Go with your Gut: You were Right all the Time

Are you in the not-top-5% of sales results for your company, which describes most of us? We struggle, daily, with self-doubt. We try making sense of our company’s marketing communication messaging which seems to have no bearing on the reality of sitting across the table from the decision-maker. We sense that, perhaps, we should be doing lots of things differently to achieve those sales results. We warm-call and network, following everything that all of the thought-leaders tell us to do.

It’s like we are following a recipe and there is a missing ingredient to catalyze the proper outcome regarding sales results.

You have come into this sales job of yours: either it was the only one you thought you could get at the time, or it’s in a field you want to pursue. Let’s go after your personal goals and the sales results you seek.

I encourage you to create a road map for following your instincts for Self Worth.  I’m not getting all touchy-feely on you either.  I’m also going to throw in a bit of a curve as well: you may be under-rating your core capabilities. Your true value to your customers may be in your ability to translate your value along the sales-engineering interface®. Those core capabilities can produce tremendous sales results.

Oh no, not that request, Babette, you may say to me, were we sitting across the table at the local pub. Oh yes, very much so, would be my response to you. I offer three tips on why this is possible. These tips may be key to why your sales recipe isn’t quite gelling the way you want it to. Your sales results will benefit.

1. It’s up to you to make sense to them – and yourself. You took on your current sales position. Now you have been working for a few months, or even years. Yet you sense you may not “fit in” to the typical sales format. You have already intuited this. You are far too analytical. Most of your company’s marketing communications don’t make common sense to you. You scrutinize before you make a decision. What makes you think your true target markets are less exacting?
2. You are capable of traversing the sales-engineering interface.  You are able to understand what everyone is saying, even though they are sitting across the business table from you. Don’t think for a minute that anyone else seated around that table is able to do what you are capable of.  Most folks shut each other out if it requires too much thought to understand and comprehend. For you, it’s an intuitive thing. You are a natural. Use your inquisitive core capabilities to open up an entirely different, lucrative business segment that you can own.
3. Your soft skills are powerful. You are a facilitator, a translator of possibilities for your customers. Technical manufacturers and service companies struggle to make all that they know accessible to their target markets. You can become that trusted advisor and vendor who leverages your facilitative know-how against your company’s products, services and platforms to produce revenue and business development strategies that fuel everyone’s bottom line, including your own.

There’s a very good reason why you aren’t able to fit into the sales mold of your company. You have sensed it all along. You can take their template and spice it up a bit with your own unique value add. That’s when their technique is blended with your spin on things and the sales artistry happens. That’s when you get those amazing sales results.

What’s your plan to incorporate your ability to communicate with your technical as well as business counterparts? 

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo to small and mid-sized businesses in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical startups. This article is based on the June 2013 post appearing in her monthly column for Top Sales World magazine.