Why selling a new idea is about Leadership, not Sales.

The title of this post is not an exaggeration. I thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that if anything, it’s an understatement.

I’ve been selling new ideas for over 20 years – that’s how I know.

Start Early, Start Young.

The first time I sold a new idea, I was in my final year of Engineering. I presented a concept for “Natural Gas as a fuel for automobiles”, and won first place. Looking back, I wonder how much that first victory shaped my professional life. If I had bombed, would I have had the courage to take the direction I did? Or would it have made me choose a safer path? Hard to say. But the experience certainly taught me that concept selling is a whole new game.

You see, in normal sales you have something tangible to sell – a box, a service, a solution. So you pitch and push ‘from the back.’ Meaning, you listen to your customer, you respond to him, you play off his feedback. But when you sell a concept, you’re selling yourself i.e. your skills, your knowledge, your passion, your credibility. It’s the opposite of product sales – you’re leading from the front not pushing from the back. (This distinction matters because, as someone said, people don’t invest in business models or business plans, they invest in people. Only people can sell ideas – no plan or strategy can do that.)

Leadership and Credibility

Those who are familiar with my startup story will know that I began my career by selling concepts. My first concept sale to a major client (Kennametal Widia) was literally selling a concept-in-a-box. We had no product, not a line of code, we just had an idea. You can imagine how terrified we were, even more so than my first deal with MICO. What saved us was, that despite our fear, we went in with a swagger – we went in like leaders, not salesmen. (Also, we were young and cocky and I guess that helped a bit.) But we’d done our homework, we’d spent the preceding couple of years learning the customer’s business, inside out, so we didn’t go in to sell or demonstrate, we went to lead. From the front. With ideas. We went in believing we knew more than the customer – and very fortunately for us we were able to prove it.

In concept selling, conviction is half the game but the other half is proof. The bigger the claim, the more you will be asked to prove it. With every single one of my concept pitches, including that first one, I was greeted with skepticism, confusion, doubt, and outright disbelief. But that’s ok – it’s only natural. So now I go in knowing I will have to prove my statements, up to the hilt.

That’s the model I’ve followed ever since.

To sum up, if I had one piece of advice on how to sell concepts it would be this: do your homework, then go in strong.

Doing the homework means studying the customer’s business, industry and market. You have to know more than the pundits, the gurus, the analysts, and the customer himself, which takes a lot more than you might think. But after that comes the really hard part: Going in strong. Because you have to stand neck to neck with someone who has 20-30 years of experience under his belt and has been running a successful organization for a couple of decades, and you have to look him in the eye and tell him he’s dead wrong.

And then you have to tell him why.

Scary?

Yes! But worth it – for me, the rush of turning skeptics into believers is like nothing else.

I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts on how to sell a new idea, do leave me a comment below.