Well, first of all, I’m not a seller. I’m an engineer by trade, but I can sell and obviously, charisma matters, but in the end, it’s all about listening carefully to the customers, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how you bring the power of the portfolio against those challenges in an integrated solution and business outcome-oriented way. As an engineer, you love your technology, you know, you can spend all day long talking about architectures and speeds and feeds, but it’s meaningless if it does not deliver some sort of business outcomes.
And that’s the biggest challenge. I think technology’s sales forces are going through, moving from selling technologies, to selling outcomes. And that’s a journey, that’s we are all on it. And the reality is that not everybody will make it. If my demographics are in the 50s, and I learned to do certain things in a certain way, we will give the chance to everyone. We are retraining, rescaling, giving them tools. It comes down to confidence. And if you can’t build confidence in the way you speak, in the way you articulate that outcome from the technology that we deliver, that’s a problem.
And so there is a lot going on in our digital marketing platform, in our sales enablement, in the way we train, but also in the R&D side, because you know, I learned one thing about sales. Number one, they are very operated, that’s for sure. What is the least path of resistance or the least amount of friction, I can go retire my quarter? That’s all the second part.
And the third one is the more packaged it is, the better it is for them because if I can sell the black box, and customers are more and more or less interested in what is inside the box and more what is the outcome of it, then we position ourselves for success. It is always a question of art and science, and that’s why the two parts come together.
