Yes! You can make millions! Well, maybe not millions of dollars or Euros, but perhaps many fans of your work and presentations. In a previous blog, I mentioned communication skills as one of the most critical personnel development areas IT folks should pursue. Within that domain, most have had the pleasure of delivering training or presentations to groups of all sizes. We’ve all seen some really well done presentations and some really bad or even horrifying sessions where a coma would be preferable to sitting and enduring the presentation.
So how does selling mutual funds fit in here? Well, for starters, there are several transferable skills one gets learning to get rich on a tiny sales commission selling funds or anything for that matter. I tried mutual funds and other insurance products right after getting my Bachelor of Arts degree. While I only earned a whopping $735 over a 7 month period, I gained many great skills that would have a huge payback later in my career.
Let’s look at just four of these skills that are actually very simple to acquire while learning to sell mutual funds (or whatever), and then we’ll highlight a few notes on how this helps in IT:
- Building rapport – nothing is more of a challenge than cold calling someone to talk about investing. Trying to get people’s contact info at seminars or conventions is a close second, and both require you to learn to establish rapport with someone unfamiliar very quickly.
- Presence, confidence and appeal when speaking/presenting – Monotone droning, full of “ums” and “uhhs” will close the door for you rather quickly, so we worked on this endlessly. Being able to speak well with a good flow and remain interesting was critical.
- Listening skills – When you are in an oversold market trying to pawn off front-end load funds or insurance, you absolutely have to listen well for the nuggets the client may let out to demonstrate need or the desire to invest/insure. You actually have a listen to talk ratio of 2 to 1. This is hard to master but a great skill to have.
- Confidence out of the closet – I was always a geek inside and found it difficult to reach out to strangers and push some of my ideas and goals. (One of my dream jobs was sitting in a cozy office or cube in the CIA analyzing photos and transcripts – in my closet doing my job.) Instead, I had to fight to put gas in the car and food on the plate by earning a % of a small % fee doing something I seemed to really hate with a passion – selling. I had to really push myself hard to get out there each day with passion and do this to survive (plus I had some help from a friend).
So if you are still wondering how these apply to an career in IT, let’s review each point.
Building rapport is essential in IT, in order to gain people’s trust whether you are answering the support calls or consulting with them on a new ERP solution. This is the human side, the soft skills many in IT never obtain. Find interest in the customer first and then explore how you can help (the help desk tech may follow a different path of course such as morning visit to customers like mentioned in this great resource).
Presence, confidence and appeal in speaking and presenting is probably the easiest of the four, especially if you have a sense of humor and thick skin. Being able to sell a new VM solution or other deeply technical topic to business folks is much easier when you can capture their interest and keep them there through a passionate and well delivered pitch. This also has great benefits for teams dealing with conflict and discussion problems, since speaking well under pressure is the core skill.
Listening skills should be understandable enough, but we are all guilty of speaking at people about technology or their support issue instead of really listening to them. While it has great benefits for Tier I support staff, this really enhances higher level tech staff’s ability to understand the customer’s needs and pain points, while leading them to the right solution.
Confidence to reach out to the customer and be passionate about helping them better utilize technology is like walking around with a golden halo. Learning to overcome introversion and gaining passion to help someone can open many doors. Many business folks see this as a huge shortcoming of technical folks, even when they exhibit the same behavior. You absolutely have to get out of the cube and passionately sell or support your business teams and technology solutions.
In my next post, I’ll go over some specific exercises and group tasks to help develop these skills so you can foster huge improvements in your IT communication capabilities. Besides gaining some much needed skills, your team will have some fun and it’s virtually free!
