I recently attended our company’s annual National Sales
Meeting in Schaumburg, IL. The National Sales Meeting is always a fun event
that brings most distributors and company marketing and sales people
together to review the results from last year and be motivated to do even
better in the coming year. It also provides excellent opportunities to meet a
lot of people and build camaraderie among us.
This year’s event was even more interesting since a “Technical
Summit” was added to the event such that engineers also participated in the
overall activities. There were general events for all the participants and
specific “Technical” and “Sales” tracks for “gearheads” and marketing/sales
professionals respectively. I must say the general events such as the
motivational speaker discussing Behavior Types and Team Building exercises were
the two highlights of the event.
I also had the privilege to share a topic at the “Sales”
side of the meeting. Being an engineer by training, it is always fun for me to
share with sales and marketing folks. So I prepared myself pretty well and told
the audience that I was going to throw out my engineering hat and wear my
salesman’s hat for this presentation. About two minutes into my talk, I
mentioned that I was going to share with the audience the advantages and
disadvantages of the solutions and products that I was presenting. No sooner
when those words left my mouth, I knew I made a pretty bad mistake! Sure
enough, someone from the audience shouted out: “A GOOD salesman will never talk
about any disadvantages of the products he is selling!!!” Well, I guessed my
attempt to wear the salesperson’s hat didn’t go as well as I had planned.
The experience reminded me of a demo that I did many years
ago for some high-level executives when I was a young engineer at my previous
company. As usual the demo was put together in the last minutes, and sure
enough it broke during the presentation. Glued together hardware and patched
software (i.e. smokes and mirrors) usually do not work very well for technical
demos! Instead of figuring out how to recover and gracefully move on to other
things, I started to go into detailed technical discussions on why the system
did not work and what should have been done to correct the problems. Well, the
executives just smiled and moved on to the next demo when I was done. But after
the whole thing, I was chastised “BIG” time by my boss for not knowing what NOT
to say under the circumstances. I guess I didn’t learn about knowing what NOT
to say very well, did I?
Is it in the engineers’ DNA that we just have to explain
everything the way it is? We sure know that no product is perfect so what’s
wrong with explaining the disadvantages or issues of a product? We know the
issues and we know how to fix them, so why can’t we talk about them so people
can REALLY understand??? Hmmmm… May be
engineers should have listened to their parents better when we were told “If
you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.”
Anyway, I am glad the company did not hire me as a sales
person and I better stay with the tasks I know how to do. Of course, I am sure
you want to know the problems with this plan of staying with the jobs I know
how to do. Let me describe them to you ……… NOT!
