Why Technical People Must Learn Sales Skills

Selling is your biggest weakness and your biggest opportunity

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Technical roles are becoming blended, especially for leaders within organizations. Not just executives or managers, people that act as leaders within a team.

During a meeting with a vendor, a leader will act as a BA by sharing their organization or business units’ functional or non-functional requirements.

Some leaders are involved in the hiring process and asked to sit in on interviews to feel out if candidates a good fit for the team.

These are examples of how technical people are being asked to perform duties far out of their job description.

Without a doubt, the most important skill for technical talent to learn is sales.

When interviewing for a new job or reaching out to a prospective client for a technical project, you would assume that the person with the technical knowledge is in a position of power.

This isn’t the case. Technical people can truly only be in control when they understand the basics of how to sell.

A great place to start is with the phrases used to communicate.

Here are some tips on how to be a better seller by changing the phrases we use, adopted from Dan Lok’s wonderful video:

1. “To be honest”. Were you not being honest in the first place? Why did you not start off being truthful? This phrase is a great way to make the person you’re communicating with not trust you. “To be frank” and even “honestly” should also be avoided like the plague.
2. “Trust me”. This is the same as begging. This always comes off as “Please trust me”. How powerful does this sound? If you have proof of what you’re saying (which you always should!), bring it up instead of just pleading for trust that you’ve yet to build.
3. “Sorry to bother you”. Do you believe that what you are doing or what you are offering has value? If you do, stop apologizing. Believe that you’re helping the person you’re speaking to because what you are offering them is great. If you start off by apologizing, you automatically make the person on the other end feel as if they’re doing you a favor.

Years of growing up being the “nerd” or the “geek” has caused many technical people to merely settle on the fact that they are so called introverts. This is not an excuse for technical people to communicate poorly.

We all know that you are an expert developer, or a great infrastructure engineer. The problem is that sometimes you can’t demonstrate these skills during a conversation, especially to someone less technical.

This is where strong communication skills come into play. The person you speak to might not understand technology, but they do understand what a great communicator sounds like.

“Learn to communicate value, not tasks”

While “I fixed the load balancer” might describe the technical task that you completed, this does not translate into anything valuable to someone who does not understand technology enough.

If the person also cannot equate reduced downtime and improved site performance to their organization being more profitable, you have presented your work as less valuable than it actually is.

Instead say:

“I saved the last company I worked with $100'000 a year by re-designing their load balancers so that downtime was eliminated and the performance of their e-commerce platform was improved by 5%.”

The above is a much better statement because it not only communicates the value of the task you performed, it also gives the listener numbers to work with to better gauge your value.

If you feel something you’ve done at work has made a valuable contribution to the organization, always ask for metrics that quantify your achievements.

If management or whoever is the keeper of KPIs does not share this with you, calculate it on your own (estimate).

If you learn to communicate your value better, you will find that the same work you perform brings you in a better salary or hourly rate. This will also put you in a better position to work in management positions.

While learning new technical skills can help, learning how to tell people the value you add will boost your career much further than you would expect.

Here’s the video from Dan for reference.

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