2010 March | Sales Aerobics for Engineers ® Blog

Why is what you are doing important?

March 30, 2010 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Why do you do what you do?

1)self-fulfillment

2)impressing others

3)accomplishing societal goals

4)flavor-of-the-month

5)making a difference to your profession

6)doing what you need to do to achieve your next career move

7)making a difference to folks you know

8)making a difference to folks you’ve never yet met

9)bragging rights

10)keeping your boss happy,.. and so forth.

Wake up call here. I’m not proposing that you walk around with an “Importance Meter” in your head, constantly self-assessing and rating yourself. You know, it just may not be all about you.

Yet we all get up each day and do something important. Whether it’s for our Selves or for Others.

What is it that you, personally and professionally, bring to the table, time after time? Are you in a personal as well as professional environment that will allow you to feel what you are doing is important? Because that’s really what it’s all about. Making a difference. And a difference that extends beyond the tip of your own nose.

We all have something to contribute to our profession. It may not be Nobel-prize worthy. But what we have to contribute just may mean the difference in a company’s remaining solvent or not. Or a village having running water. That’s probably worth more than a Nobel-prize to that company.Or that village. And to you.

There is a humanity to our professionalism. So what do you do each day, professionally, that is important?You know, there’s nothing wrong in being motivated by that thought. That you do make a difference. No matter how small.

Your insight, your perspective, your innovation – yes even doing your job is innovative – can bring light to dark places. We all get jaded by performing what we feel are repetitive functions that no one seems to take notice of. We all get a bit disillusioned by the economy’s impact on our ability to achieve our personal and professional goals.

Yet we all continue to pursue our careers. And it’s not because we have nothing better to do. Our professions are our passions. Our professions are the conduit for how we can bring “our selves” to others. And while we are not our jobs or our professions, our skills do allow us to communicate, innovate and contribute in specific and special ways with society. And with others.

What we all bring to the table, personally and professionally, is important. Taken individually, there must be a system of self-belief in place.We must recognize that the small contributions we make are additive. And combined with the contributions of others, there is synergy.

What you do is important. It’s up to you to determine what that is and why it is important. Sitting around the workplace feeling unrecognized and uncompensated is not an option. Understanding that what you do is important is the fulcrum for moving forward in this life, both personally and professionally.

Opportunities will be presented to us that we need to recognize and embrace. By understanding why what we do is important, we can contribute via these opportunities. So what if it doesn’t fit into your self-created career path? How rock solid is that career path, anyway? The constant throughout everything is you, yourself. Opportunities can open doors. All you need to do is recognize them and walk through them.

Even if it’s something as basic as stewardship. Even if it’s something as out-of-the-box as blogging. Even if it’s talking to the person in the neighboring cubicle.

Why is what you are doing important? Now that’s something to think about.

Do they ask “What do you think?” or only “Can you do this?”

March 21, 2010 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

What role do you play in your organization? Where do you sit at the table when you attend meetings? Are you actually invited to attend these meetings? Do you run meetings? Or are you dealing with the results of these meetings?

Are you an order taker or an innovator? A technician or a thought leader?

I’m asking lots of questions.

The bottom line is: how are you establishing your value to your organization? How can the value you establish help you within your organization or as you move towards your next career?

Establishing your value to your organization can be a matter of differentiating yourself from the technicians in your organization. Non-technical management may not make this distinction. Perhaps they do not understand the difference. How can you work with non-technical management so they understand how to use the various tools in their human tool set to implement revenue-driving solutions? And how can you assist them in understanding the differences between true technicians and engineers?

Establishing your value to your organization can be a matter of understanding the role of technical resources and recruiting their expertise to provide team solutions. And this suggestion goes for those of you in a business development/ sales function as well. Your ability to lead others in disciplines other than your own and lead work teams becomes part of your expanding skill set.

Establishing your value to your organization can be a matter of identifying the learning opportunity in each project you are working on. The most mundane project can provide an opportunity for you to update your knowledge base. How many projects can benefit from incorporating lean and green principles and new technology applications? How many projects potentially may require you to hybridize your tool set and assist in the sales and/or engineering side of the equation? The more professional languages you can legitimately “speak” help you provide simultaneous translation to your organization.

Establishing your value to your organization can be a matter of adding another area of expertise to your personal arsenal. Researching particular topics of interest, and assessing their applicability to current projects, allows you to bring more information to the table during meetings. You may become the go-to guy or gal on specific topics as your suggestions create potentially proactive, robust solutions.

Establishing your value to your organization can be a matter of assessing the role you are comfortable taking and understanding the limitations and opportunities of that role.Several questions you need to ask yourself are: 1) what is your current level of frustration in either attending or leading meetings when you don’t have the authority to drive change throughout your team, department or organization, and 2) what will it take for you to earn that authority?

Bottom line: Do you want to assume that type of authority and responsibility? Is that one of your career goals? And if so, how great of a priority is this goal… to you and to your management?

Bottom line: Will that opportunity/ career goal be available to you at your current organization? And if not, are you prepared to change jobs to achieve your goal?

Bottom line: What gaps are present or absent from your skill set that will allow you to facilitate and implement your career goal?

Bottom line: How practical, realistic and achievable is this professional goal?

Do they ask you “What do you think?”or only “Can you do this?”Have you interpreted “Can you do this?” as a career move or opportunity? Have you accepted “Can you do this?” – and the responsibility involved – without asking for compensation or authority? Has “Can you do this?” resulted in your being seated at the table?

Whether you are comfortable, and satisfied, with remaining an order taker vs. an innovator is firmly in your hands. It’s up to you to recognize the difference between being asked to take on additional responsibilities and being asked to take a different seat around the table.

Your ability to understand these differences can assist you in making productive decisions that lead to sound career choices over the long haul.

Think about it.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling Tagged With: business development, professional development, sales, soft skills, technical/non-technical collaboration

What did you teach yourself in engineering school?

March 16, 2010 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

Think about it. In general, we are pretty idealistic as undergraduates. And indecisive. And perhaps even naïve and self-focused, feeling that our interests should become the top priority of everyone we know.

After all, shouldn’t an academic advisor simply hand us a four-year “recipe” for the exact courses we should take at the exact time in order to achieve the exact type of degree they feel we should earn? And then, once we graduate, of course there should be the perfect job and career path automatically awaiting us.

As though our education occurs in a vacuum. As though we merely play a part in everyone else’s melodrama.

Oh please……

Regardless of whether we went to college in the midst of recession, inflation or whatever else, how realistic is this “ultimate” pathway that we visualized? You know, the COMPLETE NO-BRAINER. Just plug yourself in and “go”?

And that’s the problem.

By our very collective natures, we are not “no-brainer” folks. We are thinkers and sometimes second-guessers, to a fault. And life certainly does continue to happen at the same time we pursue our undergraduate degrees, no matter how much tunnel vision is involved on our part.

Perhaps the most important lessons we learned as undergraduates didn’t have a course number associated with them. If we are truly life long learners, this habit of ours started when we were children. We carried our pursuit of learning into our college years and, hopefully, beyond.

What life lessons did you learn? What people were around throughout your life and, especially, during your undergraduate years? If you could assign course titles to these lessons and these folks, what would they be called? Eating 405, Concert Attendance 1201 (!), Fraternity 709, and so forth. Think about the net impact of the “people” factors in what you taught yourself in engineering school – or any other discipline for that matter.

And, depending on your generation, these people and your education were undertaken in the midst of history and social causes that impacted our perception of self and decision making.

Whatever the recipe is that we either followed or abandoned, how much of our personal and professional choices involve stewardship? Yes, stewardship.

What did you learn about stewardship in engineering school? In any undergraduate pursuit? What did you teach yourself – and learn from your friends and perhaps a little history – in engineering school? What an interesting factor to add to our personal equation….even if stewardship was partially or completely absent as an undergraduate.

The question remains: how can we currently use who we are and what we have learned in order to foster our own education in stewardship on behalf of others?

Believe it or not, a lot of what “they” didn’t teach you in engineering school amounts to everything you, yourself, taught yourself as an undergraduate – in any academic pursuit for that matter.

You know, we really gave ourselves a very good education. Our “life lessons” – and our professional pursuits – benefit from what we taught ourselves in school. Some of us put these lessons to use on behalf of others, as undergraduates. Some of us have discovered the value of stewardship later in our lives.

You may have been taught more than you realized in engineering school. Just not necessarily as part of your course curricula.

It may be time to put what you taught yourself into use on behalf of others.

Think about it. I certainly know I am.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling Tagged With: engineering school, engineers, professional development, stewardship, technical/non-technical collaboration

5 Steps for Spring Cleaning Your Client Closet

March 9, 2010 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

New Year’s Eve isn’t the only time to take personal inventory. It’s an ongoing process… continual self-improvement. As the Spring approaches, perhaps it’s time to clean out our professional closets as we are already one quarter into 2010.

What does your “client closet” look like? Think of your closet at home, where you have clothes and shoes you wear a lot and those clothes that are sparsely worn. And guys, this means you, too. You are not fooling me!

Your “client closet” is full of clients you like to deal with and those you don’t, just like some pants, shoes, shirts and that great worn-in sweatshirt you’ve had for ages that you wear every weekend. Some clients are more interesting than others, some are more innovative and some are merely dramatic without substance.

Do you like buying clothes or do you avoid this task? Is your wardrobe up to date or outdated? Do you rely on your current customers to sustain your business year after year or do you welcome the opportunity and actively engage in new client acquisition?

I’d say it’s time to Spring Clean your client closet.

Here are 5 steps to get your client closet – and yourself – revitalized as we move into Q2 2010.

Take inventory of your client base. How many clients do you have? How much revenue do they generate? Is this revenue spread out evenly among all clients or do a few clients contribute to the bulk of your revenue stream? Do you even like the clients who contribute to the bulk of your gross revenue? Are they your most profitable clients?
What industrial / business segments comprise your client base? Into which segments do the clients contributing to the bulk of your revenue fall? Do you like working in these particular client segments or did you “fall into” them and subsequently cultivate similar clients over time? Are these segments areas of strength for your company?
In terms of client company size, is your client base balanced or skewed? Do you like the composition and balance of your client base in terms of segmentation, size, revenue generation and profitability? What types of clients are missing from your client closet?
Is your company good at retaining existing customers? How many new customers do you acquire each year? How important is new customer acquisition to revenue generation, based on project life cycles? Do you acquire new customers to replace those lost or to grow the size of your client closet?
How dependent is your company on new projects generated from your existing customer base? How has this situation impacted your actively seeking out new customers? What if you had to start all over again and only depend on new customer acquisition? What kind of customers would you put in your client closet?

I’m not suggesting that you “reinvent” yourself and go after style points that make absolutely no sense for your business. However, taking stock of your client closet does make you consider whether your current client base is holding you back or revitalizing your business. Your existing customer base can be a springboard for business development in related business segments.

Perhaps last year and the loss of clients served as an involuntary purge of your customer base. Perhaps you have won new customers because of the necessity of replacing those you lost. Some of these new customers may be just the type of customer you should be working with for future growth.

Although every cloud may not have a silver lining, I do clean my client closet annually during Spring. This exercise allows me to revisit how I serve my client base and what they value in what I bring to their collective tables. This exercise also focuses my attention on the clients with whom I work collaboratively and those who drain energy, time and profit.

Whether or not you decide to purge your client closet is up to you. However, realizing why certain clients “fit” you better than others creates a great framework from which to continuously improve your 2010 client acquisition strategy.

Why don’t you try this strategy on for size?

Filed Under: Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: business development, customer acquistion, customer base

It’s always about the customer. Precisely because we are not stupid.

March 2, 2010 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

How well do you know your customers? And I am not talking about going to the same country club that they belong to (like we can all afford that one, right?). It’s not about finding out when their birthday is, so you can send them a card (so much for Client Relationship Management software). It’s not about being their pal or buddy or influencing their decision by wining and dining them.As though your customers owe you something.

It’s about the ANTHROPOLOGY of your approach to business development.

Because our customers are not disposable. You can’t just run out and get another one just like that. Vendors – no matter how much value we provide for our customers – can always be sacrificed.Depending on the anthropology of the decision that needs to be made.

Whether you are an engineer or in sales, do you develop business with an anthropological perspective? Hints:

It’s not about digging around to find the vulnerable chink in the proverbial armor that will force your hand in the customer’s decision to spec your company’s services, your recommended solution or your specific skill set.
It’s not about manipulating the customer’s thought processes during the presentation so they have no decision to make other than specifying – yup, you guessed it – your company’s services, your recommended solution or your specific skill set.
It’s not about reading one more book on sales technique to employ that silver bullet strategy that closes the deal. As though everything you’ve been doing in the past has been ineffective.
It’s not about all of your certifications, all of your degrees, the number of professional organizations with which you are associated or your publications in professional journals. For some reason, that stuff simply isn’t impressing your customers.

It’s about taking the time to discover the context of the decision that needs to be made. Do you know how to be an anthropologist?

Because that’s what business development is all about: how well you know your customers, their mindset and context under which they make decisions. Whether you are approaching this function from the sales or from the engineering perspective.

Just because you are talking to another engineer doesn’t mean he/she has the same agenda that you do. The decision maker has a context which directly impacts how and why a decision will be made. And sometimes the decision that is made is to make no decision at all! I know you’ve encountered that scenario. We all have.

Just because you are talking to another business development/sales executive doesn’t translate into your thinking along any of the same lines. They may not even understand their own internal customers. Don’t fall into a false sense of self at any point during – or after – the business development process.While you may be impressed with yourself, your customer may not. The process may stall out.

The CONTEXT surrounding decision making governs the decision that is eventually made.I recommend spending more time understanding context of the decision and less time trying to dazzle customers with your expertise and deliverables.

Hint: this is something that they not only didn’t teach you in engineering school but they didn’t teach any of us in any school whatsoever.This is an acquired skill.It’s not people skills. It’s not engineering acumen. It’s not sales skills.

It’s authenticity. It’s being inquisitive, presumptive and just plain curious. It’s knowing your stuff yet deciding to not depend on your superior technical savvy or sales skills as the fulcrum for business development.

Your customers know why – and why not- they make decisions. Let them teach you… by asking them to define the context of their mindset.Dig deeper with each question you ask.Understand the root causality of factors impacting their decisions. It comes in layers. Like an anthropological dig. Because there is never just one decision maker. Context provides a company-wide perspective to root causality and incorporates corporate culture, attitudes towards risk and innovation and ability to run their business successfully.

If every conversation you have with someone is simply about being genuinely interested in who they are and what the context of their business decision is all about – from their perspective and their team‘s -– think about what you will learn.

You may decide not to waste your time pursuing their business – at all.
You may decide to keep in touch with them, provide information and, when their (not your) timing is more favorable, pursue your solution once again.
You may decide they are a viable candidate for your solution, but your sales cycle will not be short
You may decide the customer doesn’t need your solution at all.
You may need to teach them how to work with their internal resources to approach their problem. Which may or may not end up involving your solution.

It’s really not about your solution at all – or anyone’s for that matter.It’s about the customer. And why they make decisions. Why they have to make a decision.And how compromised they are feeling about making that decision. Before you even walk through their door.

Do you know your customers that well?

Now that’s something to think about.