Why Engineers Make Great Salespeople

Richard Byrd

All right, everybody, welcome to the Above the Clouds podcast. Today we have Todd Miller from Kinematics. Welcome to the show, Todd.

Todd Miller

Thanks. Glad to be here.

Richard Byrd

I'm glad we were able to connect while you're in town.

Todd Miller

Yeah, the timing was great.

Richard Byrd

Before we start, I'm going to admit it: I didn't know what a slew drive was before we spoke the first time. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about Kinematics, what you do, and the problems you solve?

Todd Miller

Sure. We provide components to tracking companies for solar plants. In most of the larger solar plants, the panels actually track the sun as it moves, to get as much energy out of them as they can.

The tracking companies are our main customer base. They design these systems across the entire plant, and we provide them with components. Our main component is a slew drive, which is essentially a gear you use to turn those panels. It's combined with another component we provide, a controller, which is the electronics device that tells it how to move, and a motor. We don't manufacture the motor, we pass it through, but those three components are what we provide to the tracking companies.

Richard Byrd

And who are the tracking companies' customers?

Todd Miller

The tracking companies sell directly to the IPPs, the independent power producers, the people who are ultimately going to own and operate these plants. They're looking at it from a much bigger perspective: how are they going to design this whole thing? They need to consider string lengths and sizes and what the ground is doing to make everything work just right, and they have to drive the piles and mount everything. There's a lot to consider for our customers.

Richard Byrd

Absolutely. It's a complex industry. So when you were sitting there in elementary school, you obviously were thinking, "I want to sell slew drives when I grow up."

Todd Miller

Yeah, ever since I was a little kid.

Richard Byrd

Tell us how you wound up at Kinematics. I think it's a really interesting story.

Todd Miller

I'll step back a little bit. I was a math and physics major in college. I probably would have been a mechanical engineer if I'd known any better, but I knew I wanted to get into renewables.

I was really lucky to get hired by a company called Global Energy Concepts, a wind consulting firm out of Seattle that was very quickly bought by DNV, the company I worked for for the past 18 years. DNV is a global risk management company that does a lot of certification.

I started there as a data analyst on the wind side, doing wind resource assessment. We would support our customers, the developers, putting towers out in the middle of green fields with sensors on them to measure the wind and see whether it's a good place for a wind farm. We'd collect all that data and pass it to the energy team, who would do the analysis: we know how windy it is, so if we put turbines in these locations, this is how much energy you'd make. That's ultimately how many dollars you'd make, and that's how they try to get the project off the ground.

I did that for a while and wanted to move into energy, but there weren't any opportunities there, so I went the management route. I became a team lead. I never intended to be in management, but after being a team lead for a while, I liked it. Then I was head of section for the data and met mast services team for about six or seven years.

After that, I wanted to get back into the technical end. I felt like I was getting a little too focused on the bottom line and too far away from what we were actually doing. So I stepped out of that and did technical project management for the turbine testing team, which was also within measurements.

That was really interesting. After a wind farm is built, the turbines are rated to make a certain amount of power when the wind blows at a certain speed. We would test that for the customer and say, "We're measuring the wind, it's blowing this hard, but you're only making this much energy." We'd create a report, they'd present it to the OEM that manufactured the turbines, and they'd negotiate how to resolve it.

I was working from home this whole time. I worked from home for fourteen years, well before COVID. It has its benefits. The laundry's always done, and I can keep something on the stove if I want. But I'm extremely extroverted, and you definitely miss some opportunities when you're not in the office with everyone.

I'm married with two kids, and when they were small, me being home was super helpful, especially with people needing to go places at different times of day. But I was getting tired of it. I needed to meet more people. I didn't want to leave DNV, though. I loved working there. I'd been there a long time, made a ton of friends, learned a ton, and traveled all over the US and parts of Europe.

So I went to my boss and said I needed a reason to travel. When I was doing turbine testing, we used to go into the field a lot to install equipment, but at the same time we were trying to reduce our risk, so we started training our subcontractors to do that work. There was no reason to travel there either.

Then DNV bought a company called Green Power Monitor. They're a DNV company, but they're branded separately, and they deal with a ton of data as well. When we acquired them, I was head of section, and we had a lot of conversations about how we might work together, so I was familiar with them.

Long story short, my boss heard they were looking for a wind-focused salesperson in North America, which meant some travel. DNV doesn't have a lot of salespeople; they mostly sell on brand. But Green Power Monitor has a whole sales team. So I moved over and did about two and a half years of software sales.

It was really fun, and I got to meet a lot of great people and travel a lot more. It went from fully at home to at least several days a month out of the house, sometimes two or three trips a month.

Richard Byrd

Your wife and kids were like, "Where's Todd?"

Todd Miller

It changed a lot, but it was fun. My wife was great and totally dealt with it. The kids being older helped a ton too. We were out of the daycare situation, and they were in the same school, so other than sports, the drop-offs and pickups were pretty simple.

Once I started in sales, I got really active on LinkedIn, and people were reaching out constantly asking if I wanted to sell for them. But I was happy at DNV, and I didn't want to leave for a sideways move.

Then someone reached out about a VP of Sales position. I hadn't managed sales teams before, but I had managed teams, I had done sales, and I had a lot of experience in renewables. If you put it all together, maybe it was a good profile. So I thought, this one's interesting, I'll at least talk to them. For the most part, you just tell people no thank you, or ignore them if it's something spammy.

They asked when I wanted to meet the hiring manager, and I said, "How about Tuesday morning?" They said she couldn't do Tuesday because she was going to be in San Diego. The whole reason I'd said Tuesday morning was that Tuesday afternoon I was flying to San Diego. We were going to the same conference, and the headhunter helped us meet up.

It was the Solar Asset Management North America conference, which was my most important conference of the year in my old role, because I sold directly to asset managers.

We met there, and it was great. My boss, Jenn, and I hit it off right away, and I thought, this is definitely someone I could work with. I had a lot of questions based on my career experience: What software are you using? How are you monitoring these things? What's the team like? What's the company doing? They had bought P4Q, which is the controller side of our company, not too long before that.

They were scaling up their C-suite, and she was basically hiring me as her replacement on the solar sales side. So even though I had a lot to learn about this part of the industry, the person who previously did the job would be my boss, and I got along with her.

Richard Byrd

And her job is to coach you anyway.

Todd Miller

Exactly. So I thought, this is a pretty good opportunity. It feels safe, and it's still in renewables, which is where I want to be. Let's give the interview process a go.

Richard Byrd

The big question our audience is going to want answered: why would you want to manage salespeople?

Todd Miller

I like to help people. At DNV, one of the big things they pushed in their internal management training was "success through others," and that really spoke to me. I want to put people in position to succeed. After doing sales for a couple of years and seeing what I felt I could do as a manager in that same role, it was something I was really interested in.

Richard Byrd

It's interesting. I think about this a lot. I'm older than you are, and when I was young in my career, management style was very top-down. Do what I say, or you don't work here anymore. Then as I got into management roles, servant leadership came into effect. I've never been able to be the hard-driving boss.

Todd Miller

I've been lucky. My whole career, I've had great managers, and it's all about succeeding together and asking, "What can we do to help you?" It can be tricky, though. DNV is a really big company. There's a global strategy, and there might be seven layers of management between you and that strategy. What can I do on a day-to-day basis to help it?

I think managers are in a great position to interpret that and say, "If we want to help the strategy, here's what we can do. We're going to set some goals based on that, monitor them, and work together." It really helps a company's culture for people to feel like they're helping the strategy and not just pushing pencils.

Richard Byrd

A hundred percent. Salary is important, but once you've reached a certain threshold, I think that's what really motivates people: am I making a difference here? At least the right kind of people. Some people are happy to coast along, but if you're trying to build a winning culture, the only way you keep A players is if they feel like they're adding to it.

Todd Miller

You want people who are going to add. You want to grow as a company and as an individual.

Richard Byrd

Absolutely. We have a client in the HR space, and I used to think employee engagement was one of those weird little buzzwords. But it's the name of the game at the end of the day.

Todd Miller

I think people stick around longer when they feel that way. Not everyone is going to stay forever, but you don't want to lose your good people.

Richard Byrd

You lived through a lot of M&A while you were at DNV, and we had a pretty interesting conversation about that. Tell me your impressions.

Todd Miller

It was really interesting. Like I said, I got hired by Global Energy Concepts, and literally before I accepted the offer, I got a phone call from my soon-to-be manager saying, "You might read in the newspaper that we've been acquired." I'm like, "Do I still have a job?" It was my first job out of college, so I was pretty nervous.

We got bought by DNV, and once I started working there, I realized they were acquiring companies all the time. That's completely common and normal in business, but I was new to work at all.

Richard Byrd

Inorganic growth.

Todd Miller

Exactly. And that's all well and good, but there were also several times DNV merged. I have all these mugs in my office that show it: I started at Global Energy Concepts, then Global Energy Concepts, a DNV company, then DNV, then DNV KEMA, then DNV again, then DNV GL, then back to DNV. Then I went to Green Power Monitor, a DNV company, which is a little different because it's branded separately, and I don't think it'll ever be truly DNV.

Richard Byrd

You kept the coffee mug company in business during that stretch.

Todd Miller

A lot of money made off coffee cups, that's for sure.

The conversation we had specifically was about GL, which was a really interesting one. They were a big competitor of ours in the area I worked in, energy assessment. Energy assessment takes all the data we were collecting on the wind side and asks how a project is going to produce long term. The two companies had very different processes for doing that.

A lot of the important technical people deciding how we'd approach energy assessment had basically spent their careers trying to disprove the other company. Then we were the same company. There was a lot of built-in tension: "Not only have I been trying to prove this person wrong forever, but now we have to decide officially what the way forward is."

It led to a lot of tension. Luckily, I was adjacent to it, so it didn't get in my way. But people left the company. People said, "I don't want to work with that group."

Richard Byrd

It's like making the Coyote and the Road Runner work together.

Todd Miller

In a way. It's all water under the bridge now.

When we merged with KEMA, we had to move to a different office. I was in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the time, in a small office, and KEMA had their US headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. It was a much bigger office in an office park.

The culture was very different. We were super casual: shorts and hoodies, going out to lunch together all the time, because we were in a downtown area. The KEMA office was their headquarters. There was a small group of technical people, and everybody else was the global accountants and global HR people.

Richard Byrd

Sport coats and slacks.

Todd Miller

Exactly. It's not the biggest difference in the world, but it was a big shift for us at the time.

Richard Byrd

When you're trying to merge cultures, it can be so challenging. A lot of our clients are heavily involved in M&A, and I think the people side is where things can really fail.

Todd Miller

Culture in general is really difficult. From a management perspective, you come in and maybe there are new tools or new processes, or we're going this way instead of that way. Getting people who have been doing it a certain way for a long time to get on board with things being different is really hard.

Richard Byrd

Hearts and minds, especially with technical people. I used to work for a big oil and gas services company. We were a large international company with French headquarters and French founders, and we were very by-the-book and buttoned up. We acquired all these North American service and product companies, and when they came on board, we were very process-driven. It was, "Here's how you park your car now."

Literally. I still reverse park my car to this day. Every employee had to do it. We had safety training and all this stuff, and these people came from very cowboy, entrepreneurial companies. They were like, "What did I get myself into? These people are telling me how to park my car."

It's a tough cultural thing, but if you wanted to be part of that company, that's what you had to do. Some people decided they didn't want to be part of it, and that was okay.

Todd Miller

That's fine.

Richard Byrd

You're a technical guy at heart. We work with a lot of technical people who have moved into sales. What appealed to you about selling, other than being able to travel?

Todd Miller

Honestly, the travel was a big thing, and it wasn't even travel. It was just getting out of the house. But I'm very extroverted. I love to talk to people, and I learn by talking. If you had me read a pamphlet and then talk to somebody telling me exactly what's in the pamphlet, I'd retain ninety-five percent of what he said and ten percent of what the pamphlet said.

Richard Byrd

Me too.

Todd Miller

So getting in front of people was a big driver, getting to know people and expanding my network. I hadn't thought much about a network before my last role, because I'd been in the same company, in a very narrow area, in the same department the whole time.

All of a sudden it became really apparent to me that, from a marketability perspective, I was very niche. My wife works in HR, and I always tell her that anybody with twenty employees could use her. She has specific interests, so she doesn't want to work for just any company, but the difference in marketability between us is huge. I'd love to expand that a little, and sales is a great place to do it.

Richard Byrd

Absolutely. If you've got the stomach for it, it's perfect.

Todd Miller

I get excited, but I'm a pretty even-keeled guy. Bad news isn't going to slow me down. Let's try again. I'm not going to worry about it.

Richard Byrd

Two of my best friends are in sales, and rejection is going to come no matter what, constantly, more than in probably any other mainstream job. You just keep going.

Todd Miller

And you need to be rejecting people too, as a salesperson.

Richard Byrd

That part's more fun than being told you came in second after you put months of work into a proposal. I've got a little scar tissue and gray hair from that stuff.

Richard Byrd

We talked a little about this before. You're in a really complex buying center. You're an OEM, and you're also a subcontractor of a subcontractor. Walk us through the sales motion and how you navigate all that.

Todd Miller

Our core customers for slew drives are tracker companies, and there aren't a lot of them. Only a handful of companies in the solar space need what we sell. You need good relationships with them, and you need to be flexible.

Our customers are fighting to be different, and because of that, they all have different needs. They want to stand out from one another, which is hard, because everyone wants to sell the same result: the most efficient tracking system possible. As complicated as it is, the systems aren't wildly different. So their attempts to be different can lead to a lot of changes for us, like different production timelines.

Beyond that, we're trying to break into repowering. We started asking, "Who are our customers serving? Who's the end user of our product, and what else could we help them with?"

Richard Byrd

Before we move on, tell our audience what repowering means in your world.

Todd Miller

Repowering is a phrase used a lot in renewable energy, and in power plants in general. The repowering we're talking about is tracker repowering.

At these larger solar plants, where the panels follow the sun, the trackers will malfunction one way or another over time. The life cycle of a power plant is expected to be about thirty years, and these things are out in the elements every day, so things fail. Depending on which component fails, entire rows of panels can stop moving, and the added efficiency you were getting from tracking the sun is lost.

Our customers can support the end customer by replacing everything in the tracker, if that's necessary. But often only certain components break, and they can be the components we provide. So we can go out and say, "Instead of a major overhaul, we'll be more surgical and replace just the pieces you need."

The special sauce is that you're not necessarily replacing them with the exact components that were there before. So you need to understand how these things are going to work together.

Richard Byrd

So there's a fair amount of engineering in that itself.

Todd Miller

Exactly.

Richard Byrd

That's a nice position to be in, and it opens your market up a lot.

Todd Miller

It opens it up a lot, and it was one of the parts that really appealed to me about the job. We had just bought a company called RenuTrack, which is now part of Kinematics, and they do exactly that. Their end customer is the IPP. When I was in sales at Green Power Monitor, those were my customers: the asset managers and directors of operations at those companies. So there was great overlap. If we've got this growth mindset, I've got a lot of contacts and a lot of familiarity with those people's priorities.

Richard Byrd

I think that's the big thing with companies, especially private equity-backed companies. They're under pressure to grow. Nobody bought a company so it could have flat three percent growth.

Todd Miller

Or just grow with the market.

Richard Byrd

So being able to spot opportunities like that has a ton of enterprise value for a company like that.

Todd Miller

I completely agree. It was one of the reasons I seriously considered making the move. We want to grow, and it seems like there's opportunity there.

Richard Byrd

What's the game plan? How are you going to equip the sales team to go conquer that market?

Todd Miller

When we purchased RenuTrack, the president, CEO, and owner of that company came over, so he has a pipeline built in already. We need to support that team and expand, and we need to develop relationships with those people. Right now we're doing a lot of outreach. We're putting together a webinar that will be released in the next week or two to expose more people to it.

Not everyone knows this is an option. It's very new and very niche, so we want to get the word out that it can be done and it can be more affordable.

It's really about the knowledge. In energy, if you're talking about megawatts, you can easily just say dollars. There's a direct correlation. A good asset management team is very aware of how many megawatts they're losing because of these problems. So we can say, "If you're losing this many megawatts a day, you're losing this many dollars a day. If you work with us and let us do some of the engineering, we can recover that money in this amount of time for this many dollars." We can show you the value proposition super clearly.

But there are two problems. One, we need those details, so we need to find the right people who are willing to share them. Two, operational budgets at power plants are super low, so it's hard to get money out of there. But if you can show the value proposition to the right person, you can make it happen.

Richard Byrd

We help people with product commercialization a lot, and one thing we find is that no matter how awesome your value proposition is, if people aren't used to buying it that way, it can be challenging. You're getting people to change the way they look at their job or do their job.

Maybe you have one champion who says, "We've got to do this. This is awesome." But then there's this ugly buying committee, and it only takes one person to say, "I don't know. We're going to have to do this maintenance program anyway, so why don't we just do the whole thing?" Or, "We've got a lot going on this quarter. Let's push it to next quarter." And as you know as a sales guy, when they say "call me back next quarter," that means never.

Todd Miller

You put it in the calendar, and then they ignore you.

It can be difficult, because so often people want to see who else you've worked with. Show me that success. But when you're starting out, you need to do more and more work, so success cases are really essential. The more work we do, the more mainstream it will become, and people will start to see the value. Everyone's so risk averse, which I understand.

Richard Byrd

Well, that's selling to engineers. We always joke that at most of the companies we work with, there's going to need to be some engineer-on-engineer violence before any deal goes through.

You mentioned the value proposition of being able to replace one component as opposed to a whole row. Why do you think the replace-everything mindset exists, and what kind of savings can people expect from your approach?

Todd Miller

My understanding is that before repowering started, when things went wrong, the IPP would work directly with the OEM. There's some level of spare parts, so if a particular thing breaks, they can replace it, and there's no need for engineering because it's the exact same component.

But if things change, if you want to work with someone else, or if you weren't happy with the original supplier, that's where more of these opportunities are coming from. Products also change over time, so the exact same product isn't necessarily still available.

Richard Byrd

We see that in chemical and power plants too. Maybe there's a thirty-year-old valve that's been sitting in there forever, and the manufacturer doesn't even exist anymore.

Todd Miller

Right. And the plants themselves are built by EPCs, but the EPC isn't on standby once a plant becomes operational. Some plants have people on site full time. Others subcontract out the O&M, the operations and maintenance. But the engineering part, when there's a difference in components, is where the real value comes in.

Richard Byrd

Like you said, you can't just trade like for like on these components. It's a highly engineered environment, and putting in the wrong component could make it worse.

Todd Miller

For sure. It would just be wasted money, and things still wouldn't work.

Richard Byrd

Repowering isn't just a new service line. It's a completely different customer for you, right?

Todd Miller

Right. When I first came onto the team, the plan was a thirty-to-sixty-day onboarding and diagnosis. One of my biggest takeaways was that our main offering goes to a small group of companies, and there's a lot of risk there. We go as they go. When they're having great years, we're having great years, but there's risk.

Luckily, the company was already ahead of that before I came on. What we needed to do was look at the whole pipeline: who's using this at the end, and where can we help and add value? That became a great opportunity. Our tracker customers sell to a lot more people than we do. Now we have the same customer base, and we're helping solve the same problem together.

Richard Byrd

That's an interesting place to be. It puts you in a lot more control. Everybody talks about a rising tide lifting all boats, but they don't tell you what happens at low tide. I've been in low tide, and those situations are not fun.

Do the tracker companies see you as friend or foe in that situation?

Todd Miller

It's complicated, because some of the companies have their own repowering. Anytime we work on something that belongs to one of our customers, we want to collaborate with them.

Like any other part of the energy industry, a lot of these companies don't even exist anymore. They've been bought up and changed. If it's somebody we haven't worked with, or who doesn't exist anymore, it's pretty clean. If it's somebody we still work with on the drive or controller side, it needs to be collaborative. Give them the opportunity, and make sure they're aware.

It can get complicated if the end customer doesn't want to work with the original installer anymore and they're having problems. We can solve that problem, but we've got a lot of relationships to consider.

Richard Byrd

Nobody wants to be accused of biting the hand that feeds them. But you're also hungry, and you have your own growth targets. Balancing that can be a real challenge.

Todd Miller

It's going to be interesting. It's new. We've had some conversations with customers whose product we'd essentially be repowering, and so far they've gone great. But there's definitely some risk there.

Richard Byrd

I think if you position it as, "You've been great at pulling us into things. Now we're going to pull you through."

Todd Miller

Exactly.

Richard Byrd

We're going to lift our end of the couch.

Todd Miller

Exactly. And I think the tracker companies don't necessarily want to be in repowering. That's not their game, but they're often the first phone call the IPP makes. "My tracker isn't working the way I want. Let me call the people I bought it from." Hopefully we can fill that gap for them.

Richard Byrd

Absolutely. When my car's transmission stops working, I'm not going to call Allison Transmission. I'm going back to the car manufacturer.

Earlier you mentioned that you can convert megawatts to money right off the bat.

Todd Miller

Good asset managers are already doing that. As soon as you say how many megawatts they're losing, they do the math.

Richard Byrd

So why can't you just lead with that in the conversation?

Todd Miller

We can lead with that, but we need to know the details on their end. How much are you actually losing, and is it because of the tracker? Is it something we can solve? Then we need the details from an engineering perspective of what's out there, because it's not just X dollars per component fixed. It depends on how much engineering needs to be done.

What's interesting about repowering is that if you know every single component, you can design what the new solution needs to be. And if anybody else has the exact same setup, you can do it a lot faster, because you don't have to do nearly as much engineering.

But if it's a completely different setup, with a different TCU, a different drive, a different voltage, or power coming from a panel versus a hard line, all of that needs to be considered. In theory, the customer should be able to tell you pretty quickly what their loss is. But telling them how much it will cost to fix requires some level of engineering.

So it's not super clear. My hope is that if we can find a few setups that are really common, and we know which plants were built that way, we can start reaching out to customers proactively and say, "We have a solution for your problem."

Richard Byrd

So right now it's almost an engineering service first, instead of an engineered solution.

Todd Miller

In an ideal world, we'd probably have a small engineering contract first to figure it out, and then the actual repowering contract. A good amount of work has to go in on the front end.

Richard Byrd

The upside should be clear, though. I know it varies and you have to do the engineering to figure it out, but what does a repowering job cost versus changing out a whole row? That's got to be a massive savings.

Todd Miller

I'm sure it is, but honestly, I don't have the answer to that question. I haven't seen enough of the repowering contracts yet.

Richard Byrd

I can imagine. It's like buying a whole new fleet of cars versus changing the carburetor in one car.

Todd Miller

It can be very difficult. Asset managers, in my former role and now, will tell you the same thing: "I see the value. I have this problem, and you're showing me the value. Now I need to convince somebody above me that even though this will save us money, I've only been budgeted a certain amount." They'll probably have an O&M contract in the first place, which is one of their biggest ongoing expenses. Then we say this is going to cost five times what they thought they could spend this year. Even though it will save them money, that doesn't directly translate into what they can do.

It's about convincing the right people and finding people who are willing to see the value. The money has to come from somewhere. It's not easy, but it definitely provides value. You just need people to embrace it.

Richard Byrd

And getting the right people. All of our clients sell into very complex buying centers, and it's probably like that in your world too. They might get to talk to one or two people, but there might be ten or twelve people involved in the decision. All it takes is one person to say no.

Todd Miller

Absolutely.

Richard Byrd

And you might never even meet that person. Then you're left asking, "What happened to our deal?"

Todd Miller

That's a huge part of sales: finding the right people. Always ask who's going to affect this decision.

Richard Byrd

Does it vary a lot in your world who the economic buyer is?

Todd Miller

The bigger the company, the more pieces there seem to be in the way. When people have full-on procurement departments, those are big barriers for salespeople. "You can't talk to the person this is actually affecting. Just fill out this super generic form." It can be really frustrating.

Richard Byrd

We do a lot of commercialization and go-to-market strategy workshops, and procurement people are the most hated people in every one of them. I used to think, "Man, these procurement people are awful." Then we got a client in the procurement business, and I was like, "Oh no. I've heard bad things about you guys."

Todd Miller

I've theorized, though I haven't done the math, that getting rid of all procurement departments would ultimately save people money. But I'm sure that's not true.

Richard Byrd

In certain circumstances, giving engineers a blank check isn't the best-case scenario either, because they like cool, shiny stuff. But they're also logical and practical, and they're trying to make things better, not just buy shiny things.

Todd Miller

My biggest beef with the procurement process is when you can't talk to the users of whatever you're selling, because there's a true buffer in between. That makes it really difficult to make a sale, and I think the end customer isn't necessarily getting what they need most. They've made it such a repeatable process. They want it all to be apples to apples, and I get that, but you lose the ability to really highlight your value and show your differences in more unique ways, because the questions are so typical.

My guess is that procurement talks to the engineers one time and says, "What do I need to know?" They write down all the questions. Then you answer them, and you have questions about the questions, and there's some back and forth, but there's always that buffer in between. Couldn't we all just talk?

Richard Byrd

Let's get in a room and figure out what the real solution is. We might recommend something completely different from what you're bidding out right now. Without conversations with the person closest to the problem, you won't get there.

I've also found that procurement people are often domain experts in procurement, but they're rarely experts in whatever domain the business is in.

Todd Miller

Almost never. They're doing the same thing for a million different situations. They can't be experts in all of it.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. And that apples-to-apples comparison is so rough. Right before this, I was on a call with a client in Dubai. They were working with a big company that had heavy procurement, and they had ground everybody down to the lowest bid. Then they brought in people who couldn't deliver on those projects.

Our client went in and renegotiated to a performance-based contract. It took two years to negotiate, but now everybody's happy. The client's happy, and they're happy, because they're not going in at an ultra-low day rate and dragging their heels. Now their interests are aligned, and they're solving the problem together. I think that's how people make a big difference commercially and solve hard challenges.

Todd Miller

My mindset is that I'm looking for partners, not necessarily customers. When you can't talk directly to the people you're trying to partner with, you might miss an opportunity.

In my experience, these decisions too often get distilled down at larger companies to: Did they check all the boxes we needed from a financial perspective, a safety perspective? They checked all the boxes? Okay, now put them all in a line. Who has the lowest price? Maybe not the lowest, let's go with the second lowest. And that's the end of it.

You miss so many opportunities, because ultimately people are working with people. You want to partner with people, and that process takes too much away. Maybe some of those bidders are saying whatever they can, because it would be such a huge contract for them. Then when you actually start working together, it's, "Oh man, they don't have as much experience as we thought, and I hate working with this person."

Richard Byrd

And even the person who was the low bid loses, because I've made that mistake before. "Let's get in there. We can land and expand." Then you get the contract, you hate yourself in the morning, and your whole team hates you. Nobody's making money, the client isn't happy, and it's a lose-lose situation when you get caught in that procurement trap.

That's why I say salespeople should sometimes spend more time disqualifying than qualifying, especially in a fast-growing industry. We get RFQs in the mail all the time, emails inviting us to bid. We're a small company, and I'm our sales guy. I'm also the CEO and a consultant. Every company has limited resources. Nobody has unlimited resources.

So I'll turn them down almost every time. The question I ask is just what you said earlier: "Can I talk to the people who asked you to put this RFQ together?" If they say no, I say we're not interested.

People get really mad at me about that sometimes. But why would I want to spend the next two or three weeks of my life, which I'll never get back, chasing a deal we're not going to win? We're never the low bid. We might not be the second lowest. We're never the highest bid either, so we get caught in the middle territory. That's not for us.

Todd Miller

It takes some of the value out of it in the first place. I'm not the biggest fan.

Richard Byrd

We've got a large commercial audience here. Talk to someone in your spot: a technical person leading a team who's now in sales. You went willingly, but a lot of technical people get dragged into sales kicking and screaming. "Now you're our sales guy." What advice would you give them to take back to the office after listening to this podcast?

Todd Miller

Going from a technical role into sales, it's really just about understanding the customer. They have a problem, and technical people, especially engineers, want to solve problems. So really buy in on understanding the customer's problem.

If you start there and look at it as solving a problem instead of selling, I think the transition will be easier for a technical person. What they're doing is still solving a problem. You can still put a box around the answer at the end.

That was a way I really liked to work when I started as a technical person. At the end of the day, there was a number, I'd done it, and I felt good about it. It's pretty similar in sales, if you frame it properly in your mind. There was a problem, and the solution is the contract.

Richard Byrd

I agree wholeheartedly. I was a reluctant salesperson. I started on the marketing side, and I remember my first boss said, "I want you to come over and do business development for me." I said, "No thanks." He asked why not, and I said, "I'm not a sales guy."

He said, "What are you talking about? You've never met a stranger. You love talking to people. You love helping people solve problems. That's all sales is. Go meet a stranger. If they have a problem we can solve, tell them we can help. We'll give them a price, and then we'll help them solve it. If we can't solve it, we'll recommend a friend."

I said, "Oh, I'm still helping. Okay, I can do that." Once I looked at it through that lens, I loved it. I think engineers and technical people are even more hardcore about that than I was. It's all problem solving.

Todd Miller

Absolutely. And dealing with people, which is harder than dealing with physics. People are different. On the sales side, people are busy. Getting their time and finding the right person can be really difficult, and that's a problem to solve in itself.

Richard Byrd

Oh, a hundred percent. We could do a whole episode about that one.

Thanks for joining us today, Todd. I really enjoyed our conversation. It sounds like you have some real opportunities ahead of you. Go out there and drive that growth.

Todd Miller

Thanks, Richard.

Richard Byrd

Thanks to the folks at Anthem for letting us use this beautiful studio. And if you made it this far in the podcast, you should probably subscribe, because you were obviously picking up what we were putting down. Click that subscribe button, and we'll see you on the next episode.

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