What engineers can learn from sales

You’re an accomplished technical expert with years of experience. You have clear ideas about what we should do. But unless you also know how to sell them, you’re going to hit a roadblock. You’ll always need to convince someone that your plan is watertight—whether it’s clients, managers or sceptical peers. Here’s the bitter reality: the truths you proffer are not self-evident.

There’s more than one way to play this. You could end up as a genius boffin, cloistered away from the messy realities of business. Think the Oracle at Delphi, but for software engineering (or your specialist area.) Sales teams would come to you for guidance, try to interpret your teachings, and then deliver their version to clients. Some nuances would be lost, but it would save you from the indignity of having to defend yourself to the uninitiated.

I’m joking, but only slightly. This is how a lot of experts end up—so focused on their specialism that they can’t explain why it matters to ordinary mortals. They end up needing supervision or separation—so that their minders can translate their advice into business language. But this often breeds resentment—“why are you changing my words? I don’t need babysitting!”—and so on. So why not miss out the middleman, and learn some basic sales techniques? It’s not rocket science.

What smart salespeople understand

Sales gets a bad rap—mostly well deserved. Whether they’re pushy, insincere or just annoying, many of our interactions with salespeople are negative. But I’m not talking about cold callers, or emails asking for 15 minutes of your time, or insurance peddlers on commission.

I’m talking about the salespeople who actually solve your problem. The ones who listen to your situation, check they understand, lay out options and explain the differences. The ones who never push you to buy, but instead wait until you’re ready.

Great salespeople understand that the products they offer don’t have value in a vacuum. Products are only valuable to the extent that they relieve a customer’s pain (or conversely, satisfy a need). A smart salesperson doesn’t start by recommending a solution or listing features and benefits. They start by talking about you.

What are your goals, problems, needs? What’s your philosophy or perspective? What do you already know about the solution you’re looking for, and what would you like to find out?

Think about the last time you had a positive interaction with a salesperson. When they found you a solution that worked. What was their secret weapon? Listening.

Sales techniques for technical experts

The benefit of adopting a sales approach is that it forces you to consider how others see you. From the viewpoint of a client or manager, you are a potential solution to a pain point, not a font of good ideas.

But it goes further. They really don’t care about the details, about how it’s done, about the trade-offs and judgement calls you might have to make. They care about making their problems go away. They are the customer—this is their meeting. You need to talk about their issues and needs, not yours.

Here are four ways that engineers and other technical experts can use sales techniques to get their ideas shipped.

1. Listen to their pain points

Your first job as a part-time technical salesperson is to listen. What are their goals? What problems are they facing? How do they see the world, and where might your expertise fit in? Try to get inside their head, and see the world as they see it.

Listening builds trust—which is important—but that’s not the only benefit. Understanding how a client perceives the problem is vital information. It shows you how to position your solutions and explain how they work. You can’t teach unless you know your audience’s knowledge level—and listening is the best way to find that out.

2. Don’t be pushy

Don’t be the engineering equivalent of a cold caller, trying to force your solution onto someone before they’ve had a chance to figure out if it could work. Pushy sales tactics put people off for two reasons:

1. The timing is wrong. You’re asking me to accept a solution before I’ve had the chance to consider the problem I’m trying to solve. In the case of cold callers, this is deliberate—the pressure is necessary because the seller knows I won’t choose their product if I have enough time to think about it.
2. The fact that you’re trying to push a solution makes me hesitate to work with you, because it reeks of insecurity. If your products are so good, why would you resort to strong-arm tactics?

Engineers can come across as pushy because they think they understand the problem space and already know the best solution. Maybe you’re right. But there’s no harm in being proven wrong—and anyway, if you hold fire until you’ve listened, you’ll come across as thoughtful instead of arrogant.

3. Establish authority

A good salesperson establishes authority by giving you something you can use. Whether it’s sharing industry knowledge, answering a question or supplying a tool to aid decision-making. These gifts make the recipient more powerful—and as a side effect, they prove that the salesperson knows their stuff.

As you listen to your client or stakeholder, consider what you can give them that will demonstrate your authority without directly benefiting you. This could be anything from a relevant report, an introduction to someone, or a shortcut that saves them time. It also includes teaching concepts from your field that give them a higher resolution experience.¹

4. Make the client look good

A salesperson isn’t going to win by bigging themselves up. They win when their customer wins.

In the same way, don’t try to make yourself look good. Don’t puff yourself up or try to take charge. Instead, focus your energy on making your client or colleague look good. How can you use your expertise to support their goals? What advice can you offer that might solve their problems? Or to take another angle, what can you do that would get them promoted?

If you pull this off, you won’t need to press for a sale. People will come knocking on your door, asking you to implement your solution.

Doing your own sales makes you a stronger engineer

Some experts don’t have the luxury of a dedicated sales team or another layer separating them from clients or end users. So they have to do their own sales.

But even if you have that luxury, doing your own sales brings tangible benefits. It forces you to see yourself in the way that others see you. It makes you listen to—and perhaps empathise with—the way other people experience problems. And it lets you practise teaching, a master skill for senior technical experts.

In short, learning from sales will make you a stronger engineer.

1. Kathy Sierra, author of Badass: Making Users Awesome (as well as the best-selling Java book of all time), argues that app designers need to give their users higher resolution experiences by building their knowledge. Experts can do the same thing by levelling up the skills of their clients or colleagues. ↩