific demos and providing pre-sale technical support. They speak technical talk and are a good way to keep your engineering department focused on making products. Putting your Engineering resources into sales can be a HUGE time drain on the engineering department.
...or sometimes a Solution Architect.
Most big tech companies (think SAP, Oracle, IBM, Red Hat) have a specific role for this. It is someone who could be an engineer but is specifically assigned to the sales process. Once the sales person has found the lead, the SE works with the customer to identify their needs and how best to meet them with the company's products. The sales person writes the deal and handles all the "sales" stuff.
Oh, and the SE gets a set percentage of the commission.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
If your company is selling a product that can't be backed by the foundations of its engineering and technical capability, and requires 'sales techniques' and the prospect of 'alleviating people from their money', your problem isn't compensation and delineation between the sales and tech people. It's that your management doesn't care about building a long-term customer base and is only looking to make sure the next quarter looks good.
If you're planning on making this job a long-term relationship, either point this out to the appropriate ladder rungs and make your concerns heard, or get the hell out of their look for a company that has some respectability.
And they used to exist in a lot of industrial marketing lines. A good idea that got chopped by short-term management philosophies directed toward wall street performance. Basically, it's an engineer that promotes sales of the product by facilitating its use, suggesting good applications, etc.
As far as compensating? They are part of the sales staff. Maybe geared more towards salary and less toward commission, because their role is more directed toward long-term market growth than the main sales force, but yes they should be compensated for scoring the big deals too.
We are the 198 proof..
In an attempt to actually answer the extremely good question as opposed to some of the perfectly good personal opinions: As some of the comments have alluded to you are referring to Pre-sales Engineers who are this lovely breed of technically savvy, personable (mostly) and engaging characters who can articulate a technical message, marry it to a business requirement/message and do it convincingly. I have been working in this capacity for 6+ years now and have been through many iterations of compensation, some of which were better than others. They were: 1. Per-sale based compensation - not so good as you're eating into the sales person's comp, and they don't like it. It also incentivises you to act more and more like a sales person. Not so good either. 2. Qualified pre-sales visits compensation - generally "how many pre-sales calls did you make". The goal is to measure the ability to generate new business. Not so good, as it's very difficult to quantify and track, and the general pattern of behaviour is to just have stacks of meetings without providing any quality. 3. Quarterly/Annual Revenue based - this has been the most successful in my experience. Success is measured on overall revenue generation of the sales organization (of which this kind of person is a part of) rather than individual sales based commission. Commission is generally a fixed amount per-quarter based on attaining revenue figures or % growth thereof over previous years/periods. This is good as it tends to remove the person a step or two back from chasing individual sales, and then bickering over the commission for each one. The fixed comission amount (say 15% of gross annually or something) coupled with the quarterly revenue targets creates a more team based focus for everyone to assist in the success of the venture. As for the trusted advisor vs. sales debate - the sad truth is that no matter who you are, if you're asked to sell a single product/suite (instead of solutions) you're going to lose a little bit of your trusted advisor status as you're only pushing that single product rather than considering the larger picture/industry solutions. I hope this helps, PM me if you'd like to discuss further as I have had exposure to a fair bit of this type of situation and may (or may not!) shed some light to help you come up with something that works for your company.
for some reason all my formatting died in the posting - that should read a lot easier :(
I don't know how it works all over but I work for a copier sales and repair company. When a service tech sees an opportunity for a sale they discuss it with the customer then tell them that they will pass on the lead to the sales rep. After that they write up a lead sheet and give it to the appropriate sales rep. If there is a sale from the generated lead within 60 days then the tech gets a commission in the range of 25 to 150 dollars per machine sold depending on the cost of the machine. The techs also get a commission on selling professional IT services time blocks at a rate of 8% for new IT services customers and 4% for renewals. As a tech myself I find it gives me an incentive to keep my eyes and ears open for potential sales leads. Get Moose and Squirrel! Ray Moore Analyst/Technician Premier Office Equipment Marshalltown, IA
Thinking outside the box, give them a bonus?
I'm confused why this response isn't +5 informative yet.
Yeah, and there's no reason to read anything else other than this thread.
If the sales people were actually doing their jobs, there wouldn't be a need for this "question". The best business sales people are experts in their field - yes, they would understand the engineering part even they weren't trained in that area.
The original poster needs to stop hiring ex: car (new and used), consumer electronics, insurance or any type of financial service for that matter, telco, real estate, and every other type of "slash and burn" sales people.
Nobody begrudges honest and informed sales people. It's only the crooks that folks hate.
Don't compromise them with the sale itself, which would create a bias and hurt their ethics.
Compensate them on the product being delivered as promised to the spec.
One of the big problems is that you're adding work to your engineering staff without staffing up for it. The real engineers will dodge the sales role, and other may step up and become application or sales engineers. I'd develop the exact skills you need and not dilute your engineering resource by loading non-engineering tasks on them. If they currently help, you might want to figure out how much that's costing you in opportunity cost as well.
our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people'
So you want your customers not to trust either of them? It sounds like they'll eventually develop the same distaste for all of your employees that have customer relations. The reason they are viewed as trusted advisors is because they don't think like sales people, but you're trying to make them do exactly that, it sounds like.
Okay, now from TFA.
So, the "socially inept" engineers somehow manage to convince the customers that they (the engineers) are trustworthy.
While the socially skilled sales people are unable to do this.
I question your definition because it seems to be the opposite. At least in the case presented in TFA.
I'd look at the root cause of why the customers seem to trust the engineers more than the sales people.
...merely to see that look on your once-smug face when you wrap that commission-funded Porsche of yours round the nearest lamp-post after one too many bottles of Pinot Grigot at your expenses-funded lunches.
Here's how it should work:
1. You tell me what you need and when you need it by.
2. I laugh in your face and tell you what you really need and when you can have it by.
3. You get two phone calls or two emails to me between now and the deadline to ask me "How's it going?" Any more than that and I get 10% of your commission for each additional call or email over the limit.
4. You are a salesman, you deal with persuasion and lies. I am a techician, I deal with reality and fact. So don't try to get all technical on me because you read 5 pages of the product manual.
5. When it's ready, I will call you and you can have it. It will leave my lab working but if it's broke when it gets to site, you lose 10% of your commission immediately plus 10% for each 4-hour period I have to spend on making it work again.
That's it. Simple.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
In a former life, I ran the technical sales organization for a company I started with some friends, and later sold to a much larger organization. So I've seen a couple of different models for how to do this.
The first question is - how are your sales people currently compensated? If they're compensated with a straight percentage commission, or something similar like a sliding percentage based on quota achievement, then the easiest thing to do is to also give your consulting engineers a straight commission on add-on deals that they are involved in. That percentage is typically a fraction of what the sales person makes - for example, if your sales people get 10% commission, then the technical presales folks get between 1-3%. It's critical to understand that the sales person also needs to get their commission, and the SE/presales guy is getting his cut almost like a bonus for bringing the opportunity to the sales person's attention.
This can get tricky, though, because what happens if you have multiple engineers working on one account? You can't very well pay every presales guy who touches every account 1-3%, as your margins will go to hell. In those cases, if you want to keep doing straight percentage, you need to divide it up account by account as opportunities roll in.
The other way to handle that situation is to have revenue targets, and to pay people a bonus based on their achievment, along with a personal target. So, perhaps across all the engineers, they have a target to generate $1m in revenue worth of add-on business in a quarter. If they get that target, each engineer gets $10k as a bonus, plus a variable amount based on their personal contributions. This can cause hard feelings sometimes because it involves passing judgement on people's contributions, but may be more sustainable, and also helps align the presales person with the overall goals.
Which brings me to the last point - impartiality. It's true that sales people are often incentivized to sell things that the customer doesn't need, or at inflated prices, because of their commission structure. However, engineers tend not to think that way, partially because as a percentage of their income, commission represents a dramatically lower amount compared to a sales person, and partially because they understand that if they help sell something the customer really doesn't need, they're going to be the ones who have to implement it or help fix the situation once it's screwed up. Also, if you set the revenue targets to be communal, it helps encourage people to think about the business as a whole, instead of closing one gigantic deal.
Hope this helps.
me@mzi.to
If this fellows customers get wind of their "trusted advisors" getting kickbacks for making sales, they'll be a lot less trusted.
If the OP wishes to compensate his engineers for their time, that's all well and good. But they need to be compensated whether they make a sale or not. Anything less is a conflict of interest for an engineer who is used to operating based on facts.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
in the end sales people live and die on commission
And you wonder why your customers don't like your sales people?
Instead of trying to work around a problem, why not solve it. Pay your sales people properly, and they might start listening to customers instead of trying to make every sale they can (without the customers interests in mind).
When we have customers approach us, we set them up with a technologist: they gather all the details from what the customer needs without trying to sell them anything. the technologist hands the details off to a sales person, who themselves MUST be familiar with the products/services the company sells, who contacts the customer with some ideas of what might help them.
Commissions are for people who don't know the value of what they're selling.
Maybe you should find some less sleazy salesmen. It IS possible to sell a product or service that genuinely helps a client without coming across like a corporate shill. If your salespeople are pushing product like a Bestbuy employee stalking the TV department trying to sell replacement plans, you've found your problem...
Of course, you may not sell as much, and we all know that's the real bottom line...
Consultants will talk about hunting verses farming. Software companies talk about inside verses outside sales. Executives will talk about synergistic commission plans.
What does it all boil down to at the end of day. Create metrics, Measure metrics reward desired behavior.
Do not make bad assumptions - Good Engineers do not always make Good Salesmen. Client satisfaction is an important metric as well. Maybe upgrading your sales team would be a better approach rather than trying to get your delivery team to do sales.
..."Our customers trust our technical people because they aren't part of sales. How can we change that?"
Some people will tell you the simplest answer is don't push your technical staff to be sales people, and there is some merit to this. I've worked in a lot of different "technical" environments, and I could count the number of technical support or engineering staff that "liked" sales on a single hand. But business is business, and if you can make more money, that only ensures their jobs stay secure. Engineers may not recognize this as a valid argument though. They will counter with "us being able to do our jobs without having to sell also keeps this company afloat." They are of course correct, if you didn't need them for the job they are doing... you wouldn't have hired them. So, burdening them with extra responsibilities can have detrimental effects. The last job I worked at had a sales quota for every member of it's technical staff. The staff despised this, despite the fact that the commission they were paid was identical to what the sales staff were paid. Many engineers will strongly dislike sales... so IMO putting a quota on your engineering staff would be a HUGE mistake. That being said, it'd definitely worth giving the engineering staff the tools an incentives to make sales, without making it a requirement. Then you can have the best of both worlds: Engineering making sales, without destroying morale that comes with forcing sales.
So on to how to actually implement it. First off there is nothing worse than there being discrepancy between commission in two departments, assuming the entire sale can be processed by each department of their own accord. If an engineering staff signs up a customer for a product, he should get the same commission the sales staff would get for it. If there was a difference, it wouldn't take long for engineering to find that out, and I promise they will not be pleased that they are getting less commission for doing the same amount of work as their sales counterparts. Having engineers be capable of placing the entire order themselves id ideal. Sales might be a little peeved that engineering can put sales through themselves... but that's like being upset they aren't being handed free sales they don't have to work for anymore. Another commenter suggested a varying commission bracket for inside sales vs outside sales, and this makes a lot of sense to me too.
Now, if engineering is not capable of putting a sale through themselves, and it HAS to be sent to a sales rep... you have a problem. There isn't going to be any one way to do this perfectly. If an engineer sends a "sale" down to sales to be completed, how do you compensate each member appropriately? Well, if you try to split the commission 50/50 you're going to have situations where an engineer says he "sold" a product, and a sales staff says the customer got down and asked 30 minutes more worth of questions, and so he didn't put the engineering staff's name on the sale. This will be common, and it will be a headache. It's also terrible for morale, as THIS is exactly what would create animosity, so that's no good. The other option, which will not disrupt morale or create animosity but will cost you more money, is to have the sales staff put the engineering staff's name on a sale... and give the engineering staff 50% of what you gave the sales staff. Sales is not going to be upset about putting the engineering staff name on now since they get all the commission they were going to get anyways, and the engineering staff will hopefully understand that "closing the sale" part can be tricky and it's worth the extra commission. This has some of it's own problems too though. It leaves the possibility for fraud open a little too easily. If an engineer and a sales staff get friendly, you might notice one of your engineers is pass a LOT of sales down to a specific sales team member.
So, in closing, here is (IMO) the best way to handle it:
Do not have sales quota on your Engineering staff.
Give your engineering staff the tools to fully place an order themselves.
Allow engineering to defer a
Once they learn the slease of the businessman they have the option of going rogue & making much more money on their own terms. Just starting up a servicing business here in CA & I have to say, the assholinness of pushing "system optimization" for another $50 is the hardest part.
Hmm, I had no idea that Michael Scott was a slashdotter.
Don't treat engineers like salesmen. Engineers might look down their nose at the "charlatans", but they can be just like them if their pay depends on it. Instead go for less monetary benefits, like a 3-day weekend. Engineers hate sitting idle and much of their work is thinking, so as long as they can connect from home, you might even get some work done, (and even if they get work done over the weekend, the engineers will still enjoy the freedom). Quaterly sales bonuses based on their pay-grade rather then % of sale, (engineers like to think analytically, and so this will automatically make sense; just make sure you also have performance bonuses, as well, so they will work just as hard at their main job). A paid 3-or-4 day trip could do wonders, to visit family, maybe someplace tropical... maybe a convention... some place to get away.
Another solution would be to get that fancy new piece of equipment they've been asking about, but you can't justify in the normal budget. Maybe even a couple couches in an empty cubical.
What about Compensating Sales People for NOT contributing to Technical work?. I've had so many problems with Sales guys telling the development staff how things should be done without regard to the entire project itself. The sales guys oversell (lie) to a customer and then it's up the the development staff to fix their obligation.
Rather than sales I'd suggest some kind of participation in profits. Perhaps x% of profit above $x is divvied up amongst staff in proportion to their salaries + commission for the year.
It should be clear to engineering staff that when they "make a sale" it's appreciated and noted, a slight nudge forward to promotion maybe, but I really don't think it should be a focus for them.
Trust with customers is important, particularly for repeat business. Your engineers have it, your sales staff do not, and your response is to make your engineering staff like your sales staff?
Try thinking about where do your salespeople's work ends and when should other client-facing people be the main interface between client and company. Agree on a deadline and ensure the client relationship is "owned" in a way that complies with that deadline. I think it's important to ensure that commission is paid a fairly long time after the actual contract signature, so that salespeople are kept honest. On the other hand, I think it's important that account managers and support are given sales targets to keep them aligned with the needs of the business.
I have worked in companies where the first sale is handled by a specific team, who hands over the client to support and account managers, who will take all the commission thereafter. As long as the deadline is clear for everyone involved and the commissions are based on margin, people can live with this kind of agreement without losing sight of the long term goals of the company.
When I call my major vendors, I have a single main sales contact. This person is usually pretty darn smart about what people need and want. When we get to some details that he/she can't answer, they set up a conference with a technical lead (who may or may not also be in sales). While this conference occurs, I can tell that the primary salesman is taking hardcore notes and prepping up so he doesn't have to waste the engineer's time again on this particular subject. I've watched a good amount of these salespeople learn and grow until they no longer need to consult with anyone else.
As a customer, a salesman's admitted lack of knowledge doesn't hurt. In fact it helps strengthen our relationship because he's not only honest, but he still has the ability to point me towards someone who does know. In contrast, I quickly drop salesmen that completely bluff with high confidence (these can lead to expensive mistakes, especially in terms of volume licensing if the vendor blows it).
During lunches and other casual chats, the really good salespeople are genuinely curious about what motivates me and what is exciting me about the direction of our company. This isn't just idle chit chat - they're boning up on their knowledge. Just last week a vendor asked me "What tech news sites do you read?" and proceeded to bust out his notepad and write them down. And some of those special sales/tech pros I talk to are actually sales people that used to be engineers, but love the interaction and incentives of sales. They weren't failed engineers. They were looking for a new challenge with a potential for higher rewards, and they were extremely well equipped to earn those rewards because of their knowledge. The age old adage of "engineers are socially awkward" doesn't always stand true.
That being said:
1. Don't touch your engineers at first. Leave them in their current positions.
2. Start by coordinating some method of training your sales team on the product - connect them with engineers for a while, or get them reading materials. Do this tactfully and lean heavily towards rewarding the engineering team. If your sales team comes off as a bunch of scavengers with no respect for engineering and only want to leech enough to make profits for themselves, your engineers will probably feed them the wrong info and laugh over it later. Prep your sales team accordingly, and reward your engineers accordingly. Engineering will be doing you a huge favor here, don't screw it up.
3. Also set up a way to bring in engineering knowledge on special sales calls. Provide some sort of incentive to engineers and/or an inter-departmental billing process for sales support (when the sales guy calls on the engineer for a conference call). This measures potential abuse of engineering's time from your sales staff and tells a story to management of why engineering projects might not be chugging along as quickly. Also allows you to measure the proficiency of your salesmen (the # of calls should decrease over time for each salesman, and you can figure out the average training time until a new salesman is effective).
4. With the metrics of #3 in hand, you should be able to gage how many full time engineers might be needed for the sales team. Meanwhile you can feel out which of your engineers enjoy this new consulting duty, and see if you can't transition them to a full time sales role (provided they aren't all senior engineers whose salaries would destroy the sales margin).
5. Once you transition any engineers over, they are now officially in the sales group as "product experts" or something of the sort. Get them out of engineering, make a clean break from their old jobs, and start providing them with the same sales incentives as others (if you already haven't been giving them a percentage for their previous consulting). They won't turn into some greedy self-serving salesmen nightmares. If they worked on the products before, they're going to trust and have faith in the product enough to be solid salesmen.
6.
Yes I have, and I do.
I am currently a VP of pre-sales, which is basically the technical role you are describing. Our people do services, and help with sales.
One good comp is to give the technical folks a bonus when sales hits their number for the quarter. This can be cheaper than just comping them straight off the deal they contributed to, and it's very effective as sales will often consult with them often, on lots of deals, which is difficult to track and quantify. You don't want to discourage that behavior, because it will create the best sales and technical sales people you will ever see otherwise.
Another way is through time off, "toys", etc... Technical people often value those things differently than sales people will.
Do not take away from your sales commission to pay techs. You will discourage the team behavior that is necessary to get where you are going.
You will also find that spending that extra money, above and beyond your comp, pays off. Why? Because you can expect bigger deals, and you can expect some extra effort out of the techs, because there is money, or some material comp attached to it. Sales people will do what it takes to chase a deal, because that is how they are paid. You want your techs to do this when it matters, which is why you do the comp. Ideally, you will see some bonding with your sales and tech people, and that is worth gold. Encourage that, knowing you will lose a tech or two to sales for it, but they will be some of the best sales people there ever are, and you can get more techs mentored in anyway, where you can't always get new technical sales people.
Yes, your cost of sales will go up, but so will your deal size, and or number of closes in your pipe. Been there, done that many times.
Blogging because I can...
all sales people have them and it sounds like you even have one.
Dam right all sales people want is the closeing, and they will say what they need to.
I've spent a lot of time on this subject and consulting companies trying to come up with the right strategy. My approach is this - pre-sales engineers should be "Sales Engineers", even though their technical, they represent the company and should be promoting sales. I've been a pre-sales engineer for over 12 years, and make a high six-figure salary so I really enjoy what I do. I'm not interested in moving up the corporate ladder or into management. I've gone on sales calls where the account manager simply introduces me, hands his card over to the customer and says if you need pricing let me know, otherwise my SE will handle it from here. I've also gone on 12 legged sales calls to large corporations that get frustrated when the entire sales team shows up. They just want the technical details. A strong sales engineer should be extroverted enough to be a good sales person and introverted enough to do the engineering part - attributes that are very, very difficult to find, especially today it seems. Most system engineers can only see as far as the technology and technical objectives of their engagement - a sales engineer understands the technical as well as business objectives, and can spot an opportunity and approach it effectively so that the end result is sales. My last favorite sales people are "gathers" or engage in "transactional" selling and there's no shortage of them. The joke has been for years - they just sit around the fax machine and wait for an order to come in. The best account managers are the "hunters" and that still engage in "relationship" selling.
clientsvcs@gmail.com
Any salesman will be happy to share a commission with you, provided you actually sell something. However, from your description I can only see that you are reacting to a specific customer's wish to purchase something. Neither have you actively made the customer come to a decision to purchase something from your company, nor have you done anything with regard to the administrative side of sales.
In short: You have done what you are already paid to do, nothing more. Had you done anything less, you would have actively hurt the company that pays you to do your job.
I am head of sales for a software company and I expect support in sales from our engineers. That is covered by their salary. My base salary, however, is a lot less than theirs and I actually take financial risks to be compensated only when I or my sales team do well. You, on the other hand, want a commission on top of a risk-free salary and in that case I would either demand a cut in your salary if you ask for a commission, or I would tell you to be happy with what you earn.
You can't have both.
However, if you feel comfortable in dealing with a customer and if you are willing to put some effort into learning all the soft skills necessary to be a good sales rep, you will probably be an enrichment to both the sales and the technical department. Few sales people do actually understand deeply technical stuff and can rarely transport customers' technical input to the engineers.
Someone who speaks both languages is a valuable asset and I would immediately hire you and make sure you make lots of money.
Get ready to fucking fail. Your customers will start looking at your competition. Short term gains will be up, but long-term, you're fucked.
Why do you think the salesmen are mistrusted and the engineers are trusted? Ever bother thinking of that? It's probably due to salesmen lying only slightly less than politicians for their bread and butter, and engineers being about as factually oriented as you can get. Sales types are hated by engineers for this very reason: sales will commit engineers to one lie after another without second thoughts, making things difficult. It's just a lie to the salesman, but it's actually something the engineer has to perform.
Furthermore, competent 'engineers' don't need to be told to "upsell" products. They'll recommend the most technically appropriate (per their knowledge/experience/etc.) product to the customer. This is not only why they are called engineers, it's why they are trusted. If you try that to try and 'improve the bottom line' you're a fool and don't understand your customers or your employees.
Furthermore, the competent engineers will become disatisfied with falsifying things or pushing products, and look elsewhere. I've seen it happen. If they don't become dissatisfied and look elsewhere directly, they're going to start asking for larger and larger raises because they dislike the work. I've seen it happen time and time again.
On the other hand... getting rid of sales outright might improve the bottom line, as well. It really depends on what you'll be having the engineers do. (Broadly speaking your requirements do not sound that broad.) Overall, I'd say axing 'sales' is a good idea. Keep marketing, kill sales.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
so you want to go from good geek squad to best buy geek squad.
i don't understand why sales people need commissions in order to do a good job. how about giving them stock options or bonuses just like everyone else?
surely a work force that's interested in furthering the interests of the company as a whole is better for the company than one that's only interested in their own well-being?
if you're getting a commission then you're less likely to be a team player, less likely to find innovative ways to collaborate with your colleagues, less likely to benefit the company.
I agree with Potatohead (12771) in the assessment of incentives to reward technical personnel for getting the sales of material. I have been in this position on both sides of the fence, and although you do want to reward technical staff for helping, the percentage of the sale can overall have other implications within the company (positive and negative). Instead, the bonuses, "toys", time off, etc are more effective, provided you make sure the technical staff know why they are getting it to encourage the sales again! Good luck!
Pay your engineers a salary, make customer consultations one of the goals and factors for career advancement and raises.
If you want to give them a percentage cut, give them shares in the company, so their incentive is to benefit the company, not just wring dollars out of customers.
I used to head up product and pre-sales in a company that we were trying to turn around. The way we got around the issue was that sales people had commission for each and every sale but for engineers, that was scoffed upon. So we increased the overall bonus bucket and made 30% of bonus of engineers and 50% for pre-sales engineers (Who also used to get commission for sales, but not as high as sales people) dependent on overall annual sales. The bonus was paid every 6 months so we could tweak it as we needed (e.g. if we needed a product done within tight timelines, we could dial up the engineers' bonus on hitting the timelines rather than sales).
Must say it is all easier said than done though, and it did take engineers sometime to get into the new mindset. However, once a few of them started getting bonuses and public recognition, people gradually started seeing value in that (I must admit, the first couple of times we actually paid bonuses even though the guys maybe didn't fully deserve it, but once that was done, that motivated others to do better). The most important change that happened was that when sales people asked engineers for help, they actually were willing to help, rather than considering it as a distraction as they used to do earlier.
What's under yellowstone?
They have no soul left. The world IS a worse place because they exist.
It's been pushed too far. We once had just salespeople. An ok thing. Then it became sales and marketing. And it all went to shit.
These people are soulless greedy fucks.
Why the hell would any tech want to give up their soul?
Fuck you man. I like my soul. I might need it.
As a 'consulting' firm, your product is (or should be) the expertise of your engineering staff. Your sales staff should be out beating the brush for new customers or work. Once that contact has been made, engineering steps in to deliver the product, so to speak. Engineering staff should be paid their salary, which is based on your hourly consulting rate.
If you are selling some other product or service, and not an engineering service itself, then contact between your sales staff and engineering may be optional and a by-product of the sale. If this contact results in additional service work or product sales being brought in, then engineering participation in commissions may be warranted. But there could be a problem with your primary sales staff if they perceive that they are getting (small) commissions on the initial sale but no reward when engineering expands revenue beyond that point.
Have gnu, will travel.
that breed of tech person, who has sales skills.
They are fairly rare. I found out I am one of them. After jumping careers a few times to avoid outsource waves, I find pre-sales type work a lot of fun. I do more generalist type work now, though I still do direct project implementation work too. The most rewarding, and difficult part happens to be the project planning where sales has sold something, and the customer expectations need to be managed. Often, these two are different, despite work to get agreement and alignment.
I will build plans and "sell" that implementation strategy for a best fit for longer term success, and it's often not easy, particularly when it involves enterprise software (read, big, messy stuff), scope creep, etc...
What I have found is the "trusted advisor" role can be maintained with credence, so long as I remain willing to talk about product weaknesses. That's hard, because everybody wants their product to just work, but products don't just work. Being realistic about that actually pays off huge, and it took me forever to make that case.
Here's the case:
When something is sold that isn't a good fit, there is a seriously large opportunity cost. Technical people have to do heroics to get things slammed in and working. That consumes time needed to qualify other deals, implement things, perform services, etc... Each bad project or deal costs the margin of that deal, and quite possibly a few others. Not ok, and that's a sufficient incentive to advise the customer, given they are told that.
It's perfectly ethical to tell them the costs of failure, and the importance of qualification no matter what vendor they deal with. I have a lot of success with that, often forming relationships that pay off down the line, because everybody appreciates that vendor who can say, "not this time", it's not good for us, and it's not good for you.
Pre-sales people often perform this task, where the sales person doesn't have the qualification ability, nor the drive to do it. Pre-sales type people, or that "sales engineer" type, can and will do it, and ideally do it early, seriously improving the productivity of the sales person, and the enterprise as a whole. Saying "no" actually matters in this way, and it's as important as saying "yes" at the macro level.
That's what you want out of your more sales oriented techs. The bond between sales person and the techs, or just tech, is key to this, because a sales person needs to trust them just as much when they say no as when they say yes. Good for everybody.
Structure your comp plan to encourage that, and you will benefit from it. Just thought I would clarify some of what I read up thread.
Blogging because I can...
Profit sharing for the non sales staff, it worked quite well at a place I used to work.
I know it's a little unfair to lay it out like this, but it sounds like:
Customers hate and distrust sales people. Customers like and trust tech people. So we want to turn the people they like into the people they don't like."
This seems like a dangerous direction for your company.
The answer should yes if your efforts directly contributed to the sale of a product. If the decision to go with a product was based on your efforts, you should absolutely get compensated for it.
"...without the fancy corporate speak... ...empower... ...service orientated. ...trusted advisors... ...opportunity for a complementary... ...remunerate...
Thank you for not saying "synergy". It's Sunday and I have too much to do today to pull out my phone and start playing Angry Birds while nodding thoughtfully.
I work for a software company that compensates everyone. Engineers start with a nice salary and get a yearly bonus that is determined by how well the company is doing. The exact amount varies, but I can generally expect 2.5 to 5 pay checks worth bonus at the end of the year.
Our fiscal first quarter ended a few weeks ago we had exceeded 150% of our goals (and our goals are always ambitious), so sales and engineering went out in a limo that seated 20 and visited various wine tasting rooms and then had dinner. It was arranged by sales as a thanks to engineering support.
You need to sit back and look at your language, and what it says about what you're trying to do.
You have a team that's trusted by customers, and you want to *empower* *them* to think like salespeople? When your corporate culture has produced salespeople so lacking in integrity that your own customer base has come to the conclusion that those salespeople are only interested in "alleviating them of their money"?
Your technical team is working *fine*. Don't break it.
Your sales team sounds dysfunctional and broken. Fix it.
As a general rule, fix what's broken before you mess with what works. This is counter to most corporate cultures (which has a tendency to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by trying to 'fix' the goose to lay larger eggs), so don't try to ape others without some analysis.
In the end, the best sales technique is to make it trivially easy for someone to give you money, and to make something that someone would want to give you money for. In this world, making it easy for the technical staff to say "oh, we have a product that'll solve that problem, let me give you a single-user ninety-day license for that." would go a long way towards exposing your products to your customers without spoiling your technical team's reputation.
(And WTF is this 'service orientated' crap? I doubt the technical team would describe themselves that way, although they might say 'service oriented'.)
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
To clarify, our technical people are viewed by our customers as trusted advisors and when they see a opportunity for a complementary sale/network refresh/project they often involve our sales team, however when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money! I'm interested in what the Slashdot community thinks of how we should remunerate engineering teams for this 'sales' work (which would cost us commission to sales people anyway) but in a way that doesn't foster any animosity between sales and tech staff because in the end sales people live and die on commission.
Thirty pieces of silver?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I was working technical support for a small software company in Oregon and I had a knack for selling some of the more complex (and expensive) features in our apps. One day I asked for part of that commission and the sales guy got really pissed. Well that was the last call I ever helped their entire dept with.
....you could pay some or all of the engineers to teach the sales people the technical details of the products they are selling?
it's because the tech rep is honest, douche bag! the tech rep goes in and chats to the customer about the benefits and failings of his kit and how he's working on the problems. He's up front about the competition and talks about what's possible and (more importantly) not possible with the instrument. He has no motivation to lie to you to satisfy the parasitic venture capitalist that wants 1,000,000% return on his investment to maintain his 3rd home in Marbaja. The customer is scared of the salesman because they know they will tell them anything, charge them as much as they can, and run away as soon as possible, leaving them in a world of shit to explain to their boss. Nobody trusts somebody with spikey hair and spikey shoes that says "yeah baby" and makes pistol pointing finger gestures. Stop lying, change the culture of commission based pay, hang venture capitalists, and sales will improve. World peace will also follow, as well as airborne pigs.
And sales and technical support were compensated based on a concept we called "total compensation". Sales had a much much larger portion of their "total comp" based on their individual sales goal achievement. Tech guys had only a relatively small portion of their "total comp" based on sales/revenue/profit figures, not enough that the lure of lucre distorted their ability to speak the truth. And some of the figures the tech guys and gals were getting paid on were company wide figures and revenue based with much less of a focus on even a subset of the organizations achievement or on an individual sale. So the focus was on company success which of course meant keep the customer pleased so revenue kept inflowing, For exceptional efforts (long term and with engineering excellence as part of the criteria) tech folks could also receive bonuses. The bonus or incentive payments for the tech never impacted the sales person's incentive with was probably 6-12 times as much as a percentage when compared to the tech persons.
The planned total comp for the techs had to be competitive even if sales goals for a time period were not reached in total lest the techs flee to another company. So the planned % of total tech's comp was on the order of 95% to 110% of what we figured was the competitive range.
This approach was for customer impacting techs, not for pure developers who were paid more of a competitive-survey based straight salary
In all my time, I never lied once to a customer nor was I asked to. Emphasized positives yes...but never hid anything and always came out feeling uncompromised.
The solution is not to turn your consultants in to sales people, or to attempt to coerce them into becoming an extension of sales.
As others have pointed out, this is how it works everywhere in the industry.
If you are a product company, and you have a consulting staff, you don't "pollute" them by having them also overtly serve the sales organization, you use them as your "feet on the ground" to gather intel about what is going on inside the customer account and to help you figure out how to best align your (sales) goals with what the customer is doing. A good sales person does not ask the people in the field to compromise themselves as trusted advisors to the customer, but they will try to figure out what is going on in the account in order to make the best pitch to the customer.
Easy.
What makes this sound like it won't be so easy for the OP is that he claims to work for an "IT consulting firm" not a product company. If you have a sales staff, like it or not, you're working a product company.
I don't get commission and I don't want it. I get my salary and profit sharing and that's it. The field engineers make more than me and the salesmen too, but I'm happy with my compensation level. If I want to do what they do I can migrate to one of those roles within the company - I'm capable and experienced in both. People do migrate between roles where I work. But that's not what I want to do. I'm happy where I'm at. Frankly I wouldn't do my work any differently if I were compensated differently, but I would be less comfortable about it.
Getting commission or other incentives on individual deals just wouldn't feel right to me. But that's just me. Other people might be differently motivated. For all I know other folks in my role where I work are compensated differently, and that might be your answer. People are individuals and need to be offerred the carrot that works for them. Some might get more motivated by things like tradeshow trips or training excursions or something. Some might be unable to handle directly tied compensation and lose their objective focus of what's best for the customer and put your "trusted advisor" role at risk.
All three roles are important. Disparaging one or building another up to be preeminent isn't the right tack to take. We are a team and defer to each other in our respective fields of expertise and focus.
I am going to read carefully to see what other people think though.
The incentive is that when the techie helps the sales team, sales is able to generate revenue to pay the techie's salary. I have been in this position thinking I should receive a cut of the sales person's commission when helping to close a deal. Unfortunately, that is just wishful thinking. If you want to make more money sell your soul and join the sales team.
Tom Smykowski: Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the *&^%(@# customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I was in that position in the early 80s, tech eng support for what was then called a "bureau operation" (online timeshared services). We — and the sales team — were regarded by the clients in exactly the two ways you describe, Our solution was that a tech eng whose effort led to a sale was rewarded by the sales person direct, and the onus and amount were left to the sales person. While this has its risks, it was a relatively small operation (a couple of hundred people in one building), so everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew who was supporting which client. Tech eng were always involved in the business, from the first call through pre-sales, demo, negotiation, contract, implementation, and post-sales, so the opportunities for doing a bit of biz dev were good, and the sales people appreciated it. It was the first time I had worked closely with sales, and on that occasion it worked well. YMMV.
Your language stinks of marketing bullshit, and you're trying to infect your engineering team with marketing bullshit.
"...empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people" ??
They will know it, and will hate you for it.
You want your engineers to flob for new business? Make them happy with the work they are doing and give them money.
Let them know you notice when they speak positively about the company to customers, when they inquire about doing more work for the customer... and give them a BIG fucking bonus. Make sure you make the reason for the big bonus clear. Put all of the marketing speak away. "X consistently spoke positively about the company and promoted new sales."
I am assuming, this being slashdot, a reference to a book is not going to get read, but "Punished by rewards" is right up your alley. Written by Alfie Kohn, and it takes up how your incentives (bonuses, commissions, whatever) is going to lead to things like your salespeople not being trusted.
The technical teams already have their hands full supporting your systems and customers. Asking them to learn about pricing models and sales techniques will alienate and piss off a lot of them. If a techie wanted to be a sales person, they'd have signed up as a sales rep.
Your sales team, on the other hand, should be trained in the technology they're selling so they can answer customer questions. It's called "knowing your product." And if you don't know you're product, you aren't a good sales rep, just another lizard in a suit.
If your customers "clam up" when transferred to a sales rep, your sales reps aren't doing a good job. Our sales reps get along with our customers, answer the questions they can, and bring in techies on the hard questions. They work with the customer and earn their trust, the same as our techies do. Your problem isn't transferring calls to sales -- it's that your sales team is probably putting on too much pressure to buy upgrades and services that the customer doesn't really need. An unfortunately common situation.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Firstly, Your doin' it wrong. (tm).
In-house engineering consultants. You need some. Give em the stable standard Engineer wage and keep them doing light-weight engineering tasks so they keep the tech fresh. These are people that "don't quite make it" with the engineers on competency. Usually they're the "strugglers" that only just get all the tech but aren't really comfortable. So. You need a few people in a hybrid role. They're not exactly sales and not full-time eng. They still do eng so they can keep abrest of the tech yet they understand enough to be able to help sales as time goes on.
Your other option.. is train up sales people. This won't end well. But.. re-use some of the bottom of the heap people.
\e/
Or the commission check.
Years ago I worked for a small consulting firm as a field engineer, and later as a consulting engineer, and eventually as CTO. We had an almost identical problem, and there isn't really an elegant solution, unfortunately.
You're customers tend to trust the engineers they work with, because the engineer fixes their problems. He offers solutions. He says, "if we do this, you will see this benefit" and the customer sees it first hand. Customers tend to distrust salespeople simply because they are salespeople. Most people just don't trust a salesperson. Any salesperson. You deal with salespeople because you need to, not because you want to.
However, engineers on the ground have a tremendous advantage on the sales front, and you want your engineers to "sell" for you. They can clearly see the customers' needs, and recommend solutions with good reasons behind them. The best thing you can have is engineers out there at the client site, looking for "pick up" business. That doesn't mean making shit up (or worse, breaking something) just to get a sale. But being sales-minded enough to recognize a customer need (even if the customer doesn't), and making a recommendation. "I see your X is getting outdated and has had Y failures in the past year. You might want to think about replacing that." In a service-oriented business it can also mean picking up some extra billable time at the client site while there for a scheduled service ("I've finished taking care of that problem for you. By the way, I noticed X when I was fixing the other thing. That might cause you some problems down the road, would you like me to take care of that while I'm here?").
The problem comes up when your engineers end up doing the vast majority of the "selling" to the client, and the salesperson just becomes a passive order-taker collecting a commission for data entry. This can create some real animosity amongst the engineering staff, who see someone else collecting commissions on their "sales," while they get nothing for the extra work. The "sales engineer" or "consulting engineer" can get it even worse.
When I became a consulting engineer, I was tasked with working with our sales team to make sales. In 99% of the cases though, the client meeting would go like this:
1. Me and the salesperson meet with the client(s).
2. The salesperson does the glad-handing and introductions.
3. The salesperson turns the meeting over to me.
4. I talk to the customer, determine their needs and constraints, design a solution, answer questions, create an implementation plan, and then turn over the hardware requirements list to the salesperson to quote.
5. The salesperson closes the meeting, handshakes all around, let's do lunch, etc.
Then the salesperson would go back to the office, plug the part numbers into a quote, send it to the client, and in most cases sit back and collect a commission on a sale. Me? Nothing. Obviously, this was a problem for me.
So, solutions? Well, we tried a number of things - none of which really fixed the problem. Salespeople don't like to share their commissions, or their clients. If you say they have to split their commission with an engineer because they took him to the client meeting, they'll stop taking engineers to the client meetings. Then you have botched implementations. If you offer to give the engineers commissions on sales they make to the client, the salespeople balk because that's "their client" and they want to manage the relationship (and this reason is not totally without merit, you generally do better with one salesperson dedicated to a client). At best, you can lose the salesperson over this issue. At worst, you can lose the client.
We started giving commissions on labor to the field engineers, once they met a weekly quota. The more hours they worked, the more they got in bonus. So, if they drummed up extra work (since almost everything we did was straight service or product+service), they benefited - even if the s
I don't know the details, but it really sounds like your sales people need to be seriously put into the background, and you need hire and/or train some technical evangelists centered on each product you're trying to sell. I say "evangelists" because they don't handle the details of sales, but merely act as a knowledgable PR interface to potential customers. They can answer questions about the technology, can explain its pros and cons, can do the high-level persuasion, organize and lead speak at trade shows, etc. Evangelism is a technical PR position, and is not sales.
A lot of tech companies seem to think they only need are good technicians and good salespeople. Sales people don't know where to draw the line on promises to customers, and are motivated by something other than product merit. You need a group of people who bridge the gap who are not necessarily technicians, but who are closely related to the technical side. These technical evangelist/PR people are not going to be paid commissions on individual sales. Nor do they do the technical work, but know more than enough about the technical details to promote your products intelligently, and become the 'go to' people for your customers and the products and the industry itself.
Like a PR director, the lead evangelist is a director-level position. Technical workers should back up evangelists, but should not be responsible for building the image of the products and services, or really even answering layman's questions about the technology. Nor should they be engaging the customer in discussions about new features. And as you said, sales people are not well trusted with the task of persuasion, or worse yet, as a technical resource. Tech evangelists are definitely engineering-trained, but have enough liberal arts to know how to write press releases, make speeches and maybe some PR/Mass Comm education to organize events. There are people who do exist with this kind of dual LAS/COMPSCI background (I am one of them) but you could easily move an experience technologist with good speaking skills or a technically-adept salesperson into this position.
People don't have to be compartmentalised but often they will find their niche and want to stay there. ( To read the detail see http://vulpeculox.net/treems/LRC.pdf )
You can imagine the conflict when the sales people are desperate to have something they can demonstrate but the engineers don't want to release something that is buggy and not ready yet.
Possible answer part 1 Get the sales bods to talk to buyers and let techie speak unto techie. Each will be experienced and effective communicators in their roles. Obviously this requires team work - perhaps you should 'assign a techie to a sales bod' and see if they can work out how to complement each other.
Possible answer part 2 Pay sales people for getting the business and techies for delivering. If both understand their interdependence then they may work together.
I'm sales, in a small consulting house (custom software development, from web sites to drivers). Customers indeed have a different, mostly more negative, attitude towards salesmen than towards techies.
- if customers are really bothered by your sales guys, maybe you have the wrong ones. Consulting sales are technical ones, sales need to be able to handle that at least in part. Also, in my experience, consulting sales are not so much about the sale, as about a long-term relationship between the consulting firm and the client, so high-pressure sales, that work so well when selling carpets, don't work that well for consulting.
- your sales guys should be really focused on existing customers and on consultants placed with customers: that's where the easiest sales are - identified projects with customers that already know you-. That might also be tainting your impression of consultants as good sales reps: they *are* in contact with the easiest projects.
- as you say, clients trust techies... do you want to risk changing that ? Do you also want to risk endangering the always shaky relationship between sales and techs by making them compete for the easiest, best sales ?
Before trying to have an all-sales workforce, which always sounds sexy but mostly doesn't work, I'd try improving the sales-techs relationship:
- make sure they do regular account reviews together, where they pool the knowledge of what's going on with a client, who's who, opportunities and issues
- make sure sales guys have good pre-sales support, with one of those super-techies that are both extremely knowledgeable&experienced, and socially sophisticated, available for key pre-sales pitches. There are not that many of those.
- I'm assuming you tech guys have bonuses linked to completing projects on time. Maybe you could add a customer satisfaction survey, and a project detection objective ?
- Ask your guys what they think of the sales guys, and what the customers' feedback is. They can help you separate the wheat from the chaff.
If you really want to help sales as a tech guy, set up a training center, and use your consultants as teachers, rotating them as much as possible. You'll get oodles of contacts within existing customers, new contacts, establish a very good relationship with customers and prospects...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Asking the technical people to sell will push them to leave...... at least at the companies I've worked at, this was the case.
If they knew going in they might be required to do sales, it would be different. Just bring it up and see the looks they make at each other. They'll be fixing up their resumes that night.
Seriously, if they wanted to do sales they would get a job doing that. Of course the customers trust their opinion, customers ask me all the time what they should buy and whether the sales guy is full of crap because I'll tell them. I'm not busting my ass trying to make something work that a machine wasn't designed to do, because I will be the one taking all the abuse when it doesn't work.
Leave them to the technical stuff, they will create return customers for you.
Get lost with your "empower" crap while your at it. No one wants your motivational sales posters.
I'd urge you and anybody else involved in the decision to read Rework first.
There's a chapter in it called 'Everyone in the front lines'. The bottom line is, that everyone should be involved in directly solving the problems of those whos money the company is running on. I.E., the customers. Everyone should be scheduled in a few hours front-facing time, and if it only is in the companies callcenter or as a protocollist in a sales meeting.
I personally think in a company worth while working for everybody should know a bit about everything. At least the fun parts. Nobody needs to know the mess we go through when version X of software y doesn't run on system Z and we try to figure out what's wrong. The messy and tedious parts are for the pros of the field in question.
Likewise I needn't know where exactly the janitor keeps the window cleaner and what a fuss it is to get the installation company to finish the newest CAT5 layout on schedule, but I should be able to operate the dishwasher and know where the stuff is I need to keep my desk and monitor clean. I also needn't know every single sales statistic in the industry and whether the market we're currently aiming for is worth the 15% discount our current pitch is demanding.
But I'd actually expect a CEO of a software company to be able to understand the difference between a web and a native client UI and the ups and downs of both. I'd also expect a programmer to know where the company he's working for is currently getting its money from, and whether his work is directly related to that or he's currently prototyping for the next round of products. And I'd expect him to know what colorful buttons or neat features the sales-team needs to be able outsell the competition or justify a version upgrade to existing customers.
In a Nutshell, I'd expect everybody in a company to actually give a shit. If that's not the case, then the politics and x-department bickering starts. That's usually the time to leave and look for a new job.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
wow don't you have any real project manager in your company?
...reward them with status. Very good technical folk work hard at being 'good' - reward them with status (you could even try some gamification). Very good sales people work hard at being 'rich' - reward them with $.
Simple?
When I did sales work that sprang from my technical consulting, I rarely got anything. Then I spoke up. The deal we reached was that I would split the commission 50-50 with the salesperson if I did these things:
1. Wrote the proposal, both the sales and technical. I was writing up the tech proposal anyways.
2. I made the presentation and got the approval.
3. The salesperson was only required to draft contracts, get pricing, and arrange delivery of the hardware (if any).
Only complaint I had was when I sold a project to a client, not knowing they had turned away the salesperson repeatedly - he failed to make the technical case for the project, largely because he was trying to avoid involving me. I wond that too, since the boss told this tool he could avoid the entire conflict by giving up the account. Oh, and I piled on asking for the entire commission, seeing as I had brought the job in after a year of failure. I was happy with half.
But this requires you to do more than what you're doing now. Probably.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The minute said technical person takes money from a company to suggest their product, they are no longer considered a "trusted advisor". That much should be blatantly obvious, even to you.
we're trying to empower our engineering team to think a little like sales people instead of being purely service orientated.
You're fucked.
Certain skills come with certain mindsets. The brilliant technical people simply don't think like the brilliant sales people. What you call "empower" is going to make them miserable, less productive and worse at the job they should be doing.
And I'm dead serious about that. My last job was being the technical guy in the finance department who acted as go-between. And that's a setup I strongly urge you to consider as an alternative. Appoint someone who can cross worlds - and they are rare - to act as an interface. You don't want to make your tech people think like sales people. Because not thinking like sales people is what makes them good at being tech people.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The role is neither that of sales nor of engineering. You need a Business Analyst to do the grinding. Convert one of your Sales gals into a BA and have her sleep with an engineer and your problem is solved.
That's quite true, and the solution many technical sales groups try is to pair a salesman and a high-end technical architect. It's a technique developed during boom times and not all that great at the rest of the time.
It sort of works like this:
1. Sales rep inflates potential sales figures for sales pipeline to increase his base income.
2. Salesman does not meet his inflated targets in 1 year, gets fired, goes to another company; rinse and repeat.
3. Everyone starts looking at salesman's pre-sales guy with an eyebrow up, thinking "Are you still here?"
There is no traditional item 4 for pre-sales guy.
Moral: stay the hell out of pre-sales, no matter what they offer you. It's a trap, there is no cake at the end, and I've seen this happen a number of times (often to me, and I'm glad to say I'm over it.)
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Sales people are "coin operated" There is a purity of motive there you shouldn't mess with. :)
Nearly every "high" tech company I've worked for has a position called "SE" for "Sales Engineer". Hire some of those.
It's nice when your engineers understand how money moves so that they can hopefully understand the necessity of at least some attempt at delivery discipline (deadlines, quality, feature sets, etc.). And it's nice when your sales people have at least a dim understanding of the difficulty of delivering on the same (diverse platforms, crufty code, complexity, etc.)
What you want is *appreciation* and respect for what the other "side" does, rather than make them be more like each other.
You need a tie your engineering incentive to delivering a market ready quality product on time. Not to closing a sale.
Man, that Coca Cola mission statement is a load of sales tripe. Personally, over the years I've become completely sick of working in places where you get in trouble for not expressing the expected enthusiasm for stupid, so-called, "mission statements" like that. There is nothing in that Coca Cola mission statement that isn't either blindingly obvious standard operating procedure for the business they're in or overblown fill-in-the-bullet-point busy work. Seriously, when their "vision" is a bullet point pseudo-alliterative list that looks like an early teen wrote it, people who have real work to do tend to feel nothing but contempt when their supervisors expect them to get excited about this stuff.
Not to discount the idea of a mission statement. If Coca Cola decided to build a moon base by 2035, or even just to completely change their business model, or just developed some new goal other than: "make and sell beverages" (from which all of the stuff about doing market research, developing new recipes, advertising, etc. can be simply inferred), a mission statement might make some sense. If it's defining real goals it makes sense. When the "mission" can be pretty clearly stated as "business as usual", then they should just pencil that in and get back to work. If they really, truly want to make some part of their statement a true goal, such as "be a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities", then they shouldn't plop it down in among a bunch of stuff they clearly put in there just to fill space.
Teach your sales people computers and send them with.
you're halfway to sales already. :)
I worked in a small specialized high tech company that build semi custom process monitoring systems based on spectroscopy. We tried having direct sales force and independent sales representatives and a mix of both with varying success. For about a year we also compensated engineers with a sales override of 5% on the products they were specifically responsible for. While it wasn't a scientific test, sales that year were significantly better and went down when it was removed. The sales force got better help from the engineers and the engineers felt more appreciated. Or product group is still in business after over 30 years but I don't think it ever made a profit because the cost of providing a fully capable staff for such a complex product was never supported by our sales volume. We continue to exist because of the value we created for our customers. We were bought by a series of companies who each though they could add the magic ingredient to make us profitable with such a valuable product line. We are now a tiny footnote in a 40 billion dollar conglomerate. I personally am retired to New Mexico doing photography video and web design.
I certainly understand the motivation, but selling....or....particularly closing deals....is a skill, just as is your technical skill. If you can close deals and are really good at selling, then you can go do that because you have that skill. The only commissions I can see you trying to get given the technical skills are those related to product development - do you want to put your salary at risk for the possibility that your product will make a ton of money? Thats what start-ups do in many cases - offer tech people stock and other incentives that are - in essence - commission.
But...in your case, I'd suggest that it doesn't make sense!
See, Slashdot is populated by a lot of computer geeks and nerds, who are traditionally loners and maybe only work with an immediate small group of people. Now, engineers can be many things in many fields, but they are on the whole more socially adjusted than computer geeks. In fact, judging from my younger brother who is a civil engineer, and my father whio is an aerospace engineer, they are downright cocky. Maybe it is because the stature and glamor attached to the engineering profession. Naturally, when a client meets and engineer, versus a "sales" rep, they tend to defer to their expertise.
My two cents on the matter is don't break the trust of your customers by mutating your engineers into sales people. If you do, then you will have the worst of both worlds when your customers won't trust your engineers AND won't buy your products. An ethical engineer will not hesitate to say that they can't do something a client wants if they think there are safety or technical issues. Train your salespeople better instead.
we have this at our company, and it applies to ALL assoicates. From the receptionist to the janitor to the techs. You turn in a sales lead that turns into a sale, you get between $50 and $150 depending on the size and profitability of the job. In our case its designed for anyone to be able to get paid referrals from freinds/family/etc, or if you are out and about and you see a problem that our company can fix you turn it in.
In my case I am an inside engineer that has no real customer contact. I have been paid leads where I find the product we sell and service (that is required by law to have) has not been maintained properly by the property owner. Our sales guys walks in to a business he knows for a FACT needs our services, make an easy sale and I get $50.
So in this case, the Engineer talks up the need to the customer and gets him to buy in, hands in the "solid lead" form and the sales weasel takes over and closes the deal. Done and Done.
Rather than getting any incentive on a deal-by-deal basis, I worked for a company that paid engineers bonuses only if the entire sales team (a branch office, for examples) made it's goal. It was diffused enough from the daily deal frenzy but close enough to sales that we all wanted to help makes sales happen.
Getting engineer's pay too close to any particular deal and it becomes more commission like, in which case their salaries should be dropped they should be live off commission like sales critters do
Ha. Sales person and engineer are interchangeable? Ha!!! Never going to happen. Well, almost never.
Our shop had salesman/engineer teams. The salesman would get an initial contact and work with a customer to define a need. The engineer, as part of his daily work, would review the need with the salesman and develop a solution. If the solution was a quick, turnkey solution, the salesman would present it to the customer and work his magic. IF the solution was more complicated and required maintenance, a non-trivial setup, etc., the engineer would visit the customer with the salesman and both would work the sale together. I was an engineer in this pair, but, unusually, I HAD sales experience and also know how to handle customers. Consequently, my team had double the close rate and double the upsell rate of any other team.
Pay for sales people was a modest base plus commission. Engineers were decently compensated, earned an additional 2% on customer sales that involved a customer visit and presentation (at only a 1% reduction to the salesman's commission, this worked out for the company since engineer involved sales always involved higher margins). If, while on a technical call, an engineer made customer contact that resulted in additional product or services sales, the engineer and salesman would evenly split 4% on hardware/software and 10% on labor (very large margins there).
There was also a bonus program for salesman and engineers separately that awarded sales above a certain level and the top seller for each group. Obviously, sales targets for salesman were higher, but, it wasn't unheard of for an engineer to convince a customer that a high dollar item and service package for it was worth it and outsell all the salesmen in a particular quarter.
The danger is making sure that your engineers are being efficient as engineers first and that your salesmen start to focus only on high margin sales instead of cultivating customer relationships.
Also, as is painfully obvious, some engineers should be kept away from customers at all costs.
This seems to be a pretty common problem. Honestly, I don't see what the problem is with giving the engineers a commission. Yes, your salespeople may feel threatened -- maybe they should. If the customer doesn't trust the salespeople, then it sounds like the salesperson isn't doing a very good job. When the company has to pay another resource to do sales, especially a resource that could be billing hours to a client, that hurts everybody. It sounds to me like salespeople all across the industry need to provide a minimum level of technical competence, or face losing commissions to people who can provide that competence.
One example I saw of that was a salesguy that refused to answer any of my questions and flatly stated that I was wasting my time because he plays golf with the General Manager of the company I was doing consulting work for at the time, and that we would be buying what he was selling no matter what. He misunderstood that the GM was more interested in saving money than keeping golfing buddies happy. If I'd been an actual employee worrying about keeping my head down instead of a consultant that did not give a shit about upsetting the GM it's possible that the the slimy sales tactic would have worked. Instead we got our info and got something that did the job we wanted from somebody else for less than half the price.
So many places seem to take weeks weighing your wallet before you get any idea of a price. I now work for a small niche player in a big industry and more than half the salesfolk I run into instantly see the company I work for as a potential cash cow - first quotes are often highly inflated prices on gold-plated gear even when I specify something bog standard to start with. It's as if they are taking the spam approach and looking for one sucker and not caring if they piss off everyone that has a rough idea of what the market price is.
when the customer sees the sales people, they always clam up because they're 'sales people' and customers think they are just interested in alleviating them of their money!
Which is totally, entirely true, and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, least to someone in sales, since as you already know:
in the end sales people live and die on commission.
When I come to a decision point before buying, either for myself, or for friends/relatives, or for work, I never go to sales people if I have the choice. I only go to them _after_ the decision has been made, and then only to talk about sales issues - prices, warranties, discounts, and so on.
It's simple: you can't trust a sales person to give you the best advice (from your perspective), especially since they are more interested in the commision. They will always strive towards getting a better deal - from their point of view. It's very seldom a sales person can actually convince you that (s)he has your interest first. This is not prejudice, it's from experience. The best purchases (from those I've been involved in) were all made after consulting myself, other relevantly knowledgable people, colleagues, making the decision, then going to the sales people with a concrete list and only talk about getting better deals on those.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Fire the sales persons and allow resellers to provide the sales force. They are then financially motivated to make sales AND understand the product. You'll get the technically savvy salesmen and personable engineers taking this up. These are the ones you want selling your product, not the ones that promise what they can't deliver.
Let the engineers provide unlimited free technical support. This is invaluable for many technical products. You probably already do this anyway for the customers you want to keep, reinforce it with an informal support model.
I use a program that has adopted this model with unbelievable results! And the software is cheap!
As an employer I would seriously consider sacking any IT professional who suggested or requested this sort of compensation.
A few things ...
1. A GOOD sales person acts like a good consultant; they aren't the stereotypical used car types -- they are there actually helping the client try to figure out what's the best product to meet their business needs.
2. Traditional IT roles have become a commodity with the outsourcing movement; the long term path for an IT professional to survive and flourish is by getting more deeply involved in business facing functions.
3. A company can't survive without sales; if the sales department wants help, give the sales department help!!!
www.digitaladvisory.org -- leveraging technology for business growth
If your sales team causes your customers to clam up, they are very, very bad at their job.
The sales and marketing management should be removed since clearly they are hiring sharks rather than consultants who are capable of developing a relationship with your clients. Replace the management with people focused on building a team focused on consultative sales and then the sales staff will be seen as the trusted advisors who can recommend a service or product without seeming like money grubbing sharks.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Instead of having your tech people make sales (which most tech people hate), have the sales people bring the tech into the call so that they can develop a rapport with the customer. Otherwise, your tech people will have to attend sales meetings which will bum them out completely.
Do it differently.
Just pay sales all of it (it's easy to measure there) then use a ticketing system to compensate IT for the crap sales makes them do, and take that number OUT of the sales bonus.
Large last minute projects with no planning cost the most, of course. As do weekend hours, new software, etc. That guy that can't manage to learn how to right-click all of a sudden is a drag on the sales force and will get corrected or forced out.What good is pulling in lots of money if the back end of your organization is a time and money wasting disorganized pile. Lean it out and you'll live through the lean times when it can't be helped.
"Sorry, Mr. Happy McSmileyface your bonus is negative $1,500 this year. It'll be deducted from your next paycheck."
while engineers can be brusque, they can't lie effectively.
Novell used a similar model. They always said that their best sales people were the Engineers. Unfortunately, they recently went out of business after a decade of declining sales.
Fact is, people do not trust sales staff. Sales staff come across like a used car salesman; A person that will say and promise anything just to make the sale. Engineers on the other hand know the products, and talk straight with people because they are not paid on comission. As a result, they are trusted by the potential customer. But most technical people do not have the social skills and knowledge to complete a sale.
This requires a major Paridygm shift.
Here is what I saw at a former employer or an IT sales/service shop ( I was the service manager at the time).
The Owner saw sales as the breadwinner, and tech support as the money sink. Hence all I ever heard was "Your department needs to get their billable hours up and their non billable hours down." Part of the problem was that there was no recognition for the hours spent as IT consult assisting salespeople. Why was there no recognition? Partly because my department hadn't been tracking their own hours with enough granularity. Once we started documenting how many of these formerly non-billable hours were contributing to booked sales, perceptions of our value started changing.
Once you can document the time it takes your IT staff to assist on these consults, then why don't you ask for an internal hourly charge against the sales department? Salespeople that don't use your services don't see it impact their commissions checks, those that do will think twice before asking a tech out to every single client.
An interesting pet peeve (especially as we try to recover our finances after the recession). I am a solution architect around integration of systems with SAP. I find less clam-up issues, and more sales rep sells what-they-know-how-to-see gaps. A good sales rep has to be a trustworthy adviser or they won't be "good". I have also done the full cycle of identifying new product/market opportunities through developing collateral, providing sales rep/presales engineer training material, and delivering the training (these are TWO SEPARATE TRAINING PROCESSES). However, by having internal engineers engage the customer with the sales team, the average deal size tends to go up, the total amount of sales per sales rep goes up, or otherwise increases the sales rep's commissions for a given territory/patch (see issues below).
Suggestions
------------------
I have proposed that the sales rep and their presales engineer assess the probable deal value before I become involved. Then after I have engaged the customer we look at the resulting deal value. The difference is my "incremental value" to the revenue. Typically sales rep gets 1-5% of the deal value, I would receive 1/4 of that as variable compensation.
Some companies have a "suggestion" program that can result in significant reward to engineers who identify new opportunities and help develop the sales collateral & sales rep training/refresh.
Issues
---------
Sales management sees a large incremental value as evidence that a sales rep is not working hard "enough". So if you significantly increase the deal size or volume of sales, the results tend to be seen as proving sales management's suspicions. Solution: select good performing sales reps as your pilot partners and roll out the pilot across several geographical areas. Works nicely if you also get your district sales manager to point out their "high value" territories. In both cases you minimize management bias against the sales reps.
Bigger deals take longer to close and have higher risk of failure. Sales reps like smaller deals that close quickly (so they meet their quotas (aggravated by hockey stick/period close pressures). Solution (?) keep the bigger deals resulting from my involvement as "follow on sales", getting early smaller sales sooner.
If a sales rep sells bigger deals in their "patch" (the geo area or number of customers they sell to) they will find they lose a chunk of their patch so that next year they will have to work harder to stay obtain the same revenues. This is the biggest disadvantage (a show stopper really) for allowing engineers to assist the sales team.
Sales Engineers often have big egos and such engineers are prone to undermine the larger deal to prove they are "better" partners for the sales rep, thereby denigrate or deny value to customer. See below also.
Engineering management opposes sales compensation due to fear of breach of engineer as trusted adviser. Solution: keeping the solution architect role and the presales engineer role as separate people. Allows the presales engineer to strengthen their trusted adviser relationship with the solution architect allowed to remain in a more open, question-based-selling, problem discovery and solution role.
Sooner or later, your customers will wise up to technical people being used as sales and will start to "calm up" to your technical people. You'll make some initial sales so it will look like a success, but your trading log-term trust for a short-term dollar.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Thanks guys for the shot of nostalgia. I worked as a pre/post sales systems analyst for a minicomputer company more than 30 years ago and my colleagues and I heard/thought all of the things that you are saying. I'd joke that I could sell a system upgrade faster than a salesman could because when I told a customer that the needed it they believed me. When a sales rep told them they needed it the customer would wait until all the prices were discounted at the end of the quarter and then ask me.
A big problem was trying to find a quantitative method of selecting techs for bonuses and awards. Often the choice was made based on sales numbers that clearly weren't tied to achievement. That caused more problems than anything else.
Glad to see that 30 years later the same issues are unresolved. It would be embarrassing if the answer was obvious and we didn't see it.