Who should sell

Disclaimer: it's about IT outsourcing service.


There is a popular slogan: In our organization, everyone sells!

Actually, this principle was intended to motivate all employees to think about customer needs while performing their everyday work. However, sometimes management goes further, and tries to use this idea wider delegating selling responsibilities to production departments.

From one side, this is a very good initiative, and there are a lot of arguments in favour:

• production personnel is usually more technical, so they can quicker estimate the complexity of requirements, propose different possible solutions, involve the customer in discussion;
• production team understands the needs of existing customer better than sales people do, because of day-to-day interaction;
• having technical background, it's easier to answer process-related questions, thus presenting the company on more professional level.

These arguments are quite strong to start thinking about deep involvement of technical staff into sale activity, at least with existing customers. Why not?

Actually, why not? I still think it's not a bad idea. It just have another side of the coin:

• The most important task for a development department is production. This is the area where they have to provide measurable results. If the results are not satisfactory, even a good marketing deal won't be considered as an affordable excuse. So production managers postpone sale activities to the sideline, and usually its turn never happens.
• Size of a development department is usually the same or even smaller than amount of work that have to be performed. It means that these people simply have no enough time to do something special for sales.
  
• Production department personnel is usually not well trained for selling activities, and most of them are not disposed for this role.
  

Again, listed items do not mean that sale activity is only for sales people. They just have to be considered.


Even more, if we talk about marketing not about just selling process, then developers are often really involved in marketing whether they know it or not. If they are involved in deciding what features to build [and how it will work], they are doing marketing (And the Geeks Shall Market by Erik Sink. Business Of Software Blog. October 29, 2007).

Self-Motivation

It's quite usual to see newcomers being quickly recognized by management for some their achievements. The most noticeable category of rising stars is students, who has just started their professional career.

This fact is not surprising. People in the beginning of the career are usually very motivated to move to higher levels. These guys do a lot to provide quick visible results, follow all (well, about all) corporate policies, do not forget to provide all required reports and so on. They have a lot of things to learn, and a lot of stuff to do to demonstrate that they are not worse than others, they are better! It's a good stimulus, isn't it?

So are students usually more motivated than experienced professionals? May be, but I would say it in a different way.

Beginners are motivated by the need to prove their professional level and their ability to take different role or position. Some of them spends effort to be recognized by colleagues and management, others stay goals just for themselves. Both of these types can make a good career, but the first category usually does it faster and a bit chaotic while career path of the second group is more stable.

every soldier dreams of becoming a general;
every lieutenant dreams of becoming a colonel;
and every captain wants to be a major.

IT is quite similar. While gathering more knowledge and experience, the aspiration is being reduced.

Professional life becomes simpler, people just focus on their everyday activities. They do not try to do something perfectly and to get some bonus for that single achievement. For them, good results are not something uncommon, good results are normal.

Of course, professionals also do need to be recognized. Not just for some individual output, but for the constant success. They do not claim to get such recognition, but if such regular good work is being permanently ignored, the person starts thinking about her/his job in a different manner...

The Elite Team

In the early 1970s, a vice president of one of our client companies sent around a memo on the subject of travel expenses to everyone in his division. You may have received similar memos on the topic yourself, but this one was different. It said more or less this: "It
has come to my attention that some of you, when traveling on expenses, have been traveling economy class. This is not an economy-class organization. This is a first-class organization. When you fly on business from now on, you will fly first class." Of course that memo cost money. The expense was very real and the only thing you could balance against it was an enhanced sense of eliteness. At least one organization thought that was a valid tradeoff. Couldn't happen in a real-world corporation, you say? It happened at Xerox.

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
by Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister

This is a very good sample of understanding the team spirit background. To feel and act as an elite team, its members must not just hear slogans propagandizing that they are the best. Each team member must know that they are allowed to be different, and really to be elite.

PR and hiring expectations

Today, I was told the opinion, that company public relations (PR) does not have any effect on the number of candidates "waiting in a line to be hired for the company". A background for this opinion was a statistics, that didn't reveal any hiring increase after massive PR campaigns.

This statement is probably correct... in a case when we are talking about large well-known company.

But if potential candidate never heard the company's name before, or heard the name but still has no associations with it, then chances are she/he won't pay enough attention to a vacancy. The ad can just look like a hundred other similar ads from companies, that will never give a lot of new opportunities, and that nay go out of business pretty soon.


I completely agree that PR doesn't help to hire a lot, but on the other hand its absence kills company growth.