Demo Psychology: Sales Engineer vs. The Brain

The human brain is an amazing machine. It’s capable of incredible and wonderful things. It can also be a hidden and very overpowering opponent.

As Sales Engineers, our job is to achieve the Technical Win in a sales opportunity. Achieving the Technical Win means we need to “demonstrate the value and truth of our solution,” as my colleague and author Chris White so aptly states. “Value” is not something we can effectively define by ourselves. What we demonstrate must be valuable to our buyer. It’s the same with truth. While I’m not going to suggest that truth is subjective, I think you will agree that again, it’s the buyer’s truth we care about, not our own.

And herein lies the challenging part of our role. We need to first set aside OUR view of value and truth to discover what value and truth are to our buyer. This is not a discrete accomplishment, but a continuous exploration. Once we feel we’ve learned about the buyer’s value and truth, we then need to determine how best to articulate it in the context of our solution. This is a tremendously complicated thing to do.

As if that wasn’t enough, we then have one very major hurdle to overcome. The human brain. You see, the brain has a particular way of operating that most of the time we are unaware of. And it’s supposed to be that way. It gives us the ability to react quickly, which can be life-saving or advantageous based on the situation. But it can also work against us — especially in selling situations.

Consider some basic operating principles of the human brain:

1. Initial judgements are made automatically, based on past experience and current information. This means your opinion or judgement forms nearly instantly without any conscious effort from you. It just happens. Not only is this the “first impression,” but it has longer term implications.
2. Engaging the brain to cause it to question that initial judgement requires significant disruption. The situation needs to clearly stand out from something familiar. And even then, the brain’s tendency is to associate this disruption with something it already knows — an easy question to which it already knows the answer — and use that information to deal with the disruption it sees.
3. The brain is basically lazy. Again, not a bad thing. It just means that it wants to expend the minimum amount of energy necessary to deal with a given situation. It will always default to its automatic system, the path of least resistance. The more you need the brain to work, the more you must provide the brain a really good reason to do so.

Sales Engineers do not often consider this as they work. I still see many of them show aspects of the product that THEY believe are useful but then not take the final step of showing why it’s useful to the BUYER. The SE thinks it’s self-evident. The buyer can figure that out for themselves. As I’ve just stated above, that’s not how the brain works. You absolutely cannot leave it to the prospect to determine the truth and value of your solution on their own. Their brain will automatically want to associate what you’re showing with what they’re already doing — which is exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to do. They will also take that first impression and carry it into the rest of the time they spend considering your offering.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll offer some perspective on the workings of the human brain during the sales process and what as SE’s can do to use it to achieve the Technical Win.