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).