Bridging the sales and technical divide

How much training is enough?

By Brian J Dooley, Auckland | Thursday, 05 May 2011
For IT resellers, there have always been issues around how much technology sales personnel need to know and how much sales expertise technical experts require. One of the problems is that technology evolves swiftly, with salespeople frequently needing to handle a wide range of potential product areas.

Technical personnel, meanwhile, are being called upon to become more involved in building the business case for products. These trends have been compounded in the current environment as companies seek to reduce budgets and decision making for purchases moves from customer IT to business staff. At the same time, major changes in infrastructure and IT consumption are being fostered by developments in virtualisation and cloud IT.

Paul Kastner is security software vendor Symantec’s director of service and sales for the Asia-Pacific and Japan region.

“When we train our partners, we generally have three tiers of training,” he says. “The first tier is basic sales training, including what products do and functionalities delivered to customers, as well as the value proposition behind the solution. The second tier is for presales technicians. They need to be able to demonstrate products and need to know how to set it up, plus its functionality and technical requirements. The third tier is for those who actually implement the software. Full scale implementation requires deep product knowledge, consulting skills, project skills, detail and configuration capability.”

Symantec made a strategic decision 18 months ago to formally help partners to implement products. Implementation is bread and butter of resellers, with Symantec wanting to ensure quality levels in implementation, particularly with growing product complexity.

For the company, this reduces support problems and aids in creating quality implementations. The programme also includes training for end customers on how to use the software, and in developing skills around using the software.

“SaaS is changing how vendors see the market and in how customers view vendors,” says Kastner. “It can eliminate a lot of implementation, and provide new possibilities in remote management and monitoring. We are looking at an environment where some will want services such as mail filtering on premises, and some will want to move to the public cloud. This will make things different for the vendor, and Symantec is also moving services to the cloud and providing a choice of platforms.”

However, as Kastner notes, any delivered functionality, provided internally or through the cloud involves processes that need to be developed. Policies need to be implemented regarding people, processes, and surrounding technologies. Taking a platform to the cloud, doesn’t change need for alignment, compliance, and auditability.

“There is a demand for technical skills is in areas such as virtualisation, and in how to configure and manage a virtual architecture,” says Kastner. “Other skills always in demand include security operations and security management. This ties into security optimisation. In a mix of physical and virtual resources, on premises and in the cloud, security becomes more complex, and expert personnel are harder to find and to retain. There is already a high demand in this area, and the demand will only increase.”

For resellers, it is important to understand that vendors such as Symantec have standard certifications around their technology, for both sales and technical areas. It is important for partners to develop appropriate skills, and vendors are actively involved in training in these skills.

“Within our sales professionals, we infuse a high level of technical expertise,” says Scott Gemmill, head of Gen-i’s training Academy. Gen-i is Telecom’s data division. “Our clients view us as a strategic partner to help them achieve their business goals. To foster this relationship, our people need to have a comprehensive understanding of the clients’ needs as well as the technical skill set to deliver a solution. Our academy has been pivotal in developing sales and client relationship skills to new levels, and has been a great contributor to our efforts to recruit and retain talent.”

Gen-i regularly tests training curriculum and delivery methodologies with stakeholders across the business. Local events have had some impact on training priorities. The Christchurch earthquake has shifted focus away from learning for the short to medium term, for example. For the longer term, there will be other impacts in that area, such as possible local skills shortages as people may choose to leave.

“Cloud computing and virtualisation are certainly areas that are of high interest to our clients,” says Gemmill. “I think more than specific technical skills, the real demand will be for specialists that can link technology with business strategy. Technology alone will not future proof a client nor will it provide competitive advantage. The demand for technologists that can identify a client’s business need and align a scalable solution will continue to rise.”

Gen-i delivers sales training across core competencies through its training academy. Gen-i client managers and sales support people who graduate from the academy programme can also enrol in the Postgraduate Certificate in Management Studies jointly taught with the University of Waikato, to further develop their sales and client relationship skills.

“As long as sales staff understand the business relevance of the technology, how deep they know technology side is not as important.” says Cisco regional manager, Jen Rutherford.

One of the hazards faced by sales organisations that need to handle rapid technological evolution is information overload. Rutherford suggests that sales people need to move from retaining information in memory to knowing where and how to get information as it is needed.

Within the sales organisation, technical roles have become more prominent as companies move more into virtualised environments. The design elements for systems and networks can be complicated, and will be less familiar to customers, who are likely to require additional help. “Cloud and virtualisation skills are currently in short supply,” says Rutherford. “There are also shortages in experts who are able to tie in ROI arguments to technical sales.”

Cisco’s strategy is partner based, and it is focusing upon enabling its business partners to deliver cloud solutions. It provides a partner program, and managed services support. Partners can engage customers as vendors of SaaS or in-house solutions.

“Business is good, but it is important to remember that cloud IT impacts reseller profitability,” says Rutherford. “Short term cash flow can become a problem. As the market shifts to larger cloud providers, resellers may lose some of that business. It is more important than ever to talk solution benefits to the customers.”

Total Interaction is a Sydney-based training firm that is heavily involved in technical business in ANZ as well as in the US. The company focuses upon shifting the mindset and habits of sales staff for its clients’ business partners. It attempts to move them away from focusing on technical issues to aligning with customers’ business objectives. Clients include major international firms such as NetApp.

“Total Interaction works with a range of resellers, including Ingram Micro in New Zealand, and we have achieved some fairly impressive results,” says founder and managing director Paul Izbicki. “The training that we do is primarily with customer facing people, rather than in technical product training.”

Izbicki views the current period as unique, in that there have been major waves of reorganisation within the IT reseller business that impact the skills and outlook of participants, and affect the requirements for success.

“To understand the need, you need to take a step back,” says Izbicki. “The whole industry has changed in a series of waves. The first big wave was the GFC, which had significant effects on IT and on what you need to do as budgets shrink and customers focus on cost.

Decision making has moved up the ladder from IT managers to the CIO or CFO, and selection criteria have change from technical specifications to ROI. Technical sales people who have done well in the past are now out of their comfort zone. They need to shift from strictly left brain, linear focus, to adding right brain focus. They also require a business viewpoint in addition to the technical viewpoint. This demands new skills around relationships and business acumen.

“The second wave of change was around virtualisation and the cloud. Sales people, accustomed to selling boxes must now move to a conceptual sell, promoting efficiency over equipment. Client relationships are also altered as the industry has shifted.

“A third wave is organisational change. New sales strategies are needed because the environment has changed. Vendors are much more channel focused today, for example.”

Total Interaction uses a number of techniques to provide training, including role playing and the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. The company stresses what it calls “whole brain thinking,” which it believes to be critical in meeting the sales needs of today’s technical product resellers.

“The companies with which we work have people who are technically competent, and who have been successful themselves,” says Izbicki. “They are being told that they need to do things differently. It’s a big challenge in the industry. Thinking needs to change and it is important to get a buy-in for moving from the comfort zone.”

Sales staff need to understand the challenges the technical outcomes and the benefits that are created. But it is more important to talk about need and challenges than about technology. “The focus of our training is on selling through questioning, not selling through telling,” says Izbicki. “Customer expectations of their suppliers have changed. Suppliers are now expecting to understand their business and provide business based solutions. The only way to do that is to understand their pain. The focus is upon questioning, before even thinking about benefits.“

Between sales and technical staff, collaboration is important. To facilitate collaboration, it becomes important to understand how other people think. This goes back to the emphasis upon a “whole brain” approach. While dealing with different styles of thinking can be aggravated and frustrating, in the end, there are benefits in diversity.

In this country, technical interest in cloud computing has ramped up considerably as a result of the Christchurch earthquake. “Companies have been forced into the cloud, but there are now really good sales stories from this event,” says Izbicki. Business that are being affected, need to ask the right questions to understand the effects. The emphasis shifts to “disaster recovery” over “terabytes of storage”. It is a very different approach that has never been so relevant as it is in New Zealand right now. “