Sales Hero

Most of engineers have alergy to sales. I completely get it, flufly stuff, wrong terms, hype, things that are being forced down your throat to follow trends that don’t make sense to you. However does not matter you are an engineer, you need to be doing sales all the time. If you are an architect, even more, sales need to happen even more often.

Why Sales? Where we apply sales?

1. When you are convincing your team to use a new technology or approach.
2. When you are trying to get buy-in from stakeholders for a project.
3. When you are negotiating resources or timelines for your projects.
4. When you are presenting your ideas or solutions to clients or management.
5. When you are collaborating with cross-functional teams and need to align on goals.
6. When you are doing a paper presentation or conference talk to share your work.
7. When you are mentoring or coaching junior engineers and need to inspire them.
8. When you are writing documentation or technical blogs to share knowledge.
9. When you are participating in code reviews and need to persuade others of your viewpoint.
10. When you are advocating for best practices or standards within your team or organization.
11. When you are deliverying a demo and need to highlight the value of your solution.

Invisible Structure

Does not matter if you are doing a demo, slide deck presentation or even writting a document. You need some elements, or structure, however such structure or element does not need to be explicitly stated or even named but it needs to be present.

1. What is the problem?
2. What is the solution (IF there are multiple solutions do bike-car-plane).
3. Benefits of the solution.

What is the problem?

You need to state the problem. More important than staing the problem is to state the pain of the problem.

Bike, Car , Plane

When presenting multiple solutions, you must order them by simplicity to complexity, or from lower value to higher value. That way you are constaly raising the bar of your audience expectations.

Problem: I need to go from Porto Alegre to Florianopolis. I don’t have a transportation method.

Solution: First I give you a bike, you get there in 2 days, them I give you a car, you get there in 6 hours, finally I give you a plane, you get there in 60 minutes.

IF you are doing a demo, you can progressevly evole what you are presenting. IF you have just one solution, make sure you give the plane or the best option. IF you have multiple, organize them in a way where is progressively.

Benefits of the solution

Benefits should come last, they will be like a summary, but at this point, you are doing a RECAP, where you your audience already understand the problem and the solution, now you are just reinforcing.