As sales people, you know how much fun it is calling on technical folks. If you don’t know your stuff, the techies will toss you around like a couple of orca whales tossing their prey before they eventually decide to eat you alive for your lack of technical knowledge. So if you are “spieling the sales spiel” without understanding one word of what it really means, do yourself a favor. Stop. Run your spiel by an internal technical colleague  first. Figure out what the marketing folks (the ones who wrote your corporate messaging) have you saying. Because you know that the marketing folks didn’t bother to vet the scientific logic of their wordsmithing before they got creative.

Welcome to my world. It’s a world where word choices are important. It’s a world where customers listen to every word you say – to make sure it makes sense to them. I work with manufacturers, academicians and technical entrepreneurs. I blog for sales engineers, manufacturers, and technical start-ups. I read technical journals and engineering blogs. For fun. Really.

Some of my best friends are engineers, as well. And news flash: they don’t turn off their quest for logic when they leave the lab, either ! [Read more...]