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Ask Slashdot: How Best To Teach Programming To Salespeople?
First time accepted submitter greglaw writes "Our company makes development tools, meaning that all our customers are programmers. If you'll forgive the sweeping generalization, on the whole good programmers don't make good salespeople and vice versa. However, it's important that our salespeople understand at some level the customers' problems and how exactly we can help. The goal is not to turn the salespeople into engineers, but just to have them properly understand e.g. what the customer means when he uses the term 'function call.' Most of our customers use C/C++. Does anyone have any recommendations for how best to go about this? Online courses or text books that give an introduction to programming in C/C++ would be great, but also any more general advice on this would be much appreciated."
Actually, the GP is pretty spot on. There are two types of sales people generally, the Hustlers that tend to act like a hairdryer at management, playing buzzword bingo to provide the required level of synergy with the current corporate strategy, or the sales types that tend to understand what they are selling, and explain the benefits of the products.
Contrary to popular belief, most programmers are not socially inept basement dwellers at the mom's house. The sales person does not need to know 100% of the technical aspects, they need to be able to convey what can be done at a coarse level, and then for detail, reference a skilled programmer.
Furthermore, if you are selling into a corporate scenario rather than a small business, your business owner will at best "know of" programming. They will want to know what your product will do for his business, and let his technical guys determine if it really will do that. Really, I have yet to meet a CEO or any other Chief (Insert middle title here) Orifice that has programmed in the last 5 years.
Hence, you'll need a standard winer and diner sales person for the C(X)O's and/or middle line executives/enterprise architects, and a technical sales person for the developers/team leads investigating the technology on a ground level.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Don't talk about this like it's magic. Sales is a really tough job and you have to be a 1/100K personality type to succeed. My organization sells static analysis software, and our salespeople are a mixed bunch and have a lot of varied tech experience from their past lives:
- former military pilot
- former DEC programmer
- fool
- MBA
- former vintner
- former VAX/MVS/AS400 tech support
Nevertheless, our assumption is they know all about the customer's problem (manage costs, control risks, pass an audit, build a legacy) but know NOTHING about the technology, and we remind them of such. We pair up the salesguys with a "presales engineer" who is much more techie and a product expert but less responsible for the relationship.
Really, this is a very standard way to do technical sales. I thought everybody knew this.
Take off every 'sig' !!
I wouldn't even try.
Sales people need to be adept as selling a business story and should be able to talk to project managers and other budget holders about the business benefits of investing in the tool.
You can't cure willful ignorance. If a salesperson actually gave two shits they would pick up a book and learn basic programming skills on their own.
Why not try the same strategy that helps today's programmers constantly learn new languages, libraries, version changes, etc: if you don't keep up... you lose your job to someone who can. It seems to light a fire under the ass of IT people.