This is about getting all you can out of all you’ve got. Something so many businesses overlook. Most SME’s I come across do not need to hire in “sales talent”! The secret weapon is under their nose. But they need to engage those people carefully and in a way that’s proven to work. Your engineers and non-sales customer-facing people can contribute to generating revenue in a way that both they and customers don’t see as “selling”.
Why this is harder than it looks
- The engineering mindset that makes your team brilliant technically actively works against commercial growth if not channelled properly. Your people solve problems instinctively, but they solve the technical problem before establishing the commercial context, which means they often solve the wrong problem entirely.
- Technical SMEs consistently underestimate how much commercial value they’re already creating but not capturing. Your existing client relationships contain millions in untapped revenue, but your team doesn’t recognise commercial signals because they’re focused on technical delivery, not business outcomes.
- Most engineering firms treat commercial development as a separate discipline rather than a natural extension of technical problem solving. This creates internal resistance because your team feels they’re being asked to become different people, rather than simply applying their existing problem-solving skills to commercial challenges.
What good looks like in practice
- Your engineers proactively explore the commercial context before diving into technical solutions, meaning every project conversation starts with business impact, not engineering constraints. In firms that get this right, technical discussions happen within a commercial framework that’s already been established and agreed.
- Your engineers confidently handle commercial conversations without feeling they’re compromising their technical integrity or expertise. In businesses that get this right, technical experts see commercial awareness as an extension of their professional competence, not a departure from it.
- In firms that have solved this properly, commercial conversations happen throughout project delivery, not just at the beginning and end of engagements. Your engineers weave business impact discussions into technical progress updates, creating continuous commercial momentum rather than discrete selling moments.
Where most engineering firms go wrong
- Engineering firms typically try to fix the skills problem before addressing the mindset challenge, which means their team learns techniques they’ll never use because they don’t believe in them. Your engineers reject commercial approaches that feel manipulative or inauthentic, so any training that doesn’t align with their values will fail regardless of how good the content is.
- Engineering businesses often treat commercial development as a training problem when it’s actually a leadership and culture challenge. You can’t delegate commercial growth to your team without first modelling the commercial behaviours and conversations you expect them to have, which means the change must start with how leadership approaches and talks about commercial activities.
Where to start
Implement a weekly commercial intelligence sharing session where every technical team member reports one business insight they’ve learned about a client during their technical work. This might be organisational changes, new projects starting, budget cycles, or strategic challenges they’ve mentioned in passing. Start building a systematic picture of the commercial context surrounding your technical delivery. The act of looking for this information will change how your team listens and what they notice in their everyday client interactions.
The thing worth checking in your business
Your engineers are almost certainly having dozens of conversations every week that contain commercial intelligence about expansion opportunities, but you have no system for capturing, analysing, or acting on this information. Every technical discussion includes context about business priorities, resource constraints, upcoming challenges, and strategic initiatives that could represent significant commercial opportunities. The fact is, your team is already gathering commercial intelligence, they just don’t know it’s valuable or what to do with it. What commercial signals are your engineers hearing but not recognising, and how much opportunity are you missing as a result?
Want to know where your team actually stands?
Use the free commercial diagnostic tools to find out exactly where the gaps are in your team’s sales effectiveness, and what to do about them. Takes 10 minutes. The report is specific and actionable.