The Techie Salesman, Utilizing your innate techi-ness to make large sales

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A techie walks into a sales meeting…

Selling is an art form. An art form that requires constant creativity and figuring out what works, what doesn’t, what needs a little tweaking and what is best left untouched.  As a self employed technology professional, I was also required to serve as my own ‘sales team’. This meant putting myself out there, taking risks, getting rejected and taking those risks again and again.

What I learnt though, was that techies can and do make great salesman (think Bill Gates, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg…just to name a few).  They are already blessed with certain skills that   translate well into the sales world. This post summarizes how techies can leverage their innate skills to become effective salespersons. It also presents two sales principles that are often, underappreciated.

Tip #1 – Pick up the damn phone

As a techie, I would spend hours building the perfect online contact system, a fancy responsive website, SEO for search engines that would get my site ranked higher than others in the same category.

In the hope that ‘If I build it, they will come’. No one came .  Which leads us to the first sales principle

The First Sales Principle

There was a  simple reason why no one came. I have encapsulated that reason into The First Under-Appreciated Sales Principle

While technology has changed rapidly, people haven’t !

People still like to deal with people, not with computer systems. People still believe a phone call is superior to an email, and an in-person meeting is way better than a phone call. In fact, are you aware of any large deal that has been settled without several in-person meetings? I’m drawing a blank.

Tip #2 – Ditch Online Methods, Either Cold Call or Knock On Doors

Your website is ranked number one on google (thanks to your tweaking of inbound links, SEO and all your super techie meddling…). Yet,  you find that you are not getting any calls. Zero. Zilch.  Think about that for a moment.  Now thin, if YOU were the buyer (a large tech services buyer), would you choose a vendor through their web presence?

No big buyer is going to come solely through your web site or online presence, regardless of how high it is ranked or how many inbound links it possesses.

This leaves you with two options to land big buyers – Either call them or meet them in person. You may wonder how someone you’ve never called or spoken to, will be ready to meet you in person. You would be surprised at how often this works  – again because of the first principle (People haven’t changed)

This is all a game of confidence. If you are confident in the service you are selling , you will get an audience. It might not be on the same day that you knock on the door, it might be a future appointment, but you will get an audience! Knocking on doors takes guts,  and even the gatekeeper (receptionist) will grant you that much.

Which leads me to my next tip:

Tip #3 – A preemptive Thank You will get you past any receptionist

Here’s two different sales people talking to the same receptionist.

1. Hi. This is Bob. Is Bill (the CEO) in the office? I would like to speak with him, please.

2. Hi. This is Bob. Is Bill (the CEO) in today? If possible, I would like to speak with him. Thank you.

Which one do you think the receptionist will allow to get through? The Thank You is a pleasant surprise for the receptionist (how many people thank her for just speaking to them?).  In addition, it shows humility.

The Second Sales Principle – Try the Teaching Mode as opposed to the Selling Mode

I started my career as a Physics teacher. Every week, I stood in front of 3 sections of 50 students each and was required to field whatever was thrown at me by these 150+  eager students.  One learns to think on one’s feet, but more importantly,  one learns that there is an ideal teaching tempo.   A tempo is the pace at which you speak combined with the volume at which you speak combined with the confidence with which you speak. A confident voice is not too soft and not too loud. It is not too fast paced. Unfortunately, a lot of people mistake fast speech for confident speech, when usually, it is just the opposite. It is not too slow paced (think about that boring teacher in college – it wasn’t that the subject was boring, it was the slow pace at which he/she presented the subject).

The correct pace and volume denotes confidence. And, if you have any experience standing in front of a group and speaking, chances are you already possess this confident pace.

And that is the second under-recognized sales principle :

The Sales Call has to be indistinguishable from a teaching session  –> The Second Under-Recognized Sales Principle

As a teacher, you learn a few critical skills:

1. Thinking on your feet
2. Being able to distill complex information and translate it into simple English
3. Listening to concerns well enough

And here’s the rub:

Most techies, whether they realize it or not, are natural teachers.

Think about it. As a techie, you are constantly required to dissect complex concepts and present them in a sentence or two. You are constantly required to stand in front of a dozen people and explain what you did – as well as field tough questions (aka Daily Scrum). You are often required to mentor junior level team members as well as new comers to your team. You already have the ‘teaching’ tempo mastered, you just need to possibly brush the dust off, by practicing in front of a camera. And that leads me to the Third Sales Principle

The Third Sales Principle – Eliminate Enemy Number One (Fear)

The Fourth Sales Principle – Discipline works better than luck

The Fifth Sales Principle – The less you are talking, the better your sale is going

The Final Sales Principle – Close without fear

The close is what separates the men from the boys.  In reality, you do not need to do anything different than what you have been doing throughout your conversation. Keep in mind that by ‘closing’ , I do not mean that you get something signed there and then. A close is a verbal agreement between two parties that they will do  their part.

There are only two aspects to closing;

1. Keep it simple – The simplest closing is ‘If I were to…, would you be able to….’ For example  – If I were to  throw together an estimate for the first phase, would you promise to look at it?’
2. Stay confident – Keep the same tempo as your original sales/teaching tempo. Just because you are drawing closer to a big sale is no reason to get excited. No reason to change your tone or your tempo. Simply state the closing statement with the same tone and volume that you were using throughout the conversation.  Most importantly, do not let fear creep in (The third sales principle).

Some closing (no pun intended) thoughts. Selling ice to an eskimo, getting run over by a bus…

Americans have a knack for simplifying the complex. Hit the ground running, the jury is still out, the whole nine-yards, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, level the playing field….These are all clever, almost self-descriptive, American catchphrases that have caught on across the world.

The two catchphrases that I always pondered over were Selling Ice to an Eskimo  and In case you get run over by a bus….

Selling Ice to an Eskimo is regarded as one of the highest forms of compliment to a salesperson. After all, if you can make that sale, there isn’t anything you can’t sell.  True, but what about the poor eskimo who is stuck with a slab of ice that he has no use for?  Why not sell him a warm jacket or a new furnace instead? Why sell ice to an eskimo, just because you can?

My point here is that some salespeople sell just for the sake of making the sale. They are not overly concerned about providing actual, tangible value to their customer. Taken to an extreme, the real-estate mortgage crisis was a result of just such overly ambitious sales tactics.  People were sold something (sub prime mortgages) that they should not have been sold in the first place (like ice to an eskimo).

A techie, in my humble opinion, is far too naïve to even conjure up something like that.  Years of wrestling with 1s and 0s, so that a single missing semicolon could cause an all-nighter,  techies have learnt to get things right by taking the shortest and straightest path. They neither overpromise nor do they underpromise anything. They only promise what they can deliver. It is true that they may promise something they do not have yet (think of Bill Gates selling Operating Systems before they were even fully written), but they are confident they can deliver on their promise.

My other least favorite catchphrase is In case you get run over by a bus. .  I mean, surely, the same message can be conveyed with less drastic verbiage.  How about In case you are sent into space as part of the next interstellar mission…or In case you are called out to jury duty… ?  I still wince whenever someone says ‘ In case you get run over by a bus…’