Selling with a Straight Face

Years (and years) ago when I sold for IBM, I was pitching mainframe and AS-400 software.  This was my first experience with software sales.  This might come as a shock to you, but these were products that the average person might find difficult to understand in function and even more difficult to explain to someone else.  The problem was, and continues to be, that I am a very average person.

I didn’t really understand what these products did for their users.  I found no personal resonance in their functionality.  I didn’t have a personal copy of CICS to play around with at home.  I was not a very effective salesperson as a result.

There’s a school of thought out there in sales (perhaps the “old school” where I come from) that a good salesperson can sell anything, even if he or she doesn’t personally like the product.  It’s about connecting with the customer, they’d say.  I think that these days the average business consumer is smarter than that.  Customers can be instinctually formidable apex predators ready to take down salespeople who don’t believe in their products.  They can sense any undercurrents of doubt.

Years and years (and years) ago, before IBM, one of my first jobs was selling cars.  Cringeworthy though that might seem, I’m actually proud of my time in car sales.  Those long days as a young man plodding around on car lots superheated by triple-digit Texas summer temperatures offered a great many lessons about human nature.  This is, for instance, when I learned that after all the consumer research, all of the deal-making, all of the comparison shopping, the decision to purchase is still essentially perched on an emotional fulcrum.  All the data-crunching is basically to make you feel good about your ultimate decision.  It doesn’t remove the emotions – fear, anxiety, excitement, joy, remorse, and eventually, calm acceptance that you’ve done your due diligence.  I’m convinced it doesn’t matter if you’re spending your own money or someone else’s.  In fact, those emotions may even be heightened when you’re responsible for the success of a purchase decision made on behalf of your company.

This is why I think it’s important for the customer to not only have confidence in their own decision, they also need to see it in the salesperson’s eyes, feel the strength of those convictions in their voice. It’s not just about showing the gas cap, you see.  It's how you personally feel about that gas cap.  Firstly, if you show them a gas cap and the Ford dealer down the road doesn’t, you’ve got the only gas cap they remember that day.  But more importantly, they need to see how proud you are in the design of that gas cap and how you personally believed it was going to save them time and money someday.  Yes, I literally spent 2 minutes explaining the gas cap on a Volkswagen, folks.  Because it was important to me, and they understood why even the gas cap was an exciting piece of engineering on an 80-something Jetta.

And so I still believe that how we feel about the products we sell is relevant to the process.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that a good salesperson can sell anything. I think a good salesperson knows a good product and chooses to sell that product because they can believe in it.  They believe in the go-to-market strategy, they believe in the engineering, but more to the point they believe in the answers it holds for the customer’s business questions.  The value sell begins with the salesperson believing in that value first.

I point all of this out because in my many conversations about different sales jobs here at Stack Overflow this is something that consistently comes up: ambivalence for their current product, and a need to be excited about what they sell.  I call this belief in your product “selling with a straight face”.  Products like Stack Overflow for Teams and the newest offering OverflowAI offer the opportunity for salespeople to experience that value firsthand.  As a knowledge management and collaboration tool it offers the chance for real personal resonance with its benefits.  It’s a product that not only can you see your customers using, but you can also see yourself using it. 

I’m not here to sell you any of Stack Overflow’s products or even a superior gas cap.  But I would like to pose this question to anyone out there with ambivalence toward the software product they currently sell:  How nice would it be to sell something you believe in?