7 Steps to Prepare an Engineer for a Sales Call

If you work in a company providing technical solutions, your engineers can be a great asset in building relationships with customers.  They bring more credibility in discussing potential solutions and come up with better ideas to address a customer’s challenges than most sales or marketing professionals can.  A good engineer can in turn gain insight into how the products they design are used, which helps feed future improvements.

Unfortunately, there is the occasional (hopefully) engineer without a commercial bone in his or her body.  This engineer can take many forms. For example, some characterized by a closed-minded “not-invented-here” mentality (i.e., no one outside the organization can possibly have a better solution).  Others are exceedingly cautious and emphasize a solution’s limitations more than its advantages (so as not to avoid any risk of issues with the solution).  Or they may be more interested in looking like the smartest person in the room than they are in actually landing the sale. And finally, some just lack the social skills necessary to manage a productive conversation with a customer.

At times, however, such an engineer may be critical to involve in the sales process, perhaps because they are the true expert in the solution you offer, or they really do need the experience of seeing their products in use.  When facing this challenge, here are some tips for making the most of the situation.

Communicate the objective of the meeting. You must set the expectations on what the meeting is to accomplish, whether it’s to address a customer’s concerns, uncover their latent needs, etc.  Emphasize the reasons why you feel this engineer can bring value to the meeting, and make them feel an important part of the whole process.  It is important to communicate to the engineer whether this is an information-gathering or question-answering session.  Engineers by their nature feel a need to provide answers, when at times it may be better to say, “let me do a little more research on that for you.”

Emphasize the importance of preparing for the meeting.  Hopefully you are doing this yourself – researching the customer and the contacts you will be meeting with, reviewing the account history, and planning the approach for the meeting.  Involve your engineering colleague where you can, or at the minimum send them the appropriate materials to review.  A good rule of thumb is that each hour of meeting time with the customer requires three hours of preparation.

Make sure that the engineer isn’t over-scripting the meeting. Engineers like to be precise, and many will head into such a meeting with a checklist of questions.  This risks missing the opportunity to let the conversation flow in unexpected directions and uncover latent customer needs or alternative ideas for solutions.  Having some questions planned is good, but remind the engineer that this is a conversation, not an interview.

Communicate a dress code. What may be obvious to you is not so to those who spend their day in front of the computer or in the factory.  Be clear and specific, avoiding such broad generalities as “business casual”.  And you may wish to remind them that their clothes should be pressed; I know of a sales manager who once had to take a visiting engineer to a clothing store after his flight arrived to buy new clothes because the engineer was so disheveled.

Review how to discuss competition. Every engineer wants to believe their solution is the best, and hopefully it is.  But even so, addressing competitive offerings in a positive manner, but emphasizing your “points of difference”, will help maintain credibility and make your company appear to be a helpful resource (look for a future blog post on this topic).  Also, make sure that your messages are consistent; if you have stated a specific advantage of your solution previously, make sure the engineer knows this so that they don’t contradict your prior statements.

Lead the meeting, but subtly. You want the engineer to be the source of the technical information, but you need to take charge of setting the meeting objectives with the customer, introducing the engineer, and watching for the conversation to shift off course.  You must also intervene if the engineer is becoming, to put it mildly, a know-it-all, or is talking over the customer.  Some engineers do believe that they have nothing to learn from a customer, and these are the ones who will take the most coaching.  One last thing to watch for is whether the engineer is asking too many questions, so carefully monitor the customer’s body language and responses during these interchanges.

Document commitments and ensure follow-through.  This is basic meeting advice, but you need to make sure that the engineer does not feel their job is “done” after the meeting, if there are responses due to the customer.  Spend some time with your engineer going over the takeaways from the meeting and identify actions required.

Again, many, if not most, engineers either naturally have or have developed good communication skills with customers.  For those that don’t, hopefully following the above advice will make for a productive engagement, turning your engineer from a liability to an asset.

I’m eager to hear of your experiences (especially horror stories) and what you’ve learned from them: do you have any additions to the above list?  And if you work with this guy, please keep him away from your customers

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