Hiring and retaining talented people for sales jobs has become a significant challenge for businesses in the IT industry. And four out of five businesses plan to spend more this year to hire the sales talent they need.

That's according to a survey of 300 IT industry human resource managers in the United States. The survey was commissioned by ToutApp, a developer of sales tracking and analytics applications. The survey also found that retaining top salespeople can be as tough as recruiting them.

For solution providers looking to add to their sales staffs, the survey illustrates the difficulties they face as they compete with other technology companies for sales talent.

"It's hard to find great sales people today," said Tahweed Kader, ToutApp CEO, in a statement discussing the survey's results. "As tech companies scale, servers and storage capacity may be infinite, but there is still a limited number of humans they can hire and train to sell."

Not surprisingly, the survey found that technology and engineering jobs remain the toughest to fill: Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed said finding high-quality, experienced people for those jobs was their top hiring challenge. But filling sales positions was second, at 17 percent, followed by "creative roles" at 8 percent.

The IT industry in the U.S. employs just over 6.7 million people, according to CompTIA, the computing technology industry association. Forty-six percent of them are in technology-specific jobs, such as product development and systems engineering, while 54 percent work in non-technical jobs, such as sales, finance and administrative positions.

The IT industry added 198,156 jobs in 2015 for a gain of 3 percent, according to CompTIA.

Among the 300 HR managers surveyed in the ToutApp study, 80 percent said they plan to invest more in sales talent recruitment and hiring in 2016, while 15  percent said they would invest the same amount this year and only 2 percent expected spending to decline.

"After IT and product engineering, sales has really become the key to competitive advantage within most technology companies today," Kader said. "From business development to deal closure, revenue is directly attributed to the success and effectiveness of your [sales] team."

When asked about the kinds of challenges they face relating to their sales staffs, 47 percent of the surveyed HR managers cited retaining top talent while 46 percent said finding and recruiting experienced applicants was tough and 38 percent cited maintaining sales productivity (multiple answers were allowed).

Recruiting and hiring experienced sales talent was described as "very competitive" by 70 percent of those surveyed while 52 percent described finding and hiring entry-level sales talent as "very competitive."

The survey also found that the average tenure of sales representatives at technology companies was three to four years, cited by 28 percent of the survey respondents. Another 26 percent placed the average tenure at their companies at only two to three years, while 21 percent said it was four to five years.

The ToutApp survey was conducted between Jan. 19 and 26.