The brief is a familiar one. The business sells something genuinely technical, the customers are engineers or clinicians or specifiers, and so the salesperson must have a technical background. Often the requirement is narrower still, naming a particular application within a particular sector.
Apply those filters honestly and the candidate pool can come down to single figures nationally. Of those, several will not be looking, one or two will not be any good, and the rest will be working for competitors who intend to keep them. The search takes months and tends to end either in a compromise hire or in the role being left open.
The question worth settling before starting that search is what the technical requirement is actually protecting against.
What buyers now do without you
Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers in late 2024 and found that 61 per cent would prefer to complete a purchase without a sales representative at all. Buyers research independently, and they are largely content doing so, because the specification, the datasheet and the comparison are all available without having to ask anyone.
The same survey identified where buyers do still want a person involved. It is in working out whether a product or service genuinely fits their own situation. That is a judgement, and it draws on understanding the customer’s business rather than on reciting the product.
A salesperson hired principally for product knowledge has been selected for the part of the job that buyers increasingly handle without them.
The expertise is usually already in the building
Businesses in this position almost always have deep technical capability. Engineers, applications specialists, clinical staff and product managers are already on the payroll. What tends to be missing is depth of commercial capability, and a technical hiring filter makes certain that it stays missing.
There is a more productive division of labour available. The salesperson finds and qualifies the opportunity, understands the customer’s commercial position, controls the process and holds the relationship. The technical specialist comes in where real depth is needed, and comes out again afterwards. Businesses working this way generally get better coverage from fewer people, and they are not restricted to hiring from a pool of eight.
It also protects the technical team. Where engineers are expected to generate business themselves, they often end up providing free consultancy to customers who were never going to buy, because qualifying an opportunity is a distinct skill and it is not the one they were hired for.
What the technical requirement should usually be
Few technical sales roles genuinely need someone who could design the product. Most need someone who can hold a credible conversation, recognise when a question has gone beyond them, and bring in the person who can answer it without losing authority in the room.
That is a far larger pool, and it can be tested properly. Put a candidate in front of a technical proposition they have never encountered and watch how they handle it:
- Do they ask sensible questions?
- Do they work out who the decision makers are and what the commercial driver is?
- Or do they retreat into features they only half understand?
Technical knowledge can usually be taught to a capable salesperson within months. Commercial instinct is considerably harder to install in a capable engineer, and the attempt tends to take years.
Where the filter is genuinely justified
This is not an argument for ignoring the technical dimension. Some sales do require it. Where the salesperson has to configure or specify during the conversation, where regulatory knowledge carries real liability, or where the buying community is small enough that standing within it is the entire proposition, the requirement earns its place.
The test is whether it reflects what the role genuinely demands, or a preference formed because the last person in the seat happened to have that background. The two are easy to confuse, and they produce very different searches.
The practical consequence
A business that insists on a technical background for every commercial hire is choosing a smaller, slower and more expensive market, in exchange for a reassurance that buyer behaviour has already eroded.
Prioritising industry experience over sales ability is one of the ten traps covered in our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes, along with what to test instead.
Kingman Lennox works with technically led businesses to establish what a sales role genuinely requires before a search begins, and to test commercial capability properly once it does. You can read more about how we work and about our twelve-month guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to discuss a role you are trying to fill.
