Educating or Selling?
In one of my earlier posts I talked about one reason why you should consider presenting last in a sales cycle: because your prospect does not understand the value of your product. This brings up the question of how to balance educating a prospect and selling to them. Good Sales Engineers are masters at walking this fine line and know that to build credibility you need to do some education, but you can easily take that too far.
If you are presenting a product that is “disruptive” (to use a Bullspeak term common in Silicon Valley) then it will, by definition, be a challenge for a prospect to appreciate it’s value. Twitter is a great example. Almost every person I have ever spoken with about Twitter thought it was idiotic when they first heard the idea. Why would you want to hear peoples minute-by-minute ramblings? A friend of mine still calls it “Twittereah ” and many others question whether there is any value in Twitter at all. But with 30 Million users and growing it certainly has an audience. But understanding it’s value is going to take time and it is still a tough sell. Many other disruptive products are the same way: if they fundamentally change the game then selling them is an uphill battle.
So education must play a role in any sale of a disruptive product. One way to bridge the gap between education and selling is by making your presentations as personal as possible. If you are selling productivity software, then show the individuals involved real-world examples of how their quality of life will be improved. This will engage them and give them a desire to fully understand your product. The first reaction that most people have to something new is “I don’t see how that will work”. It’s easy to forget this reality, especially if you work with high technology. Most people in high tech see something new and say “Wow! Cool. Let me see what I can do with that”. These folks are the early-adopters and you are not going to find many of them to sell to in any market. See “Crossing the Chasm” for more on the characteristics of different buyers in a technology market.
The problem is if you spend your entire sales cycle educating the prospect on the value of the product. Although you may build a relationship during this period, it is also possible that your competition (that may not have even been engaged in the early part of the cycle) may swoop in later and present a much simpler view of the product. The end result could be that you are percieved as complex, while the competition looks like the elegant solution. You do the heavy lifting of educating the prospect and they come in and SELL.
That is why I gave the advice of going last in a sales cycle where you need to educate the prospect about your product. But if you have to educate a customer, don’t forget to continue selling during that process. The main difference is that selling means showing the relevance and value of your product to the product. Education is about understanding, selling is about creating desire. Both in equal measures will win the deal.
