Remember that old George Carlin joke about you driving in the middle lane on an interstate? Everyone who is driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower is an idiot? I am paraphrasing here, but the idea is simple - we tend to assume that the only objective reality is ours and everyone else just doesn’t get it.
In one of my older blogs I already wrote about my experience working in Japan. As a post-sales systems engineer I was responsible for deployment of complex systems for major telco customers all over Asia - Thailand, Japan, China, Vietnam and Philippines.
I will tell you that working with customers from very different cultures, many times conveying the message through an interpreter, taught me to slow down, keep it simple, stay away from corporate jargon and acronyms.
Later in my career I was a Senior Program Manager responsible for massive deployments, connecting the technology that was sold to business value. And this experience led me to transition to the world of pre-sales.
Working in pre-sales is a very different beast. I had to scope and sell advanced professional services at a product company. For many product companies, the professional services business, from a revenue perspective, is a rounding error on the books. Many times you feel like a proverbial “redheaded foster child nobody wants.”
I had firsthand delivery experience so naturally I thought that I knew what I was doing and my way was the only correct way of doing things.
Then came the first project I scoped. It was beautiful. Until it wasn’t.
When I put together the proposed engagement plan with all the dependencies and presented it to a customer in Japan, they were not amused. Their reality was much different - they needed to get out of the data center in half the time, they did not have in-house networking expertise as their network engineer resigned abruptly.
The end state in their reality was very different from mine and the whole thing just crumbled.
In Japanese culture, one of the worst things that can happen is “lost face” and it must be avoided at all costs. Add the language barrier, cultural differences, different body language... Intuitively I sensed that this was happening and tried to do my best to ensure that lost face didn’t happen.
I understood and quickly aligned with the customer’s reality in mind. Instead of forcing my own version of reality as “this is how it is done,” I went to the whiteboard and drew their desired end state and timing, did a reverse timeline of what needed to happen on both sides, and acknowledged their reality every step of the way.
It was always their face, not mine. The atmosphere in the room changed noticeably. It is amazing what happens when people feel that you have an understanding of their objective reality.
Looking back, the plan I prepared was my hypothesis. What I did wrong was I delivered it as a conclusion. I did my homework, I had the experience and I thought that this was the only way. What I did not have was a single sentence from the customer about what a good outcome (for their business) looked like. Everything I thought I knew was just a set of assumptions. And you know what happens when you A-S-S-U-M-E.
Earlier this year, Pure Storage rebranded itself to Everpure. I wrote 2 posts about it: When Data Becomes the Mission and When Category Becomes Too Small.
Every solution today is centered on data primacy. Charlie’s post, Putting Data First, makes a point I keep coming back to: every application holds its own version of the data and its own meaning for it.
Even a simple word like “customer” can mean something different in the CRM than in billing. Each system is right from where it sits, and the customer is the one who has to reconcile them.
If you send a traditional hardware seller to meet with a prospect without coaching or guidance, the old habits prevail. The presentation will still have the company overview, a mandatory Gartner Magic Quadrant slide, and features like capacity, performance, latency, backup and disaster recovery. I just saw this in a real customer meeting recently. Within the first ten minutes the customer told us exactly what worried them, a bad experience in the past and a small team that cannot support anything high-touch, and what followed was still the standard slide deck. The customer was polite and patient, and the conversation got a lot more useful once we got back to their concerns.
Why does this keep happening? Well, in my opinion, the main question customers have these days in this tough market with rising costs is - “what is in it for me?”. They don’t want a widget. They have a problem and they are looking for a partner who will help them solve it.
I think there is a real difference between selling a product and selling value. Value is not what we think the customer should care about. In my opinion, the value is what the customer would tell you is worth paying for in their own words - their objective reality, not yours.
Preparation and research still matter, but what we do with it is different. Do not just assume that you now know what the customer wants. Instead, prepare a short list of discovery questions for the first meeting. If the customer doesn’t say it back to us, it remains our assumption. And it is dangerous because we treat it as knowledge.
When I coach my team, I ask them to leave the slides behind and try to walk out with the customer’s own sentence about what a good outcome looks like. All the questions we ask should move us in that direction. We start with the current state, simple things like how an application owner gets access to data today and where that process hurts, because in my experience people describe friction long before they admit to pain.
Then we ask what that pain costs them, or what happens when the data is wrong, or different sources provide conflicting information. We try to uncover what success looks like to their boss, what metric is their bonus tied to, and if this works, what is the first thing they get to stop doing?
Those answers tell you whether you are talking to a champion, a skeptic, or the person who will be blamed if it goes wrong. After the meeting I do not check whether they asked every question. I ask whether they can tell me, in the customer’s words, what a good outcome is and why it matters to the person who said it.
I have started to think of those questions as the whiteboard from Japan with the marker handed to the customer. They draw the end state, and we work backward. There is also rarely one person in the room. One person sees an opportunity, another sees one more system to support, and a third will “lose face” if it goes wrong. Each is right from where they sit, and each has a different answer to “what is in it for me.” A deal moves when you can say back to each of them, in their words, what they get.
Carlin never says what the driver in the middle lane should do about it. I think the answer is to ask the other drivers where they are headed. From where I sit I am still going exactly the right speed, which is the whole problem.
Appreciate you reading.
Dmitry Gorbatov
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