As you know I just recently returned from visiting our technical team and I first-hand experienced a “snippet” of the tug-of-war that can take place between sales teams and technical teams. Our guys are very understanding, so nothing big - but there were definitely jokes going around that showed that at times if they could ring our necks, they probably would.

Here is the bottomline to the fights between these two teams:

The sales team is the one that is out there voicing the capabilities of what they are selling and also committing to certain deadlines. But once they sell whatever they promised, they pass it along to the technical team - it’s the techincal team that actually needs to BUILD and implement the promise.

To top it off, many times if the promise is not fulfilled, it’s the technical team that is blamed, not really the sales team (since it’s just their job to bring IN the business).

Also, by the nature of the beast, a sales team will pretty much say anything to a client typically to get the sale I mean, think about it, they have a quota to meet, a reputation to keep and an ego to inflate.

I’ve personally seen three areas where I see most of the “disagreements” take place…

1. Deadlines

We personally don’t seem to really have this problem, we have “super coders!” However, in companies where the sales team promises merchandise or some custom-tailored software, this is likely a regular problem.

If the sales person has to promise a late delivery, he/she will lose the sale. If he/she promises an early delivery, then they risk irritating the fulfillment personnel. Personally, I think the sales guy just says “screw it, let me get the money, i’ll handle the technical guys later.”

2. Unfulfilled Projects

Now, THIS one our technical team has tons of experience with me being the guilty party - they won’t admit it, but I know they’ve wanted to slap me a few times. Basically what happens here is that the management/sales/product team comes up with an idea and asks the technical team to evaluate it and as always, they say “this is urgent, do it right away…”

The technical team may slave day and night to get the discussions done and a full report ready by which time the management may have already decided to “nix” the project - meaning, not follow-through with it.

Obviously this would upset anyone, if you were just told that you have to stay up forever working on a project scope and a few days later told “Oh, sorry, we decided not to do it, thanks anyways…” I can definitely understand their issue there.

The only thing is that this will never change…especially in a start-up - things change, ideas come and go, just the nature of the beast.

3. Project Creep

This one makes me laugh because we just got done poking fun at this in the office, “project creep” is when you build a system based on well thought-out requirements and feature sets. HOWEVER, as the project starts, it keeps growing.

You think of new features, more things to add and so on.

This not only delays the launch of the project but can drive the developers crazy because many of the things you ask for may require a LOT of programming which would have been that much easier had you mentioned it from the start.

Any work around this? Not really…

Again, this will happen in a start-up. This will especially happen if you are launching a new and unique concept. You have no idea how the market will react to it.

Not only will you add/delete features during the actual development, but you’ll add/delete features constantly even after the launch of it.

But it certainly CAN help to spend just a few days extra (or even weeks) PLANNING it out in the beginning…the less project creep the better. But, I don’t think there is ANY project done in history that did not suffer from the creep.

I’m sure there are many other areas where these two teams fight with each other, but thoese are three main ones I’ve seen.

What can you do? Nothing really…just take the technical team out for a beer here and there and send them some chocolates!

Maybe do some better planning and keep them involved in your sales process to some degree - if they feel involved, then it would be a team decision that everyone has responsibility over.

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Tags: sales team, technical team

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Building A Company, Selling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.