Switching over to sales

It should've worked out as the dream of any network professional who sets up his own systems integration business - delegate the sales and marketing to a trained professional and focus on setting strategy as CTO. But Steven Morgan turned out to be a natural at sales and hired another techie for the CTO role.

Some 10 years later, in 1996, Morgan, who began his technical career as a network engineer at reseller Computerland, sold his share of the business and joined McAfee as a sales representative. He rose quickly through the ranks and became a vice president of sales just a year and a half later.

Having little formal sales training, Morgan says his technical background helped him land the job because he understood technology and could show empathy with customers. Today, Morgan is president and CEO of SalesRecruits.com, the online recruitment service he founded for IT sales professionals.

In a tough economic climate, it's wise to take stock of your skills and options should you find yourself on the job market. A career in IT sales might be a possibility. According to Morgan, there's no cap on salary for talented and experienced sales executives, and some IT workers could double their salaries by switching to sales.

"Technologists offer trust and credibility because they truly understand what customers are trying to do," Morgan says. "That's the difference compared to salespeople from a sales background who try to understand but don't have the background knowledge."

Frank Chisholm, president and CEO of AptSoft, makers of tools that speed application integration, is another IT professional turned sales executive. He worked within the IS department of Scott Paper as an internal MIS consultant. Having become so impressed by Cullinet Software's IDMS database, he went to work for the vendor and was given the lofty title of manager, Mid-Atlantic region. "But I quickly figured out it was a sales role," he jokes.

It was relatively easy for Chisholm to make the jump to sales because he did so in 1977, when the software industry was just starting out, and it was the norm for techies to sell to other techies. "All the people at Cullinet were database administrators," he recalls. Cullinet's sales presentations would last four hours and consist of 144 35mm slides.

Almost 30 years later, with many experienced IT sales professionals competing for jobs, the picture looks a lot different. The route might not be so direct for IT executives with no sales experience. Morgan explains: "I don't think my opinion [that techs offer customers trust and credibility] is universally accepted among larger vendors that are more inclined to hire people with sales skills."

One steppingstone is a pre-sales support engineer. Described by some vendors as systems engineers, a pre-sales engineer provides technical support to an account representative, helping to demonstrate a product to prospective customers. From there, it is possible to move to a sales role.