Separate technical conversations from commercial ones and teach your experts to understand the buyer’s world before presenting solutions.
Why this is harder than it looks
- Your technical experts conflate being knowledgeable with being valuable to the buyer. Knowledge only becomes valuable when it connects directly to what the buyer is trying to achieve or avoid.
- Technical experts jump straight to solutions because that is how their brains are wired to solve problems. In commercial conversations, premature solutions kill trust and make you look like every other vendor.
- Technical experts fear being seen as pushy so they avoid asking direct questions about budget, timeline, and decision-making process. This leaves them guessing about the commercial reality and building solutions for problems that may not exist.
What good looks like in practice
- In your best commercial meetings, the conversation starts with business context, not technical capability. Your expert understands what success looks like for the buyer before discussing how to achieve it.
- In successful commercial conversations, your technical expert can summarise what they have heard in business terms, not technical terms. The buyer nods when you reflect their situation back to them.
- In effective commercial conversations, technical experts end with agreed next steps that move the buying process forward. Every meeting has a specific, dated follow-up action that both parties have committed to.
Where most engineering firms go wrong
- Most technical experts try to build credibility by demonstrating how much they know rather than how well they understand the buyer. This turns commercial conversations into technical lectures that leave buyers impressed but not convinced.
- Engineering firms focus on teaching their technical people what to say instead of teaching them what to listen for. The magic happens in understanding what you hear, not in delivering polished presentations.
Where to start
Pick one upcoming commercial conversation and plan three context questions you will ask before discussing any technical solutions. Questions like ‘What happens if this problem continues for another six months?’ or ‘What does success look like from a business perspective?’ Practice asking these questions naturally, as if you are genuinely curious about understanding their world. The goal is to hear their answers before you start talking about your capabilities.
The thing worth checking in your business
Most engineering firms cannot tell the difference between a technical expert who impresses buyers and one who influences them. Impressive experts get compliments and second meetings, but influential experts get decisions and purchase orders. The difference lies in understanding business context, not technical depth.
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