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?"
It doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Translation Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Value Added Advice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
When your sales people barely know how to turn on a computer and your engineering people are too socially inept to carry out a conversation, the danger is quite minimal.
Re:It doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Also remember, most companies see sales guys as their lifeblood and engineers as a financial liability.
Alleviating people from their money (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Use engineers for sales (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You need to form a team of these guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Translation Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
What they should do is find out why their sales guys have no credibility and aren't trusted. Chances are, it's because they're like a lot of sales people that end up pissing engineering people off. What they're doing here is saying "our sales guys are fucking us over, so how can we not blame our sales guys while making our engineers pick up the slack?".
Chances are, the sales guys are the typical "promise the customer all sorts of shit and let the engineers be the ones to uncomfortably explain six months down the road that the product doesn't do seven of the forty two things that the sales person claimed it did".
Re:Sales weinies are better paid than engineers? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Dilbert potential (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at that, okay? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Trusted Advisors (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sales people (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Misunderstanding of "Sales" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Translation Time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I understand what you're saying and why, but you're wrong on so many levels. I'm an experienced programmer/software architect and entrepreneur. Sales is a vital part of a company and I'm sorry that many technical people appreciate that more. They have an incredibly difficult task - selling is not about "telling people what they need", what sales actually do is to create buyers and this is incredibly complex stuff that requires understanding of decision making, the potential customer (their needs, pain and organization) and the technical details of the product or service you offer.
...but this should be an indicator to you that I'm one of your "trusted technical people" that will tell the customer the true PROS and CONS of everything even when it means my company takes a fiscal loss.
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying. This is not what sales people do. You need to understand that making a deal is not about presenting the features and non-features of your product/service and waiting for him to say "yes" or "no". Decision making is much, much more complex than that, especially in large deals.
In a well functioning company sales and development work closely together as they both have crucial information that the other department needs. The salespeople usually have in-depth market knowledge like not yet addressed customer pain/requirements that the developers could utilize to improve the product/service and thereby sales. You need to understand that the goal of the company is to sell more and the better the developers understands sales and their situation (the tighter they are connected) the better they can understand the selling process and the potential clients and thereby improve sales. Likewise - if sales can understand the technical details of the product better - they address the needs of the potential clients better in the vision they give them of the solution - increasing sales.
Get ready to fucking fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Translation Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to understand that companies don't have goals. The goal of whoever is controlling the board is what is relevant. If their goal is to milk the company for short-term gain then salespeople need to lie. If their goal is to keep the company continually producing profit for years then they need to tell the truth. If the only goal is to "sell more" then someone is seriously fucking stupid because "profit more" is what we really want. Selling more is a means to an end, not an end itself.
Re:Inside vs. outside sales (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inside vs. outside sales (Score:4, Insightful)
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).