No Time or Budget for Human Skills?

Your SEs need demo skills. Presentation skills. Discovery skills. Product training. 

There is never enough time or budget for all of it.

So why spend either on something as vague-sounding as human skills?

An SE goes to a good demo training program.  Comes back with good ideas. Show less. Ask better questions. Connect the demo to what the customer actually cares about.

Then comes the next important demo.

Somehow, the new skills aren’t used.

• The customer starts checking out. 
• The AE gets frustrated. 
• The SE knows it isn’t going well either. The pressure rises, and it’s hard to do the things that made perfect sense in training.

Afterward, everyone is frustrated.

Sometimes a deal is lost.

So everyone tries harder. More preparation. More feedback. More effort.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes not.

Because what works often depends on who is in front of us.

One customer wants the headline and the business impact. Another wants detail. One buyer is ready to decide; another still needs time to think.

What works depends on who we are talking to, managing, demoing to or selling to.

There isn’t one perfect way to communicate. There is only a way that is more or less likely to land with this person, in this situation, at this moment.

That is where human skills start to matter.

The 10 p.m. phone call

I once worked with an AE who had a habit that drove me crazy.

Before an important 9 a.m. demo, he would call at about 10 o’clock the night before with changes.

Not little changes. Significant changes to what we were going to show and how we were going to show it.

My instinct was to push back.  Or I could have become better at explaining why the changes were unnecessary.

That wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

What helped was understanding what his behaviour was telling me.

He’s a Driver.  The common Driver response to stress is to become more autocratic, to take control.

He wasn’t suddenly discovering flaws in the demo at 10 p.m. He simply wasn’t experienced with our type of software, and the uncertainty of an important demo stressed him.

As his stress increased, so did his need to control what was going to happen.

Once I understood that, I changed what I did before the stress peaked.

We talked through the strategy. I kept him informed. I scheduled dry runs. Most importantly, I made sure he knew I was prepared and that there was a plan.

The late-night calls largely disappeared.

The answer wasn’t persuading him that the changes were unnecessary.

It was reducing the stress that made him want to make them.

That is part of what I mean by People.

Understanding behavioural differences gives us clues about what people need from us, what helps them feel comfortable and what their behaviour may be telling us when they are under pressure.

Sometimes the behaviour we are arguing with is actually information.

When the product wasn’t really the issue

I saw a different version of the same problem with an SE whose company had been acquired.

The acquiring company intended to replace the product she had represented for years with its own.

She was unhappy, and her manager knew it.

He thought:

She’s worried about the replacement product. I’ll help her understand how good it is and how it will work.

She was thinking something completely different:

How are we going to treat the customers who trusted us and bought the existing product?

Her strength of Fairness was focusing her on the people affected by the decision, not on the product itself.

So the more her manager explained the new product, the less useful the conversation became.

He was answering the question he thought she had.  She was wrestling with a different one.

No amount of better explanation about the product was going to help until he understood what she actually needed to talk about.

That is why Strengths matter.

Our strengths affect more than what we are good at. They influence what we notice, what we value and what concerns us.

If I understand that, I have a much better chance of talking about what matters to the person in front of me.

Otherwise, I can give a very good answer to a question they never asked.

And when things still go sideways

Sometimes we understand the people involved. We communicate well. We use our strengths wisely.

And things still go sideways.

We lose the deal. A customer surprises us. A demo fails. We get difficult feedback. Someone else gets the promotion.

What then?

That’s when we lean on Resilience.

Resilience isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s a skill.

We can learn ways to recover from setbacks, manage our reactions and get ourselves back to a place where we can think clearly about what to do next.

Because even when we do all the right things, we don’t control the outcome.

We do have some control over how we respond.

So why bother with human skills?

Because every discovery call, demo, conversation, sales partnership and customer decision involves people. And people don’t all hear, react or respond in the same way.

You can ask the perfect discovery question. The customer still has to feel comfortable enough to answer it.

You can give excellent feedback. The SE still has to be able and willing to hear it.

You can build a brilliant demo. It still has to work for the people watching it.

That is why my work often comes back to three pillars: People, Strengths and Resilience.

• People skills help us understand behaviour and adapt how we communicate.
• Strengths help us understand what matters to others and to us.
• Resilience helps us recover when, despite our best efforts, things still go sideways.

Human skills are what help us make all our other skills work with real people, in real situations.