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?"
It's not about the % - the idea is ass backwards!
Instead of turning your highly skilled techs into sales people spend the money training your sales people to understand the tech. They don't need to understand the minutia but they should understand it well enough to be able to converse with a tech. Rather than having them hand off a client from one person to the next have your sale's guy be the primary and only contact point. They should never need to consult with the technicians as to how/whether something can be done rather only be able to understand and communicate exactly what the client needs.
Our company uses an internal billing mechanism. Each sales person is allotted (x) hours of engineering time a month. Engineers are expected to perform (y) hours of consults with sales as part of their normal job (x and y are different because we have more sales people than engineers). Anything above (y) is considered bonus pay for the engineer and he earns extra pay at a relatively high hourly rate. The bonus pay comes directly from the sales person's commission. All engineering consults must be scheduled in advance through the project manager, to keep sales from killing our internal development timelines.
It works for us. Engineers get a chance to see the sales process, see what customers are doing with the product or what problem they want the product to solve, and a chance to earn extra pay. Engineers that have good social skills get requested by sales more often than others. The project manager is available to control the impact on our development. Sales people see the cost of having engineers on the call and thus are encouraged to keep it to a minimum or learn the technical details themselves.