For 1 year I bet on selling technical products, trying to be a technician. I failed. When I understood that my problem was one of communication, I corrected my offer to the market and went to scale.
What happens when you are an expert in your subject and only experts understand you?
A pleasant conversation but not a deal. Some technical in-depth meetings but no contract.
Huge frustration and lack of guidance.
Is it me? Is it my sales process? My price? Is my proposal wrong?
It is not possible to expand the customer portfolio and the company ends up being hostage to one, at most two, non-replicable customer accounts.
Frustration starts to become part of the oxygen you breathe but there is always hope that the next proposal will close.
And more frustration. Until there comes comfort and the certainty that those clients who keep their lights on are more "up to date" than the others who don't advance like you, but that "one day they will come". And that day never comes.
And finally comes the giving up on pursuing new accounts this year. "We're going to put all our energy into keeping our current customers."
The fact that you try and fail to get new customers is not in your process. It is in your communication strategy.
You don't buy a drill. You buy the holes it drills.
What any market buys is a final, measurable, different, and relevant result that is worth the risk (financial, time, adoption, implementation, learning, and intrusion).
Technical jargon and trendy terms will not help to fill these gaps in the mind of your would-be buyer.
He is not this technician, nor is he the cool kid who keeps up with the latest in technology.
He is the calloused, stressed-out guy who demands tangible, tangible results.
He wants to sleep well, but he can't. And here comes someone with the acronyms that came out last week at some Silicon Valley startup summit. His chances are nil.
The technician believes that the more he positions himself as an expert, the better his chances. Yes, as long as his buyer understands what the delivery is. This must be specific and dominate the communication.
Yes, there are buyers who speculate to understand the latest market fashions. But they rarely buy. And if they do buy, without understanding what the final delivery is, they will fatally not stay as your customers.
Technicism can be tenuous or acute.
I remember a shielding company, once a leader, that fell into ostracism from the market.
Her bet was that her glass was self-made and that her armor warranted thicker calibers. But its price was 20% higher than its nearest competitor.
Because it had been successful for years, it didn't realize that these technical components no longer made such a difference that people were paying this premium price. But its communication was still full of technical ballistic differentials. It broke.
There is also the case of the technology company that wanted to sell ERP licenses and realized after 3 months that NOTHING that could be talked about in technical terms, justified the work of a potential customer's systems change. Until he started offering entry solutions that promised to increase sales. The doors of the market opened wide.
The problem itself, is that a good technique, whatever it is, is a middle activity, it gets into the HOW box. It, even if interesting, is incompetent to value any proposition to the market.
Serious buyers first need to understand WHY they should evaluate your offer. And they don't expect you to come up with technical jargon. They may be impressed, but they won't buy.
Of course there is a place for a technical agenda in a solution evaluation process. But I can assure you that this place is not on the decision board.
The challenge, always repeated, invariably of the market, is to give tangibility and reasons for someone to move a finger in your direction.
And the best bet, before the wheel exists, is to demonstrate the end result. Show and demonstrate what your promise delivers, not how you bake the cake.
