I am an internal consultant in the Organizational Change and Development department of AG Communications Systems (joint venture between Lucent Technologies and GTE).

I am doing some basic research for my OCD team. I have been calling a few high tech companies (Sun, Microsoft, Alcatel, Lucent, etc.) with a couple of questions. In addition to the responses that I have received from these companies, I thought I might give Teamnet a try.

The questions are as follows:

1. What do you call internal departments that provide products and services to other internal departments? (i.e. our company calls them "internal customers and/or suppliers"). NOTE: My upper management is questioning the use of the term "internal customer" because they want the entire organization to immediately think external when the word "customer" is used.

2. Do you have a Sales Intern/mentoring program for long-term technical engineers interested in pursuing a sales career. This program would also allow sales management the opportunity to determine whether the interested engineer has the competencies necessary to be a successful sales person. If so, what does this program look like?; how is it structured?; logistics?; target competency and turndown criteria?; what is the success rate? (NOTE: This program that we are concidering is not focused on engineers that are already out in the field as a sales engineer, but have been writing code and participating in software design for a number of years).

3. What sales training consultants and/or courses do you use to improve sales performance in the areas of sales 101, relationship management, strategic selling, sales negotiation, team selling, etc.? (internally developed or outsourced).

Thank you very much for your consideration.

Greg Rodgers

-- Greg Rodgers (Rodgersg@AGCS.com), August 03, 1998