The Sales Archaeologist

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs the worlds of business and technology have certainly lost a real visionary and leader. Furthermore Steve represents someone that was a Sales leader as well – why can I say that?

I had shared 10 sales lessons from Steve in a previous post here and Dave Kurlan had an interesting post about Steve’s legacy here but this post is different because I want to talk about the way he sold without even knowing he was selling and the approach he used to sell sometimes complex technology to a typically very educated and astute audience.

The first thing he did was never sell the technology. He sold the outcome, he sold the result, he sold the coolness and the hipness of having the product, he sold the community, he sold the innovation and the prestige but he never got down and dirty or bogged down in the details of how it works, the platforms, the R&D, the algorithms etc.

I am sure he was capable of that discussion.

I am confident that most of the “nerds” and "techies" in his audience would have understood and even enjoyed that dialogue.

So if there was ever a case when we might think about leading with the details of the technology that would be it - but he never went there because he knew that was not what prompted people to buy.

So how can you learn and apply this to what you do and to how you sell? Perhaps you sell software or a piece of hardware. Could be that your offering is extremely complex. In all cases the tendency is to get stuck in a very in depth conversations related to the functionality, the compatibility and the research that goes into the solution. The tenure of your engineers, the exclusive patented technology and so on – these discussions get worse when they are joint calls with a technical support person or an S.E.

Why do sales people get stuck in these conversations that are not really sales conversations? Here are some of the excuses or reasons we hear when we are evaluating or training a group of sales people.

• The people we are selling to will not even talk to you if they think you are not as much of an expert as them.
• This is why people buy our product – it works
• They only have a few minutes and they want to spend it getting to know the technology.
• The technology is what sets us apart from competitors.
• It shows we are proud of it and believe in it and have nothing to hide.

All of these reasons sound plausible and they are always conveyed with conviction – but in reality these are myths. Your buyers, just like Steve’s buyers are more concerned with all the other things that surround the use of your solution, whatever those might be in your case. Interestingly the complaints we hear from buyers (and those found in numerous surveys and polls) have to do with rambling presentations and the fact that sales people become "talking brochures" - doesn’t this contradict all of the reasoning’s or excuses used by sales people above?

If you spend an hour with a prospect and share only information they could have read on your website or in a brochure then you have just wasted an hour of their time!

More importantly you have just wasted and hour of your own time!