Eliot Burdett, managing partner of Peak Sales Recruiting.(Darren Brown, OBJ)

A recent survey is adding fuel to the argument that Ottawa high tech firms are not putting the proper emphasis on sales and marketing in their strategies.

In May, Peak Sales Recruiting conducted a survey of human resources professionals working for technology companies with Ottawa operations to look at recruiting practices.

"The research that came back from our survey is that there is a disconnect. People are saying we must invest in sales and marketing, yet everyone seems to be saying the toughest part of hiring is the engineering staff," said Eliot Burdett, managing partner of Peak Sales recruiting.

"We absolutely need to have a dominant sales culture. Strong economies are built on profits and profits come from sales. We need companies not to just survive, we need them to thrive and for that, we need companies to have strong sales leadership."

The survey found that, while 29.4 per cent of HR professionals found technical positions the hardest to recruit, only 17.7 per cent identified sales to be the hardest, and only 5.9 per cent found it was marketing.

Similarly, the most difficult skills to find or attract were technical (41.2 per cent), sales (11.8 per cent) and marketing (5.9 per cent). The largest cluster of respondents came from companies in the 101 to 500 employee range, but there were companies as small as 11 to 25 and larger than 5,000 employees.

"The reason we did this was because we wanted to understand how companies are going about building their teams," said Mr. Burdett.

"Although there is a lot of talk now about making sales and marketing more important, the technology side is just ingrained. The general consensus is that engineering skills and talent are the most difficult to assess in companies. That's kind of ironic, because it's at odds with the consensus that we need to be more than a technology town."

That sentiment is echoed by David Perry, executive recruiter of Perry-Martel International.

"Canadian companies tend to have best of breed technology, so why are we not outselling the Americans 10 to one? The answer is because we are more comfortable hiring experienced engineering talents than we are at hiring great sales talent. For Ottawa to succeed, it has been said for the past 20 years, it has to shift its thinking," he said. "If Ottawa companies did as much due diligence on their sales as they did on their engineering staff, we would be unstoppable."

The survey found that not only are tech firms not putting enough emphasis on hiring sales, when they do hire (as more than 74 per cent of companies were planning to fill sales roles in the current year), they are not looking for the right skills.

"The reality is, companies see sales in terms of soft skills, that they don't need the same scrutiny or investment (as technical positions)," said Mr. Burdett.

In response to a question about the "biggest challenges in recruiting sales candidates," only 6.7 per cent identified difficulty assessing sales skills, versus 33.3 per cent emphasizing a match with organizational culture. Another 26.7 per cent said separating "hype" from reality was the biggest challenge.

"People might think that sales are all about schmoozing and relationships and golfing. That might have been true many years ago, but it's simply not the case anymore," said Mr. Burdett. "There is a perception if you can sell, you can sell anything. That's not true, there is a lot of science to the sales profession."

Lynn Brown-Harper, human resources consultant at PCI Geomatics, knows the science of sales quite well. She was in the minority when she answered that finding competent salespeople is harder than finding engineers.

PCI Geomatics develops geospatial software, specializing in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis and cartographic production, not something that just anyone can pick up in a training exercise.

"When you are facing these clients where this is their background, if you don't know what you're talking about, you're a little bit lost," Ms. Brown-Harper said. As a result, many of the sales staff need a specialized background and most have been recruited from within the company.

"It's a very high priority for us to find people who have the right skills, but it's not easy. Engineering staff is a lot easier to find," Ms. Brown-Harper said.

Eli Fathi, CEO and founder of OrbitIQ and chair of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation's Ottawa-Gatineau commercialization task force, said this is a nation-wide problem, and Canada is ending up the loser.

"The one example that really typifies this is the Croc (shoe). It is a Canadian invention from Quebec and America basically commercialized it. Canada didn't get anything out of it – most people don't even know it is a Canadian invention. A pat on the shoulder or an 'atta boy' is not going to cut it."

Mr. Fathi said the key to better selling is looking outside the Canadian borders and thinking big, something Canada has a hard time doing sometimes. "We don't lack the talent, we have the capability. We are only 33 million, so clearly we cannot sell to ourselves, we have to go outside to grow. The issue is that the market is outside," he said.

Selling outside the border also means taking advantage of talent outside of Canada.

"Ottawa doesn't have a lot of great sales talent, but that's OK ... we want them to be where the customers are (in the U.S.)," said Mr. Perry.

For more information on the survey by Peak Sales recruiting go to:

www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/sales-recruiting-tools.php