How to Sell Yourself and Your Ideas

When I was very young, I worked in Customer Service. After that, I was an HR person. I like to talk to people, so everyone said to me "You should be in Sales!"

I always said "I'd do any job except Sales." I thought selling was scary. I thought that to be successful in sales, you had to be very aggressive.

I didn't know what I was talking about. My dad was in Sales. He always said "You'd be a natural in a sales job!"

I was horrified to hear that. I thought selling was something only used-car salespeople and other brassy people do. I was influenced by my experiences with bad salespeople, and I didn't have a clue what good selling looked like.

You're going to sell yourself over and over during your career, and you're going to sell your ideas, too. You sell yourself every day on the job -- not just when you're job-hunting. Your boss and the rest of the people you work with don't form an initial opinion of you and leave it at that. You sell yourself in every interaction.

You sell your ideas when you propose a solution or pitch a plan to your boss or to a co-worker. When you say "Hey Jules, want to work on the new-product numbering scheme with me?" you're in sales mode. Like a lot of people, I had the idea that selling meant beating people over the head and forcing them to bend to your will. That's completely wrong.

Good selling is the opposite of pushing people to do things. Good selling requires listening and aligning yourself with another person's needs.

Great salespeople don't feel they have to push anybody to do anything. They solve problems for their customers. You can do the same thing. You can sell your boss on your ideas, and you can sell yourself to anybody who needs to know what you can deliver - on a job search, or on the job.

Sooner or later you're going to want to sell your boss on something. Maybe you're looking for a promotion or a raise. Maybe you want to sell your boss on changing the way you handle a certain situation at work . Maybe you want your boss to buy into your vision for a new territory sales map. It doesn't matter what you're trying to sell. The process is the same in every case.

You're going to start with one of our favorite concepts -- pain. We love to talk about Business Pain at Human Workplace. Our two favorite topics are pain and mojo. You're going to incorporate pain and mojo into your sales technique. Here's how!

Let's imagine your boss is called Evan. What does Evan care about? That's where you'll start. Don't try to sell Evan on your great idea, the idea to re-write your sales territory map, until you know how your idea fits into Evan's needs. What's bugging Evan? What isn't working correctly? If you can spot the connection between your big idea and Evan's Business Pain, you're already way ahead of the game.

Most people trying to sell ideas upstream don't stop and think about their boss's needs. They don't take their customer's perspective, and that's where they go wrong. In this sales situation, Evan is your customer. You can sit around and complain that Evan is too stupid to appreciate the brilliance of your idea. We've all had that feeling! But if you dig in and take the time to see the world through Evan's glasses, you can sell your idea and grow your own business mojo.

Make a list of Evan's priorities for this year. What does he care about? Let's say Evan has three goals. He wants to increase sales, develop his regional sales managers and reduce the number of incoming customer support calls. Now, let's translate Evan's priority list into Business Pain language. As long as Evan's three goals remain unmet, Evan has three kinds of Business Pain bothering him:

• He'll be behind on his sales goals - that's his biggest Business Pain.
• He'll have green, untrained regional sales managers who make mistakes in the field.
• He'll have a sky-high customer support budget with lots of overtime, and unhappy customers.

We can say that Evan has three priorities, or we can say that Evan has three kinds of Business Pain he needs to alleviate fast!

Sales are soft because the experienced salespeople are not located where the greatest need is. If the experienced salespeople were located near the customers most in need of sales help, some of Evan's pain would dissipate.

That's why you want to re-align the sales territory map. If you want Evan to take your idea seriously, you have to show Evan how your new sales territory plan solves some of his pain. You have to make sure Evan knows how his life gets better when your plan gets installed.

Don't assume that Evan, or any busy and overstressed boss, will see the connection between his pain and your solution. If you stride into Evan's office and say "I want to re-align our sales territories" Evan may say "No distractions! We have a sales target to hit."

You have to make the connection between Evan's pain and your solution very clear. You have to 'duck-horse' it, as my brother Dave, a CTO, likes to say. When Dave worked at Motorola back in the day and I was a non-technical HR person working nearby at U.S. Robotics, I would ask him to explain technical concepts to me.

I wanted to understand block waves and the Nyquist coefficient and echo cancellation, all that stuff.
He'd say "I'll duck-horse it for you." He meant that he'd give me the ducky-horsey version, the preschool version of the technical explanation. That's all I needed and all I could understand anyway, and that's what Evan needs, too.

If you don't spell out the connection between Evan's pain and your idea, he's likely to miss the relationship. He's likely to say "Don't suggest any new ideas until after we hit our sales target."

On a job interview, you're selling yourself and your ideas, too. The last thing you want to do is push. You want to go the other way -- to draw out the interviewer, to get (and keep) him or her talking about what's going on in the department and what isn't working perfectly. You have no agenda except to learn everything you can about the Business Pain affecting your hiring manager, and then to let him or her know that you've solved that sort of pain before.