Techie Sales

There’s no getting around it – sales in the technology industry can be vastly different than sales in any other industry. And even if you fall into the "other" category, chances are you are going to have to enter the technology sales segment at some point in the future.

Gillian Brouse, director of marketing for Peak Sales Recruiting, a firm that helps technology companies build revenue by placing the right people on their sales team, says that with most technology sales, offerings are more likely to be new and the benefits unfamiliar to your customer. This means that your customer may not have budgeted for your offering and therefore, there are more steps to making a sale.

"Technology sales tend to be more complex and the solutions often require a lot of explanation (and education) for a buyer to select between alternatives," says Brouse. "This means that when you look to hire someone for technology sales you will need someone who can understand and explain technology from a business benefits perspective. All of this adds up to make hiring in the technology sales environment a unique and challenging task."
Eliot Burdett, a comanaging partner at Peak Sales Recruiting, echoes Brouse when he says that technology companies are typically more growth focused, usually take more risks, move at a faster pace, are exposed to more global than local competition and non-sales and marketing leaders.

"We tend to focus on candidates who are domain-oriented and more solution-selling focused; they are often selling a new solution to an existing or even unknown problem," says Burdett. These candidates need to be able to communicate to non-technical people – translating technical jargon, interpreting the need, and translating that back to what they can offer them."

To help companies seek just the right individual, Peak Sales Recruiting recently launched their Sales Role Analyzer. While it’s an online tool geared to companies hiring for technology sales positions, Brouse is quick to say that all sales recruiting efforts should begin with this kind of role analysis. Brouse says that by using the Sales Role Analyzer as a starting point for sales recruitment, technology companies can avoid common and costly hiring pitfalls that throttle revenue growth and derail sales strategies. It helps companies to properly evaluate the sales role, create a profile of the ideal hire, and a structured way of screening candidates.

The first part of finding a tech salesperson, says Burdett, is to determine the selling environment, the competition, the offering to the sales activities – cycle, approach, sales culture. He says to look at past behavior and past success in a similar environment such as sales activity, sales cycle, sales culture, and level of activity.

"With the sales analyzer, we can look at 30-40 characteristics to define the company environment," Burdett says. "You’re going to want to hire someone who has succeeded in an environment similar to yours. Otherwise, it’s just a crapshoot."

While it’s easy to evaluate experience and successes, to gauge someone’s ability to close, negotiate, or develop relationships requires a bit more experience and time to assess. By using a combination of behavioral interviewing, third-party assessments, background checks, role-playing, and the Sales Role Analyzer, you might just hit the jackpot with the right hire.

Here’s how it works: The Sales Role Analyzer’s online form prompts hiring managers and human resources professionals to ask questions pertaining to the product’s path to market, sales approach, and other factors that contribute to the makeup of the sales role. It then produces a checklist of critical success factors to consider when matching the candidate’s experience and skill set to the company’s actual requirements. These factors are captured in an easy-to-use document that can be integrated into the screening and evaluation process. The results will be emailed to you on completion of the form, so that you can easily print them for reference as you screen candidates, and so you can share them with others involved in the search.

"In our experience, filling hundreds of sales roles every year for technology companies, we have found that the most successful searches begin by properly analyzing the sales role, and matching candidates to that role based on past success in similar selling environments," says Burdett. "The Sales Role Analyzer can help you get your search off on the right foot. It’s a much more sophisticated way of hiring and analyzing who you are hiring."

The Sales Role Analyzer is available on Peak’s website at www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/stepone.