Returning to High Tech Sales

Hello,

I saw one of your articles on PayScale.com thought you had good advice, and found your email address. After receiving a BCOM in Marketing & Management (minor Economics) I spent five years in corporate sales at a couple of different companies.

For the past two years I switched gears and am a product manager at a high tech company. Although my current career is challenging, I miss the constant customer contact that I had with corporate sales. Yet, I don't really want to go back to large based commission roles. I am looking for a transition to something, but can not decide what to do. Any advice?

Thanks,

Graeme

Graeme,

As far as high-tech companies go, I am most familiar with Microsoft so I will speak from my experience there. I’m sure that other high-tech companies are structured in other ways.

The titles may be different at other companies but, when I was at Microsoft, they had technical and non-technical product management (sometimes called product planning), and business development within a product unit. The nature of the customer interaction was different for each of the jobs. In smaller companies, all of these jobs may be rolled into one position. If your company doesn’t offer these types of positions you could likely look outside it and find these types of positions.

• Non-technical product marketing (PR, advertising, etc.): The market research jobs in this category are the best fit for customer interaction, but, still, the amount of it may be too low for your tastes since it can involves low direct interaction, such as seeing customer in a focus group behind a mirrored wall.
  
  
• Technical/product planner: There is likely someone in your organization who works with the technical teams to identify the customer needs of certain types of customers (finance, manufacturing, etc.) or feature functional requirements for certain user activities (how folks work with database work, etc.). In these jobs the product manager or product planner visit the customer’s sites to figure how the customer works and is responsible for being the expert that the technical teams can go to for synthesizing all the product market research, competitive knowledge, customer support problems, and marketing information (feature benefit statements).
  
  
• Business development/evangelists: If your company’s success is dependent on empowering other groups or filling its business gaps through partnerships then there are often marketing positions that involve empowering these groups or negotiating deals with them. These jobs are probably closest to sales.
  
  
• Consulting: Often larger companies offer consulting arms where they help customers with integrating their solutions with the customer’s existing legacy software or to meet a customer’s specific needs. These folks often have to be pretty technical, but a lot of sales and direct customer interaction is involved.

I hope the above opens some options for you.

Thanks,

C.J.