Discover the steps involved in the selling process for Engineering

How to create outlook signature

hey everyone my name is trevor and today we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics we're going to talk about how to sell for engineers and right up front i want to be clear there's a lot of great training books and resources out there that talk through the tactical ideas of selling how to give a good demo how to do good discovery all of these other very important aspects but what i want to focus on is not the tactics and tools but the fundamentals how somebody with an engineering background can walk into a room and confidently represent a product or piece of software and feel good about themselves at the end of the day so i'm going to talk about a simple three-step approach that i think way simplifies selling and is a much easier entry point than maybe consuming a whole book of tactics and tips whenever you're just trying to get your foot into the door or maybe you're new or even just trying to rediscover sales engineering in general now before i go through the the specifics here i i want to talk about a misconception right the misconception amongst engineers especially is that sales is to be associated with like a sleazy salesperson right you hear the example of like the used car salesman right and there's that trope and that stereotype of what we apply to that now don't be wrong there are bad sales people out there all over the place however a lot of the good ones are quite the opposite of what that stereotype would make you think let me use an example that stays on that kind of used car salesman type of logic right when i was young my first car that i ever bought was a chevy cavalier okay it was a terrible car it had massive mechanical issues some of them existed when i bought the car from these car salesmen some of them were just by nature of the fact that it was a terrible car that chevrolet made okay so me personally i could never ever sell a chevy cavalier it's a terrible car i would have to lie to somebody's face if i tried to pretend like it would be a good idea for them to buy a chevy cavalier alternatively i've owned three toyota corollas and i love toyota corollas i think that they are amazing cars they retain their value very well i've owned three and i've sold all three of them and and made most of my money back they've given me tremendous value for the amount of money that i paid their safe cars they're cheap to insure they have great miles per gallon they are amazing cars i would recommend that anybody buy a toyota corolla now you see the difference in my perspective there i could ethically and happily sell a toyota corolla why it's because i believe it's good okay and that's what i want to talk about is specifically how an engineer that wants to start selling products or services in the space can approach fundamentally how to assess and determine a product that they would be happy selling that they would be passionate representing out there in the field without compromising their own ethics let's get started okay so in my view selling is actually extremely simple okay there are tools and tactics that can get complex but the fundamentals of how to be an ethical and honest and good salesperson can really be boiled down to just a few simple things right first things first you need to find a solution or a product or a company that you believe in okay i used my toyota corolla example before right i believe the litmas test for if a person could go sell something potentially is the would i buy this test or would i use this test right if you as a consumer believe that something is valuable enough to spend money on well then there's a good possibility that you could convince others right maybe think about have you ever recommended a product or service to somebody i have a lot of products and services i recommend to my friends well i i'm selling those products and services by recommending them right and the only way i can do that ethically is by recommending things that i think are good right so i think that that's that's very simple and something a lot of people can think about is you know what are some technical solutions if you're an engineer that you believe in and that you would recommend to a customer that you would recommend to a colleague or to your company okay and i think in this uh assessment it may also be good to think about is it priced fairly okay because a lot of solutions i believe are really good but i think they're priced unfairly and so while i think they're good i wouldn't actually buy them and so that's also potentially something you should consider some people ignore that part but it's that's something that's important to me personally so once you find a solution that you believe in or maybe you find a job selling a solution that you believe in just practice explaining why you know just like i can tell you exactly why i think toyota corollas are good and that you should consider buying one you need to be able to articulate to other people why you believe that solution is good it's pretty simple now this is where a lot of that tactical advice will come into play this is where you could go read a bunch of different books about how to be good at demoing and how to be a good presenter and how to do good discovery right but fundamentally the skill the trade that you want to practice is how to explain why what you believe is true right about whatever product and service it is that you represent as a salesperson or as a sales engineer okay to me this is the the gold star this is really this is what makes the job easy for me right is if you follow step one and two if you find a solution that you really believe in and you get good at explaining why that is and convincing other people to see the same thing that you see in that solution then the job after that is just to go tell people the truth just go tell people about that thing that you believe is good and why it could help them okay i think that maybe maybe this seems obvious to some people but to me early on i had a lot of stress and anxiety and moral qualms about getting into sales and boiling it down to this really has helped me come to terms with a lot of that and also be much happier in my job and i think be more effective at it right i focus on what i believe the true value of something is not necessarily what some marketing campaign says the value of something is i investigate it myself i know the truth and then i just go tell the truth to other people that's that's really what it comes down to all right as always you can contact me directly and comment on this video like subscribe and all that good stuff all right everyone i hope that that was useful um was it useful did that resonate with you if you were watching it i'm i'm curious no because that is an idea uh this idea that sales is really just telling the truth in my mind that's been on my uh conscious for for the last couple years as i've learned uh to be an se and i'd like to know if that made sense or if that's just obvious knowledge that people already hold or um or how that take kind of made you feel so leave a comment reach out to me if you have any thoughts and until next time and just take it easy all right bye everybody