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."

Comments

Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, it's not that complicated. You want to hire people who have programming background, but weren't interested or talented enough to pursue that full time. And they need better social skills than the average software engineer.

That's all. You can't turn a PHB into a good salesman for a product he can't understand.

Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[dragonquest]

"Hire bad programmers with good social skills"

"You want to hire people who have programming background, but weren't interested or talented enough to pursue that full time"

And the good news is that these people are in abundance in the lead architect/team leader/technical manager positions. I can confirm their existence and numbers (did I mention abundance?) from all the organizations I have worked with.

Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[Cryacin]

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.

Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[TapeCutter]

"presales engineer" - I've done that job, the sales people won't tell you where they keep the cocaine and hookers.

Re:Hire bad programmers with good social skills

[meburke]

Actually, there is a test for that. Back in the 60's, two guys from Harvard (Greenberg and Mayer) concluded a test of what made good salespeople. The personality dynamics were "empathy" and "ego drive". A person had to be able to connect with the customer and have the drive to come out with a solution. Those of us with high empathy and ego drive did real well at things like selling encylopedias. (It amazes people how I could walk into someone's home and walk out 90 minutes later with a $1000+ order.) However, in those days, a computer salesperson needed to have less ego drive (but more than enough to stick to it) and high empathy; computer sales took over a year and sometimes two years to close. A person with really high ego drive wouldn't get rewarded often enough to keep them involved.

Interestingly enough, 1 out of every 5 people tested was suited for some kind of sales. Another interesting thing; 1 out of 4 people tested would have been better off changing to a sales job from the one they already had.

Greenberg and Mayer also addressed the methods of training. They found that the most effective way to train was using role-playing practice.

In my experience, the best sales training was provided by Xerox Learning systems and The Dale Carnegie Courses. Methods and role playing were both used over a multi-week course. (In the 10-week period I took the DCC Sales course, I made more CASH sales in 10 weeks than I had in the previous 10 years!)

Unfortunately, DCC has reduced their course to three days and some online coaching. It is not the same and it is apparently not nearly as effective. I haven't seen anything from Xerox for years. I used to do computers and accounting during the day and sell Britannica at night to make a living. Then, in the late 70's, computers got cheaper and another Britannica Salesman opened a computer store in our town. I'd like to say we got rich, but it didn't happen that way. However, it did provide many years of good, solid, rewarding work.

Many companies still hire sales people, give them a 90-day draw against commissions and then screw them on training and development. Since the sales cycle and opportunity window are sometimes much longer than 90 days, it makes better sense to have a one or two-year program in place with much coaching and feedback. I wouldn't put much faith in any single program, but the "Solutions Selling" (Bosworth, Thank you Sun Micro), "Socratic Selling" and some NLP-based course like "Beyond Selling" would probably be what I would use to train salespeople today. These are communications-based selling processes, useful in different situations.

The lack of programming ability is probably not the big barrier to the sale: It is more likely that the customer can't explain what he wants and why he needs it, and the salesperson can't PROVE that the product delivers what the customer wants. Details are so far down the selling process that the customer should have committed to buying well before that point.

OKI, now if you are dealing in the Microsoft world, you may have a completely different problem: Sharepoint, SQL Server and CRM don't play well with previous versions; "cloud" apps, especially CRM stuff has developed a 20-fold increase in database size; legacy systems that customers have been using for years no longer communicate meaningfully and will no longer print legacy reports; and the method for writing the modifications has changed drastically in just the last 5 years. The Microsoft world may be collapsing under its own weight. In this case, you had better be prepared to teach your salespeople very good requirements analysis processes and maybe some programming. Pick you languages, get a course in-house, and work on the actual solutions you need to solve.

Good luck

It's doomed.

[Anonymous Coward]

...objects can be thought of as wrapping their data within a set of functions designed to ensure that the data are used appropriately, and to assist in that use(1)...SQUIRREL!

You need a technical pre-sale consultant for that

[alecclews]

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.

The conversation with the programmers is key and important to making the sale -- but's it a different conversation about the job benefits of using the product.

So you need to go in two handed -- a business focused sales professional and a technical pre-sale consultant.

Sales Engineer

[SuperKendall]

You either need a sales engineer that goes along on calls with the sales people, or simply just send some of your developers out to do sales...

Are you sure sale people will be talking to programmers directly?

It seems very unlikely you can train a sales guy well enough not to enter a giant "uncanny valley" of terminology for any real programmer they would talk to. You have no idea how much that puts of programmers at companies.

What a Dumb Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Your company either does NOT understand sales people or what it takes to be an engineer. Sales are they to create a relationship with the customer. They usually have ZERO cred on tech issues. Have an engineer partner with the sales guy and team sell.

Socializing programmers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert Heinlein said it best: Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.