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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.
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
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!
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?
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?
...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.
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
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.
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...
..."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.
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...
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
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
People skills make money. Technical skills make products, which need to be sold and *may* make money, provided you have someone to sell them.
I'm afraid you suffer from the very blinkered thinking that a lot of other sales people suffer from - to correct you, technical skills make SOLUTIONS, not just products.
That's precisely why I can take a bunch of our existing products, explain to a sales guy how I can connect them together in a fun way for the customer, or devise a value-add service on those products for the customer and get him to go sell it. He can't design it, I can't sell it, end of story.
BTW, as head of sales my notebook is a Thinkpad running Linux.
Sorry, are you the original submitter of the article? If not, then the above is irrelevant information as I was quoting and addressing him based on his "sales-speak" type comments.
However, I drive a black company Audi, which in you eyes probably qualifies enough to be put into the "stupid sales droid" drawer.
I get a company car, I chose a VW Passat because it was a good enough car at a good enough price when I needed to buy one. It's based on the Audi A4 chassis so I'm told, otherwise it's got aircon, a music player and gets me from A-B. Car talk is wasted on me I'm afraid, I'm not an enthusiast and probably don't even know what some of my close friends even drive.
Stupid sales droid? No idea, are you one then? Again, I was quoting and responding to the submitter's comments - he sounds like he works for a reaonably big organisation like I do where there are distinct sales and technical people. Other orgs are smaller, even one-man operations, in those there are probably sales people who have to be technical also.
In my organisation, there are good and bad sales people.
The good ones know I don't bullshit, trust my ability to help them out and leave me to get on with it - they also listen to my point of view and learn something in the process, at the same time I can learn about the pressures there under & either give them more support in front of the customer or work out better and quicker ways of doing stuff.
The bad ones don't listen as soon as they realise they can't have what they want and just go crying to their boss to escalate the issue. Those are the ones I was referring to in my posting.
Only you know which of the above categories you fall into.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ha. Sales person and engineer are interchangeable? Ha!!! Never going to happen. Well, almost never.
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!
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.
It is probably a company that resells and maintains stuff from IBM, HP or Cisco. The "engineers" are "customer engineers" (old IBM job title). Sales sells the equipment, and the engineers show up to install, configure and maintain.
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."
Can't? Or Won't? Lying is wrong. It is beneficial in the short run for the individual that does it, but is harmful in the long run to the customer and the servicing company. I leave the lies to my supervisor. I won't lie even when asked to do so. I will just say nothing at all, rather than lie to a customer.
One of my buddies at work got in big trouble for accidentally exposing a lie that our company told a customer, and he didn't even know that he was doing it. The management was bringing the customer through the operations area, with no warning to the people in operations, and brought them to my buddy to show them how our remote keying worked. While observing this, the customer was able to observe that the keyer was able to see the whole image, while the customer had been told that we only sent snippets of the area that we want keyed (technically not possible with the 3rd party software we use). My Buddy got in big trouble for exposing this lie without even knowing that they had lied. If they had told the truth, then nobody has to worry about what they can or can't show a customer. Of course, if they had told the truth, we probably wouldn't have gotten the sale, because our salesman are not good enough to sell our system without lying about the capabilities.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
As an employee, I have been told by my last three employers that every employee is in sales. The obvious followup question to that is "what is my commission rate?" If you don't want to be asked about commission, don't tell them that they are salespeople.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.