This is a post about how to successfully sell your product or project as a software engineer (or really any not-super-sales-person-like-person) in meetings with non-engineering business people. I realize there are some stereotypes at play here. This post is in part about exploiting those stereotypes.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while based on previous experience. But then I joined Google and happily dove deep into their infrastructure software for 5 years with all those hard earned skills not needed anymore; until recently when I suddenly found myself talking to more profession-diverse audiences again.
In 1998, still a high school student, I started working in the then-new internet team of a large advertising agency as employee^Wstudent #2. I ended up staying for 10 years, turning the little team into a serious software consulting company. But through all that time we’d go to clients who needed a lot of convincing to trust their core business software to this tiny offspring of this other company that made their fliers and business cards. I thought there were the toughest sales meetings I’d ever go to. I’d later join a much larger competitor and thought “Now its all going to be super easy with all that reputation in the back” — only to realize that their prospective clients perceived them as too expensive and complicated. The ways to win clients in both scenarios remained the same.
The 2 strategies below are about winning people’s trust in business meetings. Once people trust you, everything else is easy.
Strategy #1 is a bit less ethical. If that isn’t your thing, jump to #2.
#1 Brutal honesty
One benefit of being considered the introvert, engineery-type-person in a meeting is that people put some inherent trust in you. They think you’re the scientist with a bias for theoretical proof and empirical research over emotion and intuition. By playing to these stereotypes one can get a significant advantage.
I call this strategy brutal honesty, because it starts by making something that nobody in the meeting expects: Casually admit to a weakness in the thing you are presenting. It is important that this weakness is not a killer-argument against whatever you are trying to sell, but it must be bad enough that normal business-common-sense would be to talk around it and try to avoid it being a topic. Game-theory common sense should say: You just made a mistake.
Making this mistake changes expectations that people have in you. They might have had a slight honest-bias already and now it is strongly reinforced. You’re the anti-sales person. It also helps doing other things a professional sales person would never do; like answering a questions with:
No.
Yes also works. The important part is that it is completely unqualified. Possibly a bit awkward, but very precise.
By playing to stereotypes and being more-honest-than-expected, people’s expectations change and their initial distrust, “they are just trying to sell me something”, has a chance of going away.
While this might all seem a bit disingenuous, the nice thing about brutal honesty is that is can be used in a charmingly recursive fashion: by explaining the very strategy to your prospective client over lunch.
#2 Empathic listening
When people judge you against your competitors, who might have equally qualified offerings, it often matters a lot who the client thinks understands their needs better. There is one-weird-trick how to increase the perception of the degree of your understanding in a very significant way. Unfortunately, people don’t do this much at all. They have their well studied sales pitches and can’t seem to actually adapt to expressed needs in realtime — and thus create the perception that they never could.
I call this empathic listening, but one can really do it in a completely formulaic way without any real empathy:
- Get a piece of paper.
- Listen to your client speak. Very closely. They are typically happy to describe their needs. Too often I see people not pay attention or not even giving them a chance to speak.
- Try to filter out the words they find important. These might be words familiar to you; or some type of domain language not used beyond the walls of their office.
- Write down these words.
- Try as hard as possible to understand what they mean to them and why they are important. They might use some common word in a special way. Make a note of it.
- And now for the rest of the meeting, and your business relationship, explain everything you do in terms of these words.
- Non-awkwardly if possible. There is the risk of misusing a term which then results in the opposite effect.
If done well this transports the message “They really understand me and what I need” which can make all the difference in an otherwise little-differentiated market. But more importantly, it might actually help further the mutual understanding.
I’ll go back now writing a post about ES6 module compilation, but I hope this excursion into the world of business was a bit useful. The summary is that one can use people stereotypes to one’s own advantage and with just a little bit of true listening it it easy to optimize one’s language for a huge boost in mutual understanding.
