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?"
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).
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.
You notice that engineers are never the ones being sent by the company on a two week annual retreat to a tropical resort to celebrate and reward having done their job while the sales guys put in weeks of extra long days, nights, and weekends to make important milestones.
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.
If you give away 40% of revenue in commissions you'll be out of business faster thank you can say "stupid idea". Sales commissions are usually single digit percentages. Even software companies don't earn margins high enough to justify the kinds of margins you are proposing. Manufacturing companies gross margins are normally much less than 40% and that is before any SG&A or interest or taxes.
This sounds like it has potential for Scott Adams to get a good number of strips out of this.
...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.
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.
Ah. I think I understand here. So basically, either an outside OR an inside salesperson makes a sale. But not both. Therefore, if it's the outside guy, that person gets 20% and the inside people get zilch. But if it's an inside guy that makes the sale, the engineering salesperson gets 10-15% while the rest of the engineers as a whole get the remaining 5% to share, and the outside people get to work a little harder next time.
In either case, if this is what you're saying AC (and I believe it is), nobody is making over 20% for any individual sale. So what you're basically doing is setting up a 20% commission and telling both groups that it's up for grabs for whoever is able to make the sale happen.
Seems a little high still at 20%. I'd probably bump that on down to about 10-12% tops with perhaps an additional end-of-year 10% bonus for your top sales rep (either inside or outside, as that gives an incentive to make more sales). Sounds ok unless you're aiming to share the commissions with everyone. In which case, it would take some retooling of the numbers. But every situation is different, of course.
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.
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.
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?
Making salespeople live by commissions is an outdated business model. It makes savvy customers react just the way described. Is this guy looking out for my interests or his bank account?
You don't want your company lumped in with car salesmen in customer's heads.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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
"...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've seen this tried before and it turns out that it's a lot easier to teach sales skills to a techie than to teach techie skills to a sales person.
If you try and teach a sales person "enough to be able to converse with a tech", you'll only extend by minutes the time it takes for the techie to blow past their knowledge base.
Also, it might seem like it would be hard to find a techie to touch sales positions, and not that many like it, but the same problem occurs when trying to get them to be a manager. If you offer enough money some will go for it.
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.
Not a great idea. I spent five years working post-sales in that environment.
The problem is that the sales people typically aren't motivated and view learning the technical details mostly as a waste of time. So they don't learn it as well as they should. Also, since they've been "trained", an engineer isn't as likely to be assigned to the sales person for the engagement. What you end up with is usually a sales person who thinks they understand the details.
The end result is that the post-sales engineer who gets assigned has to clean everything up. I probably spent at least 60% of my time having to re-engage our sales team for more appropriate contracts and re-engineer the "solution" the client was sold.
There were a few times I was sent to engagements following a new sale that had involved both a sales person and a pre-sales engineer. Those engagements went much more smoothly and usually resulted in increased sales of product and services.
To earn respect from the top brass (and the associated high paycheck) in many companies, you need to be directly involved in a) generating revenue, or b) cutting costs. a) Means you're in Sales; b) means you're probably middle management. Oh, and according to managers, engineering is most definitely not directly involved in generating revenue. They "make the product which Sales sells", or "just work the hours we bill for thanks to Sales". If an engineer helps close a deal or comes up with a way to slash costs, they are "just doing their job".
Bitter much? A little, yes....
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The author said that customers were turned off as soon as they were passed to a salesdroid. Making salesdroids techno-proficient won't change that.
Also, salesdroids are in sales because they like sales and generally dislike (and even look down on) engineering. Every time engineering comes in and saves their ass because they sold some frankensystem, they learn that (1) a frankensale is a sale, (2) engineering MUST save their ass. Making them techno-proficient will only make them realize how much farther they can push frankensystems.
And good luck turning a salesdroid into a pre-natal engineer. They are generally Business School Product. That means they get dangerous if you give them two rocks to bang together. Worse, they'll attempt to flaunt their newly discovered "skills" to their customers who will quickly realize they are talking out of their ass a bit more than usual and distrust them all the more. Salesdroids are like your brother-in-law, your wife won't let you shoot him because he's your brother-in-law.
you're halfway to sales already. :)
If you have never touched the product or installed the product. WHAT IS YOUR JOB? / WHY DO THEY PAY YOU?
The job of the salesdroid is to figure out which person among the many employees of the client has the actual control over spending money.
They don't consider technical details like that to be their domain and they'd rather fob q's like that onto engineering, because there is no upside to answering it themselves. Waste of their effort and electrons. They don't bs to engineers, only to higher level managers---much better success rate.
They want to talk warm-fuzzy benefits (and implicitly career growth) to the VP who makes the decision because that's how the money flows.
It really depends.
In some fields, there's just no choice about it. Like selling websites or custom software. If you don't teach your sales guys to basic restraints they're working with, they're going to promise to do things that can't be done, bid the wrong numbers, or do very stupid things like guaranteeing results on highly competitive keywords in seo projects. The approach I've found works the best is to actually sit in on some of these sales meetings, and train the sales guys to say what I say, do what I do, and react the way I react.
Sales meetings are easy enough, because they're all basically the same. The same questions show up time and time again, and the answer is always the same line. If you can be consistent in your approach when dealing with sales guys, they can learn your shtick, and become better at selling this stuff. Also, reviewing contracts that sales guys write before they send it to a client is important. The hardest thing for sales guys to pick up is that sometimes it's better to not take the business, than promise something that can't be delivered.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The best companies I have dealt with, have zero sales commission and their sales staff are not salesperson but company representatives.
Their function is to promote good relations between their companies and the customers. Products and product pricing, get customers in the door, good company representatives keep them there.
Generally when it comes to sales reps the bigger the commission the worse the shit head and the quicker I would kick them out, lie cheat and steal are their motto and, any difficulties are someone else's problem ie the engineering staff.
Want to effectively get engineers involved in sales support, drop commissions and establish a company wide team attitude. The company does not employ them or keep them employed, it is the customer that does that.
You know what they don't teach in college, how to lie like a used car salesman, how to lie like an insurance salesman and how to lie like a politician (note they all derive the majority of their income from commissions, the politicians just hide their offshore tax haven accounts).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I second this comment....This whole commission thing is why the customer clams up when they get handed off to "sales." If you start paying commission to the engineers the customer will not trust them. This negates the whole purpose of an engineer and equals bad customer service--ultimately a weak relationship.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock