The Technical Sales Company
Observing a technical sales company, like my brothers’ company, is a great lesson in personalities and astrology. Most of the sales people in my brothers’ company are Cardinal signs. Most of the application engineers are Mutable signs.
Generally, the sales people hang out in their group and the application engineers hang out in their group. It is kind of like high school with the “Popular” people in one group and the “Geeks” in another group. This is an example of how people of the same astrological quality can form good friendships because they have a lot in common.
On a technical sales call, you typically need a sales person (Cardinal sign) and an application engineer (Mutable sign). The sales person’s job is to make sure that they meet everyone, is well liked, and makes sure that everyone is happy when they leave the meeting. Sales people are not responsible for knowing the software inside and out. That is where the application engineer comes in. Their job is to know everything about the software. They need to show the software to the customer, answer the technical questions, and find solutions to any issue that arise.
You can see how the differences between the Cardinals and Mutables complement each other. This is where the elementscome in. Each element in astrology is made up of one Cardinal(Sales), one Fixed (Manager), and one Mutable (Tech) sign. Signs in the same element share common characteristics and now we can see how their differences compliment each other nicely.
An ideal sales situation would be to have a sales team made up of a sales person that is a Cardinal sign and an application engineer that is a Mutable sign. Both of these people would be of the same element. The sales team would be selling to a manager that is a Fixed sign of the same element as the sales team.
A good example of the ideal sales situation would be a Capricorn sales person, Virgo application engineer, selling to a Taurus manager. All three belong to the Earth element, so they share those conservative and materialistic view points. The Capricorn would excite the Taurus and the Virgo would answer the technical questions. The balanced Taurus would see the benefit of each.
Of course, how often do you have a perfect sales situation? You can control your staff, but you can not control who they are selling to. However, if you could find out your customer’s sign, it would give you an idea on how to sell to them.
For example, if you are selling to a Mutable sign, get ready to answer a lot of detailed questions about your product. This is where you may want to let your application engineer take over the sale. A Mutable would get irritated if he feels like he is not getting straight answers. If you are selling to a Cardinal sign, avoid talking about the technical aspects of the product because it would probably just bore them. Keep your application engineer quite. Concentrate more on the relationship.
It is best to figure out your customers’ astrology as soon as possible, but this is usually not that easy. What do you do then? You should have a feel for the different qualities after observing people in them for a while. With this “feel,” you should be able to make an educated guess at what quality your customer probably fits into. Just use that guess. That is essentially what a lot of motivational speakers are asking you to do. A big part of sales is identifying a personality and adjusting your sales tactics to it.