A double knit leisure suit, blue suede shoes, slicked back hair, the confident swagger, the artificial smile and the fast talking. Yep, we've seen the stereotype - the typical salesman. "He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos," is that frequently used cliche' to describe a "natural" salesman.
No wonder most people hate salesmen. Would you feel good convincing someone to spend money on a product that they don't need? I think these people are called "con artist".
So, when I decided to leave the Navy after 11+ years of highly technical, engineering and leadership experience, the last thing I wanted to do was degrade myself to the level of becoming a salesman. Somewhere along the way, though, I came under the influence of John "the Don" Devito, a laboratory chemist-turned-salesmen in the twilight of a glowing 35-year career at General Electric. Early on, John enlightened me with a very important lesson that I have been repeating and passing on for almost 11 years. With a scowling fixed glare, and a wag of the finger, John would repeatedly tell us "You are not here to sell products. You are here to solve problems!"
These words resonated particularly well with me. Some years earlier, as a newly assigned Engineer Officer on a Nuclear Submarine, my commanding officer (and mentor) would instruct me that, as a senior officer, my primary responsibility on board was to "Identify and correct deficiencies." So, it seemed, transitioning from Chief Engineer of a Nuclear Submarine to technical Sales Representative would be a relatively simple transition. Making things even more exciting for me, GE had just instituted its Six Sigma "At the customer, for the customer" initiative. This meant that all sales personnel completed Six Sigma Black Belt training and were required to participate in at least one customer Six Sigma process improvement project.
For those not familiar with Six Sigma, it is a process improvement methodology that utilizes a collection of statistical analysis tools to analyze and control the effectiveness and variance of a process. Not knowing any better, I latched onto this concept and became heavily immersed in a number of process efficiency projects with production engineers at my customers' facilities. This wasn't "sales", this was engineering and problem-solving.
Some years later, I found myself in a position to evaluate and recommend purchasing decisions for various business software packages. This meant that I was frequently on the other side of "sales" conversations. This is where I learned to actually dislike salesmen. Expecting the sales process to follow the pattern that I was taught at GE, I would come to meetings prepared to discuss the specific problems we were trying to solve and the detailed criteria we would use in our evaluation. I was repeatedly surprised when the software sales teams would come in and immediately jump into a sales presentation and demonstration of their software - taking no time whatsoever to determine my specific needs so that they could determine whether their technology was a reasonable solution. After a while, I just started avoiding these sales pitches altogether. Ironically, I spent the following year working as a software sales executive - and I don't think I did a single "canned" sales pitch the entire time.
Moving closer to my roots, the last several years have brought me back to that familiar ground of applying technology and engineering to improve the efficiency and profitability of customers' operations. At my current company, the "sales" people are the ones who design systems, size and select mechanical equipment and even do some of their own engineering. Oddly enough, one of our biggest customers recently reiterated that he did not want to have "salesmen" call on him - he wanted only "engineers" in his facilities that could solve his problems. As always, John the Don was right - we're not here to "sell" products after all.
Like I said - I'm not a salesman.....really
No wonder most people hate salesmen. Would you feel good convincing someone to spend money on a product that they don't need? I think these people are called "con artist".
So, when I decided to leave the Navy after 11+ years of highly technical, engineering and leadership experience, the last thing I wanted to do was degrade myself to the level of becoming a salesman. Somewhere along the way, though, I came under the influence of John "the Don" Devito, a laboratory chemist-turned-salesmen in the twilight of a glowing 35-year career at General Electric. Early on, John enlightened me with a very important lesson that I have been repeating and passing on for almost 11 years. With a scowling fixed glare, and a wag of the finger, John would repeatedly tell us "You are not here to sell products. You are here to solve problems!"
These words resonated particularly well with me. Some years earlier, as a newly assigned Engineer Officer on a Nuclear Submarine, my commanding officer (and mentor) would instruct me that, as a senior officer, my primary responsibility on board was to "Identify and correct deficiencies." So, it seemed, transitioning from Chief Engineer of a Nuclear Submarine to technical Sales Representative would be a relatively simple transition. Making things even more exciting for me, GE had just instituted its Six Sigma "At the customer, for the customer" initiative. This meant that all sales personnel completed Six Sigma Black Belt training and were required to participate in at least one customer Six Sigma process improvement project.
For those not familiar with Six Sigma, it is a process improvement methodology that utilizes a collection of statistical analysis tools to analyze and control the effectiveness and variance of a process. Not knowing any better, I latched onto this concept and became heavily immersed in a number of process efficiency projects with production engineers at my customers' facilities. This wasn't "sales", this was engineering and problem-solving.
Some years later, I found myself in a position to evaluate and recommend purchasing decisions for various business software packages. This meant that I was frequently on the other side of "sales" conversations. This is where I learned to actually dislike salesmen. Expecting the sales process to follow the pattern that I was taught at GE, I would come to meetings prepared to discuss the specific problems we were trying to solve and the detailed criteria we would use in our evaluation. I was repeatedly surprised when the software sales teams would come in and immediately jump into a sales presentation and demonstration of their software - taking no time whatsoever to determine my specific needs so that they could determine whether their technology was a reasonable solution. After a while, I just started avoiding these sales pitches altogether. Ironically, I spent the following year working as a software sales executive - and I don't think I did a single "canned" sales pitch the entire time.
Moving closer to my roots, the last several years have brought me back to that familiar ground of applying technology and engineering to improve the efficiency and profitability of customers' operations. At my current company, the "sales" people are the ones who design systems, size and select mechanical equipment and even do some of their own engineering. Oddly enough, one of our biggest customers recently reiterated that he did not want to have "salesmen" call on him - he wanted only "engineers" in his facilities that could solve his problems. As always, John the Don was right - we're not here to "sell" products after all.
Like I said - I'm not a salesman.....really
