Selling Complex Technology Is More Like High School Than Grad School
As kids are returning to school, it’s a reminder of burgeoning relationships, cliques, and personalities that made adolescence so much…ahem…fun.
While most of us have put those memories in the rear-view mirror, those high school experiences are valuable training for selling complex technologies into resistant to change institutions over long sales cycles.
Business of any kind is about relationships, and relationships are about feelings, and feelings are about connection to self (or lack thereof). When someone sees something in you that reflects a light on them, they feel understood, which is the cornerstone to any good relationship.
I’m not auditioning here to become the next Ann Landers, but if you are trying to find investors, partners and customers for your climate, water, or hard tech, the tools you learned to navigate high school matter more than the meritocracy you learned in grad school when you’re trying to get noticed in a crowded field of ideas.
What do I mean? Logic won’t gain you entrance into the clique. Your potential friends are looking at your grooming, how you dress, your speech, and your tastes because they want to feel that you’re a good fit and can add something to the group. Once you’ve been accepted, they’ll listen to your opinion.
Similarly, when a founder is trying to convince an industry to adopt a first-of-a-kind technology, at the top of their checklist is whether you understand their gestalt and whether you can enhance their bottom line without putting their reputation at risk.
Unfortunately for too many founders, post-graduate academic rigor erases those lessons and replaces them with a glorification of individual achievement, which is great for winning awards and enhancing the individual’s reputation, but it hoards all of the warmth of that sunlight rather than radiating it to their closest celestial creatures.
Your potential investor or customer cares first about WIFM, what’s in it for me, just like the clique. You may be blessed with brains and inspiration, but that doesn’t guarantee a second look.
This isn’t to say that a founder should dumb themselves down to fit in. I’m all for individuality and exceptionalism. History is littered with loners and outcasts whose ideas have altered societies. It is, however, to say that if you’re trying to raise dilutive or non-dilutive capital or change customer behaviors, you need to understand their paradigm before asking them to change it.
They have to accept you have their best interests at heart before they are willing to invest their time, money, and cache into your idea, let alone carry it through their bureaucracy.
You may have hated high school and felt much more at home in grad school, but remember, acceptance into the latter required your success in the former.
