My team just wrapped up a big proposal. I love the feeling when a month of writing and design work comes together. And it’s not just completion of the response itself that’s satisfying; it’s the culmination of all the groundwork that comes before, often a year or more of it.
Doing sales work requires a certain amount of brazen optimism that doesn’t come natural to many technologists, as we tend to be pessimists realists. To win customers’ trust (and their pocketbooks), you have to believe deeply that you are the best option for success. Deeply enough that it shows as genuine, because this kind of belief can’t be easily faked.
No, I’m not advocating for recklessly abandoning reality or straight-up lying. And yes, things are going to go wrong. We all know that. But the challenge of delivering a solution to a problem can’t solve itself. You can’t work it if you can’t win it. So yeah, you gotta first figure out a way to get into the ring, and leave future problems for your future self. Trust that you’re smart enough to address them, or at least be brave enough to risk failure.
I’m reminded of a chapter from The Geek Leader’s Handbook that talked about various approaches to proving truth in the workplace. While I wasn’t thrilled with the way the book broadly framed “geeks” vs “non-geeks” as fixed categories, it’s certainly the case with many engineers I’ve worked with (myself included) that we tend to disbelieve a statement until it’s proven true, and we especially don’t want to claim a fact without ample evidence. Whereas sales folks can operate more on hunch and gut feeling, believing something is achievable even when the outcome is unsure.
No where does this show up more than in the process of scoping and then selling projects; business folks need a cost (i.e. people x time) but engineers say giving such an a priori estimate is impossible. While the latter is true in the literal sense, it has to be done regardless. Rigid thinkers like myself have to get over themselves and do the best they can.
What I’ve found to work best is to find colleagues who bring a perspective at the other end of the “it must be proven before we call it true” and “it feels true so it is true” spectrum, and partner together on sales efforts. Is that not what we partly mean when we say there’s power in diverse thinking?
It’s even more powerful when some of these colleagues have been buyers of what you’re selling, because ultimately they’re the type of person you have to convince.
