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IT specialists vs salesmen: and the world cracked in half

In almost every company you can find a confrontation: salespeople and marketers, admins and accounting, salespeople and IT specialists, etc. There is nothing surprising in this phenomenon: units solve business problems, and each of them seeks to demonstrate that it is their contribution to the common cause that is key. And the truth is: if there were no engineers, developers and production, what would the sales people do? It is not clear. And if there was a cool product, but there would be no one to tell the market about it? That's the same. Nevertheless, such a confrontation generates not only positive competition for business, but also causes conflicts, breaks deadlines and sometimes even spoils a product or project. A chain reaction begins: conflict → disruption of the project and product deterioration → customer dissatisfaction → decrease in revenue → managerial problems, including personnel. And that meanslocal conflict within departments is becoming a global business problem that affects everyone. Let's see where the legs of the great confrontation grow from.


Among the warring colleagues listed in the introduction, the most critical for business and communications is the IT couple (engineer, production worker, etc.) - the sales person (commercial service employee). This couple is distinguished by an important feature: their war takes place not only on the field inside the company, but also in the external environment: this is how the attitude to the product is determined, customer support works, backlog is filled and prioritized, delivery times, shipments, releases are formed. That is, the revenue and prosperity of the entire company directly depends on the aspects of this internal war.

There is a problem


Almost all the companies in which we work with you are commercial, that is, they have the ultimate goal of making profit and distributing it among team members (in an ideal parallel universe, it is also proportional to each person’s contribution to revenue generation). If you look at the process of capital formation at the expense of the means of production ( Marx lived, Marx is alive, Marx will live! ), Then for any sphere the scheme of the company’s work will be enlarged as follows:


To achieve its goals, the company employs employees who, with their knowledge and skills (labor), help it create products and services. All actions of employees fit into internal business processes - a chain of coordinated actions with specified deadlines, responsible and triggers (well, or globular tangles of historical interactions). Each employee of the company is responsible for their segments of the processes and contacts with colleagues so that the work leads everyone to the same desired result. True, it sounds complicated and boring? 

Simply put, we all sit in the workplace, do our work to the best of our abilities, wait for a salary, drink tea and coffee and quietly dislike colleagues with whom we have to discuss the fruits of labor in order to put all our efforts into a market product in IT language that customers will buy. And each of us believes that it is he who is at the forefront of the life of the company: the developers are sure that they are sawing a product that will sell itself; marketers believe that without their activity there will be no new leads that sellers will receive; the sales people are sure that whoever sold it, well done, that’s fame, and a bonus as a percentage of sales, and the love of management ... And only one bookkeeping department doesn’t like all these parasites, because all the money is in her hands :-) Already sensed, how many sophistry and false theses are in this reasoning?

Meanwhile, this state of affairs is the root of the problems in the company, when the release may be delayed due to lack of customer information, and the sale breaks down due to a poorly tested function (from a ridiculous real one - for example, because the program does not closed by clicking on the cross, and remained deployed to the entire window ).

Conflict units has clear and unambiguous symptoms:

  • employees separate and “close” CRM , bugtrackers and task management systems from each other ; 
  • only correspondence is heard in correspondence or at meetings;
  • employees do not train each other within the company;
  • responsibility for failures is shifted;
  • the head is increasingly involved in solving problems as an arbiter;
  • products and services are developed not on the basis of customer and market requirements, but on the basis of a sense of beauty by specific developers or businesses;
  • there are attempts to create lobby groups and attract independent units or colleagues to their side (testers and technical support most often suffer as those who functionally gravitate to both sides).

Sooner or later, the confrontation becomes chronic and brings systemic harm to both the company and the employees themselves. The most unpleasant thing is that often the leader cannot effectively help the parties, because everything is equally important to him (or not important) and any “adjacency” will lead to serious consequences and exacerbate the crisis. 

What is the misunderstanding?


Company attitude


For an IT professional, a company is a complex environment within which he can use his skills, learn something new and participate in creating a cool product (we don’t do others, right?). For him, the main non-material motivation is self-realization, professional growth, and a demonstration of professionalism. He studied for a long time, he knows how to speak the same language with the machine and makes the machine fulfill your requirements and create added value.

For the seller, the company is a favorable environment for successful work: the company helps to attract customers with its name and reputation, the company pays for the means of production, the company provides a salary (in the general case) as insurance against a “lean” period. The main non-material motivation of the seller is success, which is measured by the number of closed transactions, established business contacts and the image “Yes, he sold a rubber woman to the Sultan with a harem of beauties”.  

Product Attitude 


This is the most difficult component of the relationship, because it is the product that decides the fate of the company, and it is the seller and IT specialist who look at it from different angles.

For an IT professional, a product (service, application, development, etc.) is his immediate brainchild, which he creates with his fellow colleagues. He knows how the product works, where it is potentially weak and incredibly strong, how much it actually costs and what benefits it can bring. This is the unique position of the creator in relation to his creation. 

Often, it seems to the developer that it is he who knows better what needs to be released in the new release - for example, he believes that the neural network and machine learning in CRM will be much more useful than the formation of a beautiful form of primary documentation (after all, it can also be created in the Excel template). He thinks over the architecture of the product, brings his knowledge to it and wants to make it as technological as possible.

For a salesperson, a product or service is just a product that needs to be sold. He can love, respect, use, hate him, but the main goal is the same: to bring the product to the client and get full payment, close the deal. Moreover, in technical companies, the salesperson may not know the complex product thoroughly. For him, the main thing is to understand what the client wants and be able to convince the client that the company is able to solve all his headaches. Well, or just passively sell if the product is not particularly complex. 

And here the conflict of interests begins: the techie believes that he knows exactly how and what to sell, what idea lies at the center of the product, the salesperson focuses on the client, “mirrors” his headache and looks for a solution to the problem through the product. Who is right? We will understand a little lower.

Attitude to technology


It is worth highlighting several types of technologies: 

TechnologyEngineer attitudeSales Attitude
Development tools and other technical toolsHis main work tool, constantly updated and supported by the company The seller does not apply this software in any way.
Billing, internal systems and portalsA work tool + a tool that should work with IT forces and which other units use.The source of information, often there are questions about use and additional requests (for reports, for downloads, etc.).
CRM systems and other business softwareMainly supported software, frequent requests from non-technical users. The main working software, constant needs for customization, expansion, support.

Accordingly, the seller is often an internal business client for the IT service (engineer, admin, 1C sole programmer, etc.). This causes additional misunderstanding for a number of reasons.

From the side of sales managers:

  • inability to formulate technical requests and state them in the terms of reference (TOR);
  • lack of understanding of the formal culture of requests (why you need to issue a ticket, and not just “throw a task into the program”);
  • the misunderstanding that “a slander will fix CRM” is sometimes an expensive revision in collaboration with a vendor.

From the side of the engineers:

  • lack of understanding of the urgency of tasks and the specifics of the work of sales managers;
  • difficulties in perceiving vague wording of tasks (especially bad when a salesperson tries to pose a problem in technical language);
  • difficulties in prioritizing tasks (especially if there are 1-2 developers and programmers, and system administrators, and technical support). 

Such conflicts inhibit the solution of current problems.

Customer attitude


IT people rarely communicate with customers (unless they have technical support responsibilities), so the client is a source of requests for them, which are also not transmitted directly, but through sales managers and client managers, that is, they can be interpreted and distorted. The client, in turn, requires improvements and functions that are necessary for him and he does not care if the programmer considers them appropriate.

A client for a salesperson is a source of income, an adversary who needs to be circumvented using his strategy. And if the client needs something, the seller is ready to shake the developers and engineers to get this factor closing the deal. Alas, often the sales manager does not know anything about the development cost and does not realize that a “small refinement” can entail a change in the entire product, and this is a complete development and testing cycle. A sales manager is almost always a guaranteed devil advocate representing a client.

The client, the third and not superfluous in these respects, believes that since he pays money, he can demand anything. By the way, some customers do not even try to figure out the current set of product features and immediately demand to create an individual solution. Of course, he does not want to pay extra money for this. And the more distant the client’s company is from the IT sphere or the sphere of activity of your company, the deeper the gap of misunderstanding and complaints.  

Relationship to each other


They are different. They are just from different worlds. They were redefined by their profession. The engineer positions himself as smart, the salesperson as successful. The developers believe that their product will sell itself, the seller is sure that it is he who drives the progress.

An engineer, developer, programmer, IT specialist is a logician who is used to working in the “man - machine” system, which means he thinks in clear, unambiguous and intelligible categories, does not multiply entities and prefers clear, simple and clearly formulated tasks. The developer can easily drown in the implementation of software functions and bring the code to perfection - so it seems more correct to him. Any meeting, any conversation interferes with the concentrated work of the developer. 


Something about the head of a techie.

A sales manager is an active extrovert, for whom language and speech are the main tools of work. The only way to get energized and inspired for him is to work with other people. He willingly and skillfully communicates, knows how to persuade and convince. And he knows how to distract: in order to please the client, he is ready to give up everything and not send TK or a ticket, but immediately run to the programmer and ask questions that the client formulated. Guess what's going on? That's right: the IT specialist “leaves” his task, gets annoyed and answers dryly and in essence (well, or something like “not enough data, formulate your question and ask again”). This angers both colleagues, who consider the current task the most important - and here they are, the first sparks of conflict.   


The salesperson has an open space, noise, three telephones and a full head of thoughts about deals - norms.

So who is right? None. Each employee in the company (especially in small and medium-sized businesses, who seeks to optimize staff and costs) is in its place and it is best if there are well-established processes within which each part of the work will form a single and successful puzzle. Everyone does his own thing. So how to overcome the conflict? There are options: use pressure from the head, find the arbitration department, form independent teams, implement Scrum ... NO. You need to be able to negotiate and work effectively.

How to find a common language?


In addition to non-material motivation, both employees have an important material one: personal income. And they are interdependent in the process of generating income, they go to a common goal and work for one company. If you look at the stories of the coolest companies (IT and not very), there were always two at their source: a cool creator and a cool salesman (well, or one person uniquely combined both roles). One created ingenious or simply suitable solutions, the other was able to promote and sell them. Otherwise it will not work. 

What does IT need to do?


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In this article, I examined the relatively pure types of our heroes. Fortunately, there are developers who are immersed in business (they make cool team leads) and technically / technologically advanced sales managers and commerce. These employees are able to move and inspire the whole company, because they have a 360 degree view of the business. But here, everything is not so simple: the strength of a company is determined by the level of its weakest employee. So the meaning of the proverb remains the same: one in the field is not a warrior. The task of the “stars” is not to star, but to train colleagues and form a strong team. A team in which there is no place for professional jealousy, in which the boss is so self-sufficient and professional that he will not be jealous of a subordinate who has closed more transactions in the current month or has written an ideal and sought-after code.The leader in IT is about intelligence, systematic ability and ability to convey meanings, but not about urging and nit-picking; a sales manager is about business activity, continuous training, responsibility and exceptional literacy, but not about coquetry (of both sexes) and idle chatter in working with clients. 

A good development team creates a cool product.
A good sales team nurtures a cool company.
Two good teams make the company invincible.

Discounts for CRM for business


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