Ask Slashdot: Compensating Technical People For Contributing to Sales? 331
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?"
Re:Inside vs. outside sales (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:It doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
If your engineers are in a customer-facing role, they won't survive very long without soft skills. Or at least, they won't advance in that customer-facing role.
*everywhere* I have worked which has engineers in a customer-facing role, the engineers are good at what they do while still having social skills. Where I'm working now, they won't even get to a second interview if they can't demonstrate some social ability.
Re:It doesn't work (Score:4, Informative)
-all
+most
And the answer at that point is any tech company.
Most of our folks are customer facing and =have= to have a personality to get past our interview process.
I've recommended not extending offers to prospects because of personality dissonance despite having the technical chops.
Re:If your compensation rests purely on sales... (Score:4, Informative)
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.