February 21, 2012 at 10:31 am
Joe-10953 (2/21/2012)
Supply & Demand:Good-Excellent developers/engineers are hard to find and should command what the market will bear.
'Good' salespeople are easy to find but excellent reps should be compensated based on the value they bring. Those developers will have nothing to do without the 'sale'.
It's baaaaaaaaaaack. Required reading. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
February 22, 2012 at 5:24 am
Revenant (2/17/2012)
If you watch TV commercials, you may notice that the best salesmen are cute kids, dogs, and cats, in this order. No experience necessary.Draw your own conclusions, DBAs. 😉
Hi Revenant, I always appreciate your great technical expertise and carefully weighted viewpoints. However the above is hopelessly naive - the number one 'salesman' on the above basis is clearly, by an enormous margin, sex 😉
February 22, 2012 at 6:45 am
call.copse (2/22/2012)
Revenant (2/17/2012)
If you watch TV commercials, you may notice that the best salesmen are cute kids, dogs, and cats, in this order. No experience necessary.Draw your own conclusions, DBAs. 😉
Hi Revenant, I always appreciate your great technical expertise and carefully weighted viewpoints. However the above is hopelessly naive - the number one 'salesman' on the above basis is clearly, by an enormous margin, sex 😉
And you haven't noticed the shift in sales engineers, too???????????????
February 22, 2012 at 11:10 am
call.copse (2/22/2012)
Revenant (2/17/2012)
If you watch TV commercials, you may notice that the best salesmen are cute kids, dogs, and cats, in this order. No experience necessary.Draw your own conclusions, DBAs. 😉
Hi Revenant, I always appreciate your great technical expertise and carefully weighted viewpoints. However the above is hopelessly naive - the number one 'salesman' on the above basis is clearly, by an enormous margin, sex 😉
Maybe that's my personal bias. Given my age, I am easier to sell on cute kids, kittens and puppies. 😉
February 22, 2012 at 11:27 am
Truth is you need both. But to answer which should get paid more: As a controller once told me - Cash is King.
Sales people bring revenue. Sales people are in the front lines with the customer, listening to what they want and what they will pay for that want. They convince the customer to write the check. That wins
February 22, 2012 at 11:39 am
eric.fetterolf (2/22/2012)
Truth is you need both. But to answer which should get paid more: As a controller once told me - Cash is King.Sales people bring revenue. Sales people are in the front lines with the customer, listening to what they want and what they will pay for that want. They convince the customer to write the check. That wins
As described, those are order takers, merely. A salesperson leads the horse to the high priced water, and gets them to drink. In the case of software, that generally means getting the prospect away from his/her preconceived notion of "what they want" to what the vendor has to sell. In some cases, the vendor is actually smarter than the prospect. In fact, successful VARs/ISPs get that way by being smarter than the clients and showing the clients.
It's not about using a used car salesman's tricks. That won't get you very far.
March 5, 2012 at 4:53 pm
This summed it up for me:
"While I think selling is a skill, I think it's one more easily learned by a wider variety of the population."
The above statement is a bit arrogant, however I agree with it so lump me in. I think more programmers could immediately become sales people of the software they currently program against than sales people could become programmers of the software they currently sell.
There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
--Plato
March 6, 2012 at 12:23 pm
A while back, my brother lost his job and was looking for another one; possibly another career. What did he do - he was a salesman. I suggested he look into a bootcamp for A+ Certification. Get started in IT...go to work for the Geek Squad or in a company HelpDesk group. Then as he gets experience there, move on up to other things. His response - do you really think I have the smarts to do that?
Huh???? My brother's a very smart guy....he could sell you the shirt off your back for double the price and make you feel happy you spent the money ---okay exageration, but you get the idea - a very smart salesperson and he doesn't think he's capable of learning how to work in a Helpdesk environment.
I'm in IT and I could jump into sales with no trouble if I needed to do so. I might not be a star salesperson, but I would not expect a star salesperson to immediately be a star IT person either.
But as far as a company is concerned....who is replacable?
A salesperson, knows the clients, but has to relearn the product everytime a change is made or new product is designed.
A programmer/IT person, knows the product; all the ins-and-outs about it.
If you had a highly qualified salesperson and programmer, but had to chose one to let go and replace with a lower qualified person...which would it be?
That is how you determine worth....
EDIT: I had a major typo in this post and had to fix it.
March 6, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Interesting that you'd push your brother into IT from where he came from. Hope it works out.
I'm in IT and I could jump into sales with no trouble if I needed to do so. I might not be a star salesperson, but I would expect a star salesperson to immediately be a star IT person
For me it would be tough. A completely different mindset. In IT I see things as black and white; 0s and 1s if you will. Could I learn to exaggerate when needed or explain things differently to a different audience? And if a star salesperson could immediately do our jobs then what value do we provide after making a career out of it?
Ken
March 6, 2012 at 2:43 pm
ken.trock (3/6/2012)
Interesting that you'd push your brother into IT from where he came from. Hope it works out.I'm in IT and I could jump into sales with no trouble if I needed to do so. I might not be a star salesperson, but I would expect a star salesperson to immediately be a star IT person
For me it would be tough. A completely different mindset. In IT I see things as black and white; 0s and 1s if you will. Could I learn to exaggerate when needed or explain things differently to a different audience? And if a star salesperson could immediately do our jobs then what value do we provide after making a career out of it?
Ken
Ken, he really wanted something new and different. I thought he could make it in IT and that it would give him more opportunity....he thought otherwise and found another sales job. The point I wanted to make though was that while I feel I could easily pick up a job as a salesperson (entry level of course), my brother (a salesman) did not feel he could pick up an IT career even as a entry helpdesk person after taking A+ bootcamp. Heck, he didn't even feel he would be able to pass the bootcamp. (He never took it, so we will never know).
WHOOPS...I just noticed what you were pointing out and that is a typo on my part....it should be:
I'm in IT and I could jump into sales with no trouble if I needed to do so. I might not be a star salesperson, but I would NOT expect a star salesperson to immediately be a star IT person either.
I'm not sure how I screwed that up....I'll have to go back and edit it.
May 2, 2012 at 8:46 am
jay-h (2/17/2012)
RobertYoung (2/17/2012)
- the solution is thought to be: "build a better mousetrap, and people will beat a path to your door", but aside from Apple currently (and one may argue that Apple's products are mostly toys) that doesn't happen much.I would argue that Apple is an example of a massively successful sales program. The product is good, but there are other good products. Apple has sold their image, their mindset (some might argue 'cult') with Steve Jobs as an American icon, and created a demand where people will wait in line to buy a new product sight unseen.
I think maybe the distinction between sales and marketing got lost somewhere there. Apple's marketing department (and Steve Jobs) did a great job advertising, generating publicity, and so on. Effectively creating a cult. The salesmen haven't had to do much because with the image, the cult, the product sells itself.
Back in the days when SJ was away, the salesmen had a lot to do and didn't do it at all well.
Tom
May 2, 2012 at 9:20 am
TravisDBA (2/17/2012)
Just let people give their opinions/experiences here without resorting to calling there opinions "silly". Please treat people with respect without resorting to calling them or their opinions names. You want to disagree, fine then use logic, not name-calling. Everyone comes from a different vantage point in life. You haven't got the corner knowledge on everything. That's all I'm saying. Once again, I never said anything about a DBA being gone, I was talking about a critical database being down. 😀
I hope that means that you do realise that the two things you are comparing are the value of the website and the value of the Salesman. That's not useful if what you want to compare the value of the Salesman with the value of teh DBA, rather than with the value of the website.
Tom
May 2, 2012 at 9:24 am
L' Eomot Inversé (5/2/2012)
TravisDBA (2/17/2012)
Just let people give their opinions/experiences here without resorting to calling there opinions "silly". Please treat people with respect without resorting to calling them or their opinions names. You want to disagree, fine then use logic, not name-calling. Everyone comes from a different vantage point in life. You haven't got the corner knowledge on everything. That's all I'm saying. Once again, I never said anything about a DBA being gone, I was talking about a critical database being down. 😀I hope that means that you do realise that the two things you are comparing are the value of the website and the value of the Salesman. That's not useful if what you want to compare the value of the Salesman with the value of teh DBA, rather than with the value of the website.
That horse has already been beaten to death and tenderized thoroughly, Tom. Don't bother.
(I'm surprised to see this thread being resurrected.)
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May 2, 2012 at 9:48 am
Well, I guess I'll vote for paying star salesmen a lot, and for paying star developers a lot but maybe not quite as much. Good non-star developers quite a bit less, but more than good non-star salesmen. Not good salesmen and not good developers are probably both a net cost to the company, so probably shouldn't be paid at all (unless they are considered as entertaining clowns who help boost the morale of productive people, which would be rather unpleasant so I wouldn't want to work for a company that did that).
The idea someone had that salesmen should be paid more because they have to look good doesn't hold water for salesmen any more than it does for technical people; senior developers have to look good too because they too have to impress people. Impressing government officials, impressing customers, impressing partners, impressing venture capitalists, impressing research funding evaluation panels - these are all things that have been part of my job as a technical person.
Tom
May 2, 2012 at 11:02 am
L' Eomot Inversé (5/2/2012)
The idea someone had that salesmen should be paid more because they have to look good doesn't hold water
I guess you not noticed the harlot hussy insurgence? In everything from stocks and bonds to real estate to techy bits. Sex sells, and management knows it. And, no, salespeople aren't more valuable. They only say that because, by and large, they control companies, and thus promotion processes. After all, it was salespeople who created the subprime/ARM/etc. products at mortgage companies, and salespeople who packaged and sold them from "investment" banks. Salespeople are immoral. They should be paid less.
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