Sales Engineer Guide: Yes means "yes" - Explanations mean "no"

What should customers hear when you give a long explanation in response a question that can be answered with a yes or no? 

 I believe that they are usually hearing no when they get a long explanation. Short answers usually mean the responder understands the question and is comfortable with the answer. Long answers are a way of applying conditions to the response. Long answers are often an attempt to steer the question in a different direction.  

By yes I mean a positive outcome and not necessarily the word yes.

Ask Questions to Drive the Conversation

Ask questions until you can give a short answer as long as you don't drag it out or frustrate the other party.
I worked with a great sales representative that always seemed dense in meetings.  He asked questions that made him look bad.  Later he told me that it gave the customer the opportunity to in struct and flesh out their needs.

More than sales situations

Asking exploratory questions can be useful in all kinds of situations. I use this job aid both when on the asking side and the receiving side of a question. It has the secondary advantages of showing interest and empathy.

Example

"Will this product scale to meet my needs"
  • Yes - this will meet your needs.
  • No - this will not meet your needs.
  • Long Explanation - 
    • I'm not sure if it will meet your needs.
    • No this will not meet your needs but I don't want to admit it.
    • You asked the wrong question and I will let you know it.
  • Ask more questions
    • I'm not sure if this meets your needs.  Let me understand more so I can help
    • I don't understand the true requirements.  Let me understand more.
    • You asked the wrong question.  Lets help you recognize the right question.

Video

Example

"Do we know why we lost data"
  • Yes - we know
  • No - we do not know
  • Long Explanation
    • It is really complicated and I don't want you to understand.
    • What I am telling you is just a bunch of theories
  • Ask more questions
    • Verify you understand which part of the data loss
    • Discover their bias in the question

Nuclear Example

"Will this reactor accident kill us"
  • Yes
  • Eventually - a version of yes
  • It depends on your exposure  - a version of yes
  • Long answer  
    • I'm afraid to guess
    • I don't want to give you bad news
  • Questions
    • Lets you find out their time frame.

Related

Created 4/2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Upd...
Read more

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaul...
Read more

Almost PaaS Document Parsing with Tika and AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Image
The Apache Tika project provides a  library capable of parsing and extracting data and meta data from over 1000 file types.  Tika is available as a single jar file that can be included inside applications or as a deployable jar file that runs Tika as a standalone service. This blog describes deploying the Tika jar as an auto-scale service in Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  I selected Elastic Beanstalk because it supports jar based deployments without any real Infrastructure configuration. Elastic Beanstalk auto-scale should take care of scaling up and down for for the number of requests you get. Tika parses documents and extracts their text completely in memory. Tika was deployed for this blog using EC2 t2.micro instances available in the AWS free tier. t2.micro VMs are 1GB which means that you are restricted in document complexity and size. You would size your instances appropriately for your largest documents.   Preconditions An AWS account. AWS ac...
Read more