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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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.