I don’t have a selling bone in my body.
I remember as a kid having to sell fundraisers for my school. My customers were my parents and my relatives and that was it out of pure sympathy. It wasn’t like it was a bad product. Anyone remember “World’s Finest Chocolate”? I mean it’s chocolate for heaven’s sake, surely I could sell that. Not a chance.
Sales Gets a Bad Reputation
I also remember watching as a kid the very cringe used car salesman on TV screaming his head off to get people to come down and buy a 1984 Toyota with 30,000 miles on it. Or the infomercials selling you not one, not two, but 17 sizes of pans. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! You also get a carrot peeler and a set of measuring cups for 165 easy payments of $2.99!!! Yeah sales are not my thing.
I Didn’t Go Into Sales
It’s no surprise that when college came around, I wasn’t signing up for a business degree. Instead I went into science and became a meteorologist. Surly there wouldn’t be sales there. For most of my college career that was true. I did my course work, and got ready for graduate school.
Applying for grad school wasn’t as easy as it was for undergraduate. Research money was tight at the time (although not nearly as tight as it is now) and for the first time I found myself having to sell myself to prospective advisors to try and convince them that I was the student that was right for them.
So far applications and essays hadn’t worked. I decided to visit UCLA while I was in town for a conference. I huffed across Los Angeles on what was a decidedly rough public transit system to try and meet some professors face to face. While I had made some contact with one professor, the others had no idea I was coming.
Not a good start at all and frankly the rest of the visit was a disaster. It was pretty clear early on that, while nice to me, the professors work didn’t fit what I wanted to do and I did nothing to sell myself as a good candidate for them.
Rethinking My Grad School Pitch
After applying to multiple schools I didn’t yet have any offers and there was another conference coming up in Seattle. I started researching which schools and professors fit what I wanted to do and felt I was best at. I learned about the research they did and read the papers they had published. I started to figure out how I could bridge what I was good at to the work that they did.
At the conference, one of the professors that I had identified as a fit was giving a poster presentation. I met him there and start talking to him about his work and we got along great. He started asking me questions and I started to talk about the things that I knew would link into his work. An hour later, I was still at the poster and he was introducing me to others as his next graduate student.
Whoa! That was powerful! All the time I had spent on applications and resumes and essays and I had seemingly landed a grad school position without any of that. That was the power of human connection and sales.
I returned home and an offer was waiting for me in my inbox. I was going to the University of Hawaii and a sales pitch helped me get there.
The Concept of Sales Kept Popping Up in Science
My graduate school application wasn’t the last time I encountered sales in science. It started to pop up everywhere. I took a class on grant writing and learned that 9 out of 10 grant proposals were rejected. The reason was they weren’t being sold well enough to the selecting committee.
My advisor was very good at sales even though he wasn’t in it. He found a niche in getting grants in fields adjacent to meteorology that needed meteorological services. For example, the University of Hawaii has a great Astronomy program and one thing they need to do is make sure skies are clear when they use their telescopes. In the astronomy community this is called “seeing”.
My advisor became the goto on this topic, which for a meteorologist wasn’t very complicated but there was a strong demand for it. This “finding a need” was something my professor was great at and repeated throughout different areas. He was also a consulting meteorologist and by learning about this from him, I was able to apply sales concepts to lots of things out in the community that needed a meteorologists help.
Sales Repeatedly Comes Up in My Career as a Meteorologist
Since my graduate school days, the presence of sales or other business skills have come up repeatedly in my career. The interesting thing about it is that scientists generally are not good at sales, but add this skillset to your bag and you can really start to get ahead quickly.
It starts with selling yourself for a job. I have written about this many times on this site and if you are finding yourself getting an application package ready, you need to read my articles on resumes, cover letters, and interviews.
I also write about how to make a personal portfolio for yourself that you can carry with you throughout your career. The power in the personal portfolio is that you make the rules and can sell your craft anyway you want from pictures to videos to focusing in on whats important for a specific application.
The articles referenced above can be found here:
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The PIE Model
During a leadership training that I was involved in early in my career we had Harvey Coleman come speak to us who wrote Empowering Yourself: The Organizational Game Revealed. I have to say, at first I didn’t love the messaging that he was giving us. We spend so much time honing our craft and he said that using the PIE model, Performance, Image, and Exposure, our performance only matters 10% and your Image and Exposure make up the other 90%. Image and Exposure, to me, sounds a lot like sales.
He also said things like you need a sponsor to pull you up to the next level. Suggesting that who you know is more important than what you know. I was about to tune out, when my graduate school story came back to me. All the stuff that I had done and put on my applications didn’t get the job done. It wasn’t until I established a relationship with someone and convinced them to take me on that I got an offer. Hmmm.
Selling Your Ideas to the Masses
Suddenly I found myself finding sales EVERYWHERE in meteorology. Presenting an idea to your boss or a team that you want to have move forward? You need sales for that! In fact, I wrote another article entitled: Your Idea Doesn’t Suck, Your Presentation Missed the Mark. Essentially, this is sales.
In Meteorology, we issue warnings and provide decision support. Both of these activities involves trying to influence or change human behavior. This is sales. We offer a student program every summer. The students are amazing and we have to compete with other offices to convince them that our program is the one they should select. Sales.
The Law of Distribution of Innovation
Continuing my leadership journey, I eventually ran into a couple TED talks by Simon Sinek and he was talking about the Law of Distribution of Innovation. He was explaining that this law is essentially what major companies like Apple use to be able to sell things like the iPhone.
People are essentially broken up into different categories like innovator, early adopter, late adopter, laggards, etc. By targeting innovators and early adopters, they can being to influence people in away that carries the product through to the ones who wouldn’t use it until it was proven. This blew my mind that something like sales could have psychological laws similar to some of the scientific laws I had been studying my whole life.
Science Needs Sales
Since realizing how important sales are to a field like science, I have been trying to teach those skills to others I have mentored throughout my career.
Scientists are still bad at sales. We need to be able to sell the importance of science to those in politics. We are underfunded and advancements in science and environmental well being are being stymied by lobbyists and those that can sell to the masses better than we can.
We may not want to do it, but our fields depend on it. We have to get better.
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