Selling to Skeptical Technical Decision Makers

Among the decision makers you need to convince, it’s the skeptical ones that cause the most anxiety. By effectively coaching your mobilizer, you should be able to assuage many of their concerns; however, some nuts are harder to crack. Enter: the skeptical techie.

Many salespeople avoid dealing with technical decision makers at all cost because their logical, hyper critical nature makes them hard to convince. They always seem to know just the right piercing questions that poke holes in your product. No sales person wants to feel “less than smart,” and so they settle for the low-hanging fruit prospects.

Babette Ten Haken at Sales Aerobics for Engineers recently profiled this particular member of the buying group, technical decision makers, outlining exactly what makes it so difficult to sell to them:

“There are three key reasons why technical decision makers currently intimidate you.

1. There is a sales-engineering interface® disconnect. This disconnect is caused by the composition, semantics, cadence, clarity and tempo of your sales conversations and presentations. You are thinking and speaking like a sales person. They are thinking and speaking like scientists. You are out of sync with your technical audience.
2. Your sales materials are not as credible, relevant and valuable as they need to be. These materials are not comparable to the types of information, presentation format and method of analyses that skeptical technical decision makers rely on to solve problems and determine the business value of your offering.
3. Skeptical Technical Decision Makers always utilize the scientific method when solving problems. In order to validate information and logic, they ask each other killer questions. Anticipating those killer questions completely shuts you down before you even start. Anticipating those killer questions completely catalyzes the technical decision maker.”

Yes, these challenges take more than the average sales person to overcome. Simply emailing a link to your eBook isn’t going to cut it. Technical decision makers may be among the toughest to convince of your solution: they also may be some of the most powerful mobilizers to get on board.

How can you change the way you communicate with technical decision makers?

1. Learn to speak their language. Focus less on your product, and communicate your solution in a scientific context.
2. Prepare collateral with applicable data and usage scenarios that they can analyze.
3. Don’t freak out when they start asking technical questions out of your realm of experience. Do the best you can, use your team, and with honesty and transparency work together to find out the answers to their inquiries.

As you figure out how to successfully sell to the skeptical techies in the buying group, you not only win influence from some of the hardest nuts to crack, your overall sales strategy will level up.

See how Consensus communicates personalized messages to members of increasingly diverse buying groups, Click on the orange “Watch Demo” button below.

Read the source article at Babette Ten Haken