2. Sales is a more difficult job than engineering, technical repair, or any of the other highly technical professions. Technicians invariably work with things, and things have reliable and known characteristics.
Sales people, on the other hand, invariably work with people. And each individual person is an ultimately unknowable combination of thoughts, feelings, values, goals and beliefs – incredibly complex. Now add together a group of people in the context of a business, and you have a very difficult and complex situation, full of unknowable variables.
If you can find someone with the qualities to handle this chaos -- the discipline to work an unsupervised effective work week, the personal self-image strong enough to withstand daily rejection, the personal motivation to press on no matter what – then believe me, training them in technical details is the easy part.
3. Technical people who become sales people almost always view their job as essentially uncovering technical problems to solve, and then proposing solutions to those technical problems. While this is a component of the job, it dramatically limits the sales person’s effectiveness.
Those of you who are familiar with my “peeling the onion” analogy will recognize that “technical problems” are very near the surface of the onion. As long as a sales person views his/her job as that of finding solutions to technical problems, they’ll never penetrate to the heart of a customer’s goals and motivations.
While technical problem solvers are working at the surface of things, the professional sales people are working with their customers on systems and partnerships.
The largest sales I ever made were always at deep levels in the organization, where systems and corporate philosophies and values were more important than technical issues.
4. Finally, from a very pragmatic point of view, it is easier to educate someone in product knowledge and technical applications than it is to train someone in sales skills...[Read More]
