When Space and Defense crashed in the late 1970's in Southern California, I was fortunate to move to another domain and work for a person and his firm where I learned much about process safety management. I came there from a vendor who built Electronic Document Management Systems who is now owned by IBM. When at the vendor I was the Director of Professional Services for Engineering Systems. This meant document management for engineering firms like General Electric, ENRON, Pulp and Paper, Electric Utilities all subject to OSHA 1910.119.
I then moved to a supplier of systems to that vendor and started my solutions consulting career.
I learned several phrases that have served me well in my career - both in Process Safety Management compliance, designing and building hardware and software for emergency shutdown systems subject to OSHA and European standards and every other domain since then
One phrase learned while sitting in a conference room reviewing a proposal from a vendor for an EDMS at the Tennessee Valley Authority for a nuclear power plant restart - Watts Bar. After the briefing on why TVA should buy their system over the competitors - my mentor said
Thank you for making your presentation, I see your proposal is completely buzz word compliant
That proposal document also had another fatal flaw, which I learned from him as well.
When you get a Word document or PDF, open up the property tab to see who wrote the document, how long they worked on it, what version it is. In this example the proposal was written for another customer and they just changed the cover page.
The second, life-changing experience, is his example about buying something the vendor or seller wants to SELL you. It's the Free Puppies example
- You walk up to the entry of the local grocery store.
- At the door there is a box that says Free Puppies.
- You look inside and sure enough there are puppies inside, all looking up at you.
- The very first question you need to ask yourselves is Do You Like Dogs?
- If the answer is NO, then it doesn't matter if they are free or not.
- The second question is do you want a dog? If the answer is No, then move on.
And by the way, no free puppy is free. You'll be out of pocket for $200 before that little dog is part of your household. Shots, tags, crate, leash, toys, sleeping bed, combs, shampoo puppy training classes, and other gadgets.
So What Is the Point Here?
When you hear someone say you need to use my solution to solve your problem and the person making that statement has never asked what's the problem you're trying to solve, think of the Free Puppy Syndrome.
I have a good friend and neighbor who's a very successful salesman in the high tech business - cyber security systems. He'd tell us this approach is not sales, it's product peddling.
Good sales people find out the problem before making any suggestion that their product, service, class, idea, of framework is applicable to your problem.
If they say my solution solves problems in that domain, they've got a box of puppies they want you to look at.
This is a common trait in the business process and business solutions sales field.
Run Away when the peddler says oh you don't understand how my solution can fix your problem when they can't tell you the units of measure how that supposed solution can be used to compare their free puppies with the competitions. And then when you question them further about how their solution can solve your unstated problem, they respond you need to attend our class or worse, you're ignorant of how well we can solve your unstated problem.
