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Sales

Getting Engineers to Sell: How to Ensure You Don’t Waste Your Most Precious Asset

By Jack Malcolm / 1.15.2013 / 6 Comments

Calculating the profit contribution of the next deal?

Key point: Turn your engineering and technical staff into a hugely valuable selling asset by making selling acceptable, accessible, and appealing.

Companies that sell high-tech systems, or professional services such as engineering and consulting services, will often have more non-sales people interacting on a daily basis with their customers than their own formal sales force. These non-sales staff are often physically located in the client’s location and work closely with users and influencers every single day; when they do their jobs right, they develop strong relationships, deep credibility, and intimate knowledge of their clients’ operations, viagra culture, problems and opportunities, often in advance of anyone else knowing these things. In fact, some companies even dispense with salespeople and rely entirely on their engineers to serve clients and generate additional revenue.

Relationships, credibility and knowledge are priceless assets that any salesperson would kill to have, because they are the foundation of stellar sales success. Time after time in training sessions where the client includes technical staff as part of the sales team for the class, I’ve seen non-sales staff come up with some of the best insights and suggestions to advance the sales strategy or opportunity.

In addition, engineers and other technical staff can be your advance scouts into potential opportunities. The Corporate Executive Board tells us that buyers are about 60% of the way through their buying process before they contact potential suppliers.[1] In other words, most sales opportunities form long before they are visible to the outside world. They form within daily processes and operations, when things don’t work as well as they should, when things change and companies need to adapt and respond.

Yet these assets often go untapped and quite frankly, wasted, because the people who have them don’t use them to advance the revenue goals of their employers.

Why aren’t they doing it now? Engineers either:

Don’t want to do it because they see it as distasteful. Make selling acceptable.
Don’t want to do it because they see it as difficult or specialized. Make selling accessible.
Don’t see the need to do it. Make selling appealing.

I will address each of these issues in a separate article. Here, we will discuss how to reframe selling so that it is acceptable to engineers.

Make it acceptable

The first hurdle to get over is the negative perception of selling that the typical engineer has. If you asked them the following question directly, which do you think they might check?

What is selling?

A sleazy activity that tricks people to buy things they don’t want or need, or:
Two parties agreeing to exchange resources in order to leave each party better off.

Nothing you do will have much effect until you can reframe their view of selling to something approaching the second option. [2]You have to show them that selling is a perfectly acceptable and even admirable activity. Very few people will wholeheartedly pursue an activity that contradicts the way they see themselves, regardless of how many carrots or sticks you use.

Here’s how engineers see themselves:

Engineers solve problems.
Engineers make the world a better place.
Engineers are objective, honest and direct.
Engineers are smart.

How does the ideal view of selling jibe with this self-image?

Engineers solve problems. Solution and consultative selling are both about solving problems for customers. Solution selling solves known problems, and consultative uncovers and addresses hidden problems. Learn how customers do things, find ways to improve them, and make the suggestion—that’s real selling!

Engineers make the world a better place. Selling is about making the world a better place. When two parties agree to exchange resources, it is because each intends to benefit from the transaction. While this is no guarantee that things will work, it’s an honest effort to make things better. As long as the discussion and the transaction are conducted honestly and with good intentions, both sides win, the relationship is strengthened, and the world is a better place. Plus, for those who would rather work on important problems and not trivial ones, trying to sell the solution is the most brutally clear way of finding out its true value.

Engineers are objective, honest, and direct. So are the salespeople who are most successful in the long run. They know that the only way to develop long-term, trust-based relationships is to deliver on their promises, and they can only do this when their promises are based in reality. When they can’t do something, they will tell the client. They may lose business by telling the client that there is a better alternative for them, but then this is business that they probably should not pursue anyway, and they will get other chances. Salespeople who are not afraid to (tactfully) challenge their customers’ view of the world will earn their respect and their attention.

Engineers are smart. This is definitely true for most of the ones I’ve met, but technical brilliance alone won’t make the world beat a path to your door. To paraphrase what Plato said about politics: “Those who refuse to engage in sales are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” Besides, the ability to deal with the complexities of personal perception and decision-making, at the pace of human conversation, is not trivial.

In part 2 of this series, we’ll see how to explain the sales process so that it is accessible. Part 3 is about how to make it appealing.

[1] “The End of Solution Sales,” by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2012.

[2] You can try to gloss it over by calling it “business development”, but that doesn’t fool anybody.

Persuasive communication

Everything I Say Is Wrong

By Jack Malcolm / 1.8.2013 / 1 Comment

Everything I write and everything I teach is wrong—sometimes, under certain circumstances.

Often in my classes someone will say something like, “I tried that and it didn’t work.” Or, “I didn’t do it that way and I was successful.” And they are usually right when they tell me that.

There are no absolutes in persuasion, and if someone tells you there is, they are fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Communication, thinking and decision making are too varied and capricious to be perfectly predictable, because people can be so different, situations can be complex, and times can change.

That’s why honest experts allow for the occasional deviation from the rule book. Any rule that tells you what to in a specific situation is actually based on a probability. When someone says, do this in order to succeed, what they actually mean is: “If you do x, there is a ___% chance that y will happen.”[1] The corollary to that statement is that there is always a chance that y will not happen.

Of course, they’re not going to say it this way. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are purposely hiding something from you. When you teach someone, you have to give it to them in a usable format, and if you delivered all your advice and instruction in the above format, you would quickly confuse your charges, leading to little or no learning, or give them so little confidence that they would never try your advice. Besides, for many rules, the percentage probability that y will happen is high enough that the rule becomes a reliable guide for most of the situations that they will face. You would be foolish to ask for another card if you’re holding 19 in blackjack, even if it is no guarantee of winning.

So, if you’re the one learning the rules, my point is not that you should immediately question every guideline or bit of advice you read or learn in a training class, or start breaking rules just because you feel like it. Just because a rule does not work in some circumstances does not mean it’s useless. In fact, the only reliable way to develop the judgment to decide when a rule does not apply is to learn the process and the rules so thoroughly that you can recognize when an exception is called for.

Here’s why: when an unexpected question or situation comes up during a sales call or presentation, you will not have time for cautious and deep deliberation about your response. You’ll have to use your judgment and intuition; but I’m not referring to some magical, being-in-tune-with-the-universe type of gut feel. I’m referring to Gary Klein’s definition of intuition as rapid pattern recognition: expert intuition is the ability to instantly and accurately size up the situation and respond correctly. In his studies of the application of expert judgment, he found that experts don’t compare options at the moment of decision—once they’ve sized up the situation, the decision becomes obvious to them. How does an expert develop that ability? Only by becoming so deeply immersed in the fundamentals of his or her domain, which means learning and following the rules thoroughly. In other words, to know when to break the rules, you have to be thoroughly steeped in them.

Sometimes you have to break the rules, but you had better know which rule you’re breaking, why, and what the risks are. For example, you should always plan your important sales calls, but be prepared to throw away the plan and improvise on the fly when something totally unexpected happens. The customer is always right, except sometimes they are so misinformed that you have to hit them right between the eyes with the truth. Always be passionate in presenting your point of view, except when it blinds you to the legitimate perspectives of others who may not share your passion.

If you are the one dispensing the rules, realize that there is no one perfect answer that applies every single time. Have the humility and the open mind to learn from experience, especially in a fluid environment. Also, beware the curse of knowledge. There may be exceptions to the rule that are so obvious that you don’t realize they’re not obvious to other people.

The humility of acknowledging that everything you say may be wrong under certain circumstances might even help politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington come together to produce practical and lasting legislation. It’s the only way to get things done when each side has “principles” that they hold dear.

Practical wisdom starts with accepting that every rule is wrong sometimes—maybe even this one.

[1] This is called “stripping” the claim, and it comes from Daniel Willingham’s book, When Can You Trust the Experts?

Success

Resolve

By Jack Malcolm / 1.2.2013 / No Comment

Every year at this time, millions of people solemnly resolve to improve something about their lives in some way, and the vast majority of those resolutions quickly fail. There are many who tell us that making new year’s resolutions is futile, so why try? After all, failure is almost guaranteed, so making resolutions is a waste of time at best and potentially harmful to your self-esteem.

Two of the most healthy states of mind that anyone can have are gratitude and optimism. We already have a national holiday specifically dedicated to gratitude,so why not have one set aside for optimism? In these pessimistic days, there’s a general sense that our best days are behind us, and that the future holds only danger, decline and despair. I don’t believe this is true for us as a nation, and you should never ever believe it is true for yourself personally.

In 1967, Martin Seligman and colleagues conducted experiments with dogs, in which some were repeatedly subjected to electric shocks from which they could not escape regardless of what levers they pressed. Most of those dogs learned to be helpless, so that in an ensuing experiment in which they could escape the shocks by leaping a low partition, they simply lay down and whined. I find it horrifying that anyone would do something like that to a dog, but how many times to people do something similar to themselves? People can also learn to be helpless. They try something, it doesn’t work, they listen to others who tell them it’s futile to keep trying, and they give up, even when there may only be a low partition keeping them from where they want to be.

The problem with this type of pessimism is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—that low partition may as well be ten feet high.

This is not a recommendation for uninformed or naïve optimism. Admiral James Stockdale, who survived seven years of brutal captivity in North Vietnam, told author Jim Collins that the ones who did not survive that ordeal were the optimists, who thought they would be out by a certain date, and died of a broken heart when it did not happen. Stockdale said:

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

You should make resolutions fully expecting that they will be difficult to fulfill, so when the inevitable difficulties come up you will be mentally prepared. But never let those difficulties keep you from trying.

Sure, millions of people resolve to lose weight or quit smoking, and millions fail. But millions succeed, and the vast majority of those failed numerous times before they succeeded. Don’t let the small likelihood of success turn into the certainty of failure before you even begin. Resolve.

Let’s make New Year’s Day Optimism Day.

Book reviews

Book Review: To Sell Is Human

By Jack Malcolm / 12.31.2012 / No Comment

Let me first say that I received an advance copy of Dan Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, in exchange for an honest review. Having read A Whole New Mind and Drive, I was really looking forward to reading this book.

I give to Sell Is Human four stars because who you are will determine what you think of the book. If you are one of the eight out of nine people in America who does not formally sell for a living, then it is a five-star book and this first half is for you. If you make your living in sales, it’s a three-star book and you can skip down to the second half.

The majority of readers will definitely enjoy and profit from the book. Pink writes engagingly, and fills the book with fascinating research findings and compelling stories. It also provides a much-needed explanation and perspective on the profession and practice of selling. If you think you don’t sell for a living, take a close look at how much of your day is spent trying to convince others of your point of view. And if you think selling is somehow beneath you, remember that what Plato said about politics is what Pink tells us about selling: those who refuse to participate in it end up being led by their “inferiors.”

The theme of the book can be summarized as follows:

Selling is something we all do in our work and personal lives.
Selling is talking someone into something that leaves them better off as a result.
It has to be done right, because the balance of power has shifted from the seller to the buyer.
When it’s done right, it’s a worthy and noble calling.

If you’re a “non-sales seller”, you will certainly pick up a lot of useful insights and tips from the book.

If you are a sales professional, especially one involved in complex corporate sales, you will probably also enjoy reading the book and will learn some new things, but don’t confuse it with a complete book on the art of selling. You might also be put off a bit by some of the statements that are pronounced as great discoveries. For example, he tells us that the three qualities of attunement, buoyancy, and clarity “are the new requirements for effectively moving people on the remade landscape of the twenty-first century”, as if we did not know that we’re supposed to listen, keep an optimistic attitude, and frame our messages properly. And, did you know that when you’re mapping the customer’s decision process you’re engaging in “social cartography”? In addition, the book rightfully pans manipulative sales techniques, but then fills the book with many suggestions to do just that, such as mimicking the other person, touching them, even occasional swearing and rhyming. I’m afraid that some of the good will the book creates towards the sales profession may be erased when readers come across these embarrassing suggestions.

On the plus side, Pink has come up with some interesting insights from social science research that even experienced salespeople can profit from. For example, we learn that salespeople who are neither too introverted or extraverted are the most successful, and I like his suggestion to use interrogative self-talk to conquer nerves before a sales call or presentation.