Although it would be an unfair caricature to claim IT pros are charismatically challenged or socially inept, there's something counterintuitive to the idea that technical workers should also be sharp salespeople. But once you get beyond the stereotypes and preconceived ideas, it's actually a great idea. To prove the soundness of the concept, construct a business case for spending the money on sales training. In doing so, it should become very clear how improved sales skills could help improve the IT department's performance. Increasingly, companies believe in the power of IT to differentiate its value proposition in the marketplace through product innovation, cycle time reductions and identification of new markets.
Sales training instills a customer-centric orientation.
This is precisely the attitude the IT organization should present to the rest of the company as its stature and expectations for its performance increase. Breaks down cultural barriers. As the Web forces the enterprise to knock down barriers between departments, IT pros will find themselves increasingly working with people outside the language of run-time environments, switched network fabrics and middleware. Your staff might wind up diffuse throughout the organization, assisting and partnering with every facet of the company. Sales training emphasizes communications skills, the ability to convey IT and what it does with a minimum of jargon, and also teaches tact particularly helpful when users suggest impractical IT ideas or ask what a tech person might think is a silly question.