In the 1950's the French fought a little known battle in Vietnam at a place called Dienbienphu. Several years earlier the Germans were fighting a resurgence outside of Stalingrad against a revitalized Soviet army. We can go back further into history and look at examples from Byzantium to Babylon and we find something happening again and again. Do you know what the common thread is?

In all the aforementioned cases the losing party was counting on some type of advanced technology to save the day and counteract the overwhelming odds. This technology they believed was so good, so advanced, so special and so unique that it would be their salvation - they were all wrong! Why?

Because there is and always will be a "human element" and unless we understand and plan for that then technology - regardless of how advanced will always be susceptible to failure. Now let's apply that lesson.

So many of the companies that we speak with believe and actually do have a great technological offering. The engineers within these organization will have you believe that this alone is enough to sell - in their minds all the sales people need to do is present and demonstrate and the product should be flying off the shelves, but like our examples they are wrong. They fail to consider the human element and sales is all about that. It comes down to one human communicating effectively with another and presenting details about product is not the right kind of communication.

Sales people have their faults - but to their credit they won't usually try and tell an engineer how to engineer something because they know it's not their space. I guess i would like to see the engineers show the sam respect and realize that - in this case - they don't know what they are doing and meddling will often lead their sales army to defeat in the field.