Sales. Just Don't Call It Sales.

Why the rise of technical and customer-facing roles is changing how we need to develop commercial capability.

A long-time engineering consultant gets told his accounts need to grow. Under pressure, with no real preparation, he starts doing the only thing he thinks "growing accounts" means: pushing. Upselling in meetings that used to be about solving problems. The client notices. Trust that took years to build starts leaking out of the relationship in weeks.

Nobody trained him for this. Nobody was supposed to because he wasn't in sales.

My last newsletter looked at the growing trend of non-traditional salespeople interacting with customers and prospects. Company leaders will insist these are NOT sales roles, but positions where the expectation is to contribute to revenue. Build relationships, understand the customer's business, identify opportunities, influence decisions and grow accounts.

In other words, bring in revenue, but, you know, you're not in sales.

It's important to bring this type of expertise into customer conversations, but it can also clash with sales approaches and relationship-building if it's not developed properly. A few more scenarios I keep hearing:

• A salesperson and a technical person wind up giving the prospect conflicting information.
• A product expert thinks their job is to explain and deploy the product without taking time to understand the client's business and then the client gets frustrated.

Common situations. But what exactly are the skills we want to develop here?

The phrase I keep hearing:

Commercial capability.

Know the tech, but also know how to have business conversations in the context of growing accounts. AND know how these conversations connect to a sales process. That's a mouthful, so for now: commercial capability.

Commercial capability is knowing your stuff AND knowing when someone else's business problem is more important than your answer.

In practice, that looks like:

• Asking questions that uncover what's really happening in the customer's business.
• Moving from explaining what your technology does to understanding why it matters.
• Building trust and credibility.
• Recognizing an opportunity without suddenly sounding like you're trying to sell something and getting sales involved when the time is right.

Those are commercial skills. And this is where I think we've got ourselves into a bit of a mess.

We do one of two things

If we insist these people aren't in sales, we tend to:

1. Give them sales training and remove the word "sales" from the program.
2. Or avoid the issue altogether and give them no real development.

Neither is particularly helpful. So what do you actually train?

Not a new methodology. Not a generic course called "Commercial Capability 101." It's tricky. Training non-salespeople to be more commercial isn't the same as putting them through sales training.

Try putting a room full of technical experts through a traditional sales course and see what happens. It can largely be a waste of time.

These are people who have built their careers by being experts. They care about getting the details right. They know their products, technology and solutions inside out. Then someone tells them they need to be more "commercial."

What they often hear is: "We want you to become a salesperson."

That's usually not going to go well.

What actually needs to change

The challenge isn't to make them less technical. It's to help them use their expertise differently with customers.

• Instead of immediately explaining the solution, can they get curious about the customer's business?
• Instead of answering the technical question, can they explore why the question matters?
• Instead of talking about features, can they connect their expertise to a business problem?
• And instead of waiting for the salesperson to identify an opportunity, can they recognize one themselves?

Go back to that engineering consultant. Nobody needed to teach him how to close. He needed one or two better questions to ask at the right time. He needed to know what not to say and what information to bring back to the account team for next steps. That's commercial capability. It looks nothing like a sales course.

Sales capability and commercial capability aren't the same thing

Sales capability develops the people whose job is to sell.

Commercial capability develops the people who influence the customer but aren't necessarily responsible for owning the sale.

Sometimes there's overlap. That's fine. Everyone loves a Venn diagram. Just don't confuse the circles.

The answer isn't to rename sales training. It's to understand what each role needs to do better with customers, and train for that. Help sales teams sell better. Help the people around them get more commercially effective.

So don't call it sales. Just don't call it nothing, either.

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