Do you think an IT sales person should have a solid technical background?

A Sales person's core competence lies in hunting and farming clients.
This means that he is intrinsically involved in customer relationships, mapping products/services to customer needs, showcasing the need (and the solution thereof) to the required stakeholders whether internally within his own organization or externally to potential clients.
Like any other industry sales people have invariably more people oriented characteristics rather than product knowledge.
Yet what is universally overlooked is that like everyone else they need to do their homework before they make a client pitch.
For IT we have hundreds of domains and sub domains where organizations claim expertise and the pre-requisite that the IT Salesperson needs to hold is the correct and accurate knowledge of what products he or she is trying to sell.
Know too little and you will get exposed; know too much means that you spend more time being a techie than doing your sales role.
The best person to sell the product would be a techie knowing that he/she knows everything about the product.
But the people skills and communication capabilities are the gaps that should be addressed first which are mostly available in a seasoned sales professional.
We often hear of tall stories of sales people making claims that they sold the product without knowing a shred of what they were selling.
This can be dangerous if the client sees through this as a mere sale and not as a relationship where the IT salesperson should ideally be creating a win-win situation where the client benefits from the product (with credible claims) and where the organization benefits from the sales to the client.
In a nushell, It is extremely beneficial for the sales person to have an IT background to identify with both the client who wants to purchase the software/service as well as the product team which has devised the product/service to meet the customer needs.
Anything less is not a relationship but mere selling which may work in the short term but will not yield lasting results

Yes it must have it

It's a prerequisite by most of the IT firms to skip the technical training.
Sales persons mostly comes with a commerce backgroud because they opt to learn marketing and business processes.
IT graduates are more into software engineering, QA or business analysts jobs.
For IT sales person, it's good have understanding of the basic technical tools and platforms.
IT itself is a vast industry and its really tough to learn all about it.
One should understand IT solutions are of various types i.e.
Web solutions, Mobile Solutions, Social Media Solutions, Enterprise Level Solutions etc.
and if we start to make them industry specific then it will initiate another list i.e HealthCare solutions, Banking solutions, Hotel Managment solutions etc.
A sales person will be sales person in any field.
His prime target is to gather new inquiries, create new accounts and increase the sales graph.
The sales person can initiate a buzz and it's a good practice to engage technical team to do analysis, draft a technical solution and do session with client's technical team to describe the technical end of the solution.
A sales guy should own the account responsiblity, design business proposal, discuss business terms and condition and do good followup.
These are all the general practice any sales person does in any industry.
IT sales person, is just another sales person selling IT service.
Start learning with keywords to get attention and you will excel with time.

 

I think that the IT sales person should have first step with the customer to tray to the sold technical background because he is the first person who tries to persuade the customer to buy the product or service so if the customer find the sales person doesn’t know or doesn’t answer hem with all his technical questions I thinks this will be failure in the process of the IT sales task 

Yes, of course,

you have to know about the thing you selling

Normally sales person who can sell any thing have the sales power by nature.
But i believe that the sales engineer must have great technical IT Background in order to advise the customers and guide the sales persons what to sell and when to sell

I think like that.
That an IT sales person must have a solid technical background.
Both from a technical educational and a technical work experience background But we need to realize, that there are also some worker non-technical background succeeded as IT Sales Person because of their desire to learn and want to continuously develop themselves.