The Blurring Line Between Tech And Sales

John Doe Technician at VAR X knows his stuff. He knows speeds and feeds, how to deploy a server farm and troubleshoot a network. He knows intimately the products that comprise that network--every nook and cranny and feature set. But can he sell the VAR's solutions to end users? And, more important, can he convince the C suite--the top-level execs that make purchasing decisions--that VAR X's offerings are the ones to spend their money on?

That skillset "double-shot" doesn't come easy in the channel. Yet it's one that'll behoove VARs to cull from the workforce if they plan to move beyond box-pushing and successfully embrace a solutions/services business model.

Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director at Robert Half Technology, a staffing firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., says the tech-sales divide stems from a lack of experience. "Back in the day, people who knew COBOL and Basic were expected to sit in a cube and code all day," she says. "Today, the requirements of technical people are very different. They're expected to communicate well, both verbally and in writing, and customers are a lot more technically savvy than they used to be."

While the tech-sales disconnect is nothing new, VARs, no longer content to let techies be just technical, have stepped up sales training for their IT gurus.

According to the Benchmark Profitability Database, an ongoing research project by the Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED is part of the CMP Channel Group, which publishes VARBusiness), technical personnel at VARs receive 5.4 days of sales training per quarter, on the average. That's about the same amount of training as their sales counterparts and only two-and-a-half days fewer in training than techies get on tech topics.

"When I started doing this, techies were real heads-down types of people whose social skills weren't expected to be super sharp," says Christa Baker, regional recruiting manager for the Northeast professional division of Manpower, a Milwaukee-based staffing firm that focuses on IT and engineering. "Now they're being pushed to interface with clients. Everyone's really drilling down on soft skills, because that's what's going to take them to the next level."

Ultimately, VARs need to do more than design and deploy creative solutions. They need to sell their wares with gusto.

In keeping with the soft-skills trend, project management has rocketed its way up the top-10 list of most-sought-after skillsets by channel players.

"It's a good idea today for people to go after some of the project management certifications," says Ed Shaw, executive vice president of Starpoint Solutions, a solution provider based in New York. "There are a lot of folks who have been doing this a long time. They have the skillsets but not the certification, and that puts them at a disadvantage in this market, where it's sometimes hard to make a distinction among the candidates profiled in a mound of resumes."

Dan Schneider, senior vice president of product services at Lewis Center, Ohio-based Sarcom, puts project management high on the company's hiring agenda as well.

NEXT: Tech skills that are in demand.