By Troy Harrison
I’m writing this as I am attending a conference in Las Vegas. This is a conference that has drawn a lot of coaches, consultants, and yes – sales trainers. One of them sat down next to me yesterday and his opening line (after a quick introduction) was, “You know, you can train a good salesperson to be an engineer a lot quicker than you can teach an engineer to be a salesperson.” Well, I had the right to remain silent, but as they say, I didn’t have the ability. I replied, “I strongly disagree.” I’ll explain why in a bit, but suffice it to say that the conversation wasn’t a long one, and he didn’t build the rapport that he thought he would with that comment.
His problem was that he made an assumption that I would agree with him 100%. To be fair, I’ve heard a similar sentiment from a lot of other sales trainers – but my experiences have been completely the opposite. I see salespeople making assumptions – and failing because of those assumptions – every day.
After I told him that I disagreed with him, I did what I always teach you to do. I asked a question. “What got you to that conclusion about engineers?” He explained that he had recently come from a training class with engineers for an industrial company, and he had dreaded it, and that the experience had been difficult. It seems that the engineers challenged many of his contentions about selling, and asked a lot of drill down questions that he found difficult to answer. “They wouldn’t just take my word for it!” he exclaimed.
Here’s why he failed. He went into the program with the anticipation that it would be a bad experience – and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He wasn’t prepared to be asked a lot of questions. Here’s the key with engineers.