If you feel speaking with engineers is like having a root canal without anesthetic, don’t flatter yourself: engineers feel the same way about talking to sales people. Either way, this conversation isn’t really much of a dialogue at all, in the majority of status quo conversations. Is it?
Engineers tend to be specific and direct in the type of knowledge they are asking about and in the nature of answers they expect to receive. Words are very important to technical professionals: a word translates into a design specification or outcome. If you, as a salesperson, don’t know your stuff and are throwing around technical buzz terms like they are confetti, I don’t have to tell you that technical professionals will have no mercy in making you feel like an inferior life form. Engineers won’t hesitate to let you know you certainly are not as intelligent and well-educated as they are and that you are on the outside looking in to their world. When you consider that they are just as marginalized within their own world as they are making you feel, perhaps you two do have something to talk about.
What do you sound like to an engineer? If you don’t know how to answer this question, record yourself doing the usual “pitch” that 
either you or your company has put together for their sales force. Do you sound like a real person having a realistic conversation with a technically-oriented business owner?
Do you sound like a caricature salesperson: all words and no substance, a talking head full of business babble?
Unless you are an engineer who sells, these technical professionals may not expect you to understand the intricacies of their work. But they do expect you to enlighten them about the business world in which you operate, day in and day out, and how you can make them more competitive. These technical professionals are so caught up in the myopia of their own niche markets and specific solutions that they often lose sight of how their business is similar to or different from other companies in the industrial sector.
Your ability to translate your experiences across the industry segments in which you operate can represent valuable insight. This insight, in turn, helps them be more anticipatory and predictive in their engineering and design output.
You may have more messages to discuss with them than the sales-call-close spiel your company wants you to push at them. The more relevant your discussion, the more valuable it is to your customers. You end up “selling” them on your value without having to “sell to” them about your products and services.
Engineers, and the majority of your prospects as well, don’t like their time to be wasted. They expect a salesperson to “sell” at them, to pitch a product or service to them. There is very little collaboration or engagement in that type of status quo scenario. The technical professional isn’t interested in sales spiel. However, they are always interested in features and benefits.
What if you surprise your technical colleagues by adding insight and relevance to their technical knowledge? After all, you are the sales expert. Engineers love data. What if you color outside the lines of your sales spiel and investigate competitive industry trends. Then you become a collaborative colleague instead of a pesky sales person whom they don’t pay attention to.
Change it up a bit. The one way to dispel the stereotype of being a blah-blah-blah babbling salesperson is to be a relevant and valuable resource. Take the steps to do your homework when making sales calls. Especially to your techie prospects and customers.
They are hungry for information and data. Not blah-blah-blah.
Your thoughts?
Babette Ten Haken blogs about sales, manufacturing, engineering, entrepreneurships and start-ups at Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog. Her company, Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, teaches technically oriented companies to have customer conversations that are productive and drive revenue. Her book, Do YOU Mean Business? Technical / Non-Technical Communication, Business Development and YOU, is available on Amazon.com. You can download a free chapter here.
Great article Babette, we do a lot of work with engineers here in the UK and find consistently that technical experts struggle to get their (very valuable) messages out to their clients and prospective clients for fear that it sounds ‘salesy’. My advice – don’t even try to become a salesperson, simply hold back on giving clients the pearls of your wisdom. Just ask that extra question that gives the technical issue some context before going into ‘solutionizing’ mode and you will find your expertise fits better with commercial reality.
Gary, glad you enjoyed my post. In working with technical entrepreneurs as well as established engineering and manufacturing companies, I find that developing the ability to have a high level business discussion, in addition to one’s already established technical acumen, builds credibility with customers. Once the technical expert gets beyond seeing him or herself as a sales person (hence, having to sound stereotypic and therefore “salesy”), they dig into the data aspect of business development. The entrepreneur/tech expert finds this stimulating and intellectual. Everyone seated around the table has conversations they never anticipated having with each other (because the environment is now business development and technical solutions instead of sales spiel). Either way, as you wisely note, providing context to the technical issue (e.g., biz dev / history / trending) often grows a small technical issue into a long term relationship. Cheers!
Babette,
I guess I am not sure I get it. In my 23 years of selling I am not sure if I have ever walked in with an assumption that a pitch would win a client over. In doing so you’re not a sales person, you’re more of a puppet. At that point you had better bring in lunch or a box of roles and ask for forgiveness before you start anything.
The only time I present is when I know the root of the problem based on prior Q&A discussions, or that there is a special client request to learn something new. Even in the latter case I always have a list of questions to ask before I ever get started and I qualify the team I am speaking with to assure the people that own the problems and decision makers are all in attendance.
If your mode of operation is to present, present, present! Then you need to bring plenty of drool cups so that the engineers do not mess up their shirts. I have always believed in the comment from Fortune Magazine back in 2001, “Friends, don’t let friends use PowerPoint!” You should uncover the problem, determine the business impact of the problem, assure the client that you can resolve the problem for (X) amount of dollars, then present only the requested items to the buying team after you have sold the idea.
There is a fallacy out there that salespeople can convince people to buy something they wouldn’t normally buy. 95% of all engineers are evaluators so that will not happen. They need to convince themselves. As a salesperson, you are only there to guide them through the process.
I have called on thousands of people from executives to instrument tech’s and have never felt uncomfortable and have always assured that the meetings were productive and had a clear future as we wrapped the meeting up. Know who you’re talking to and how they get evaluated, plan for good questions, think about the responses, and ask questions on the responses.
A salesperson needs to learn and not teach. They need to listen and not speak.
I am off my soap box now.
Sound insights, Steve, based on your extensive experience in the field. You and I are on the same soapbox. For some reason, many companies (and their sales people – and sales training methods) – don’t get what you so succinctly express: “There is a fallacy out there that salespeople can convince people to buy something they wouldn’t normally buy. 95% of all engineers are evaluators so that will not happen. They need to convince themselves. As a salesperson, you are only there to guide them through the process.” On the other hand, I find that far too many engineers want to lecture, rather than listen. Successful sales people and engineers are able to bridge their discipline-driven tendencies and listen to each other. When the MO becomes collaboration instead of pitching and catching, that’s when the business happens. Best wishes.