Slashdot Mirror
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?"
If your engineers are in a customer-facing role, they won't survive very long without soft skills. Or at least, they won't advance in that customer-facing role.
*everywhere* I have worked which has engineers in a customer-facing role, the engineers are good at what they do while still having social skills. Where I'm working now, they won't even get to a second interview if they can't demonstrate some social ability.