- Blog
- 28 Apr 2017
Trial by Fire

Why selling a new idea is about Leadership, not Sales.
The title of this post is not an exaggeration. I thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that if anything, it’s an understatement.
I’ve been selling new ideas for over 20 years – that’s how I know.
Start Early, Start Young.
The first time I sold a new idea, I was in my final year of Engineering. I presented a concept for “Natural Gas as a fuel for automobiles”, and won first place. Looking back, I wonder how much that first victory shaped my professional life. If I had bombed, would I have had the courage to take the direction I did? Or would it have made me choose a safer path? Hard to say. But the experience certainly taught me that concept selling is a whole new game.
You see, in normal sales you have something tangible to sell – a box, a service, a solution. So you pitch and push ‘from the back.’ Meaning, you listen to your customer, you respond to him, you play off his feedback. But when you sell a concept, you’re selling yourself i.e. your skills, your knowledge, your passion, your credibility. It’s the opposite of product sales – you’re leading from the front not pushing from the back. (This distinction matters because, as someone said, people don’t invest in business models or business plans, they invest in people. Only people can sell ideas – no plan or strategy can do that.)

My first (but not last) time trying to convince an older and wiser audience.
Leadership and Credibility
Those who are familiar with my startup story will know that I began my career by selling concepts. My first concept sale to a major client (Kennametal Widia) was literally selling a concept-in-a-box. We had no product, not a line of code, we just had an idea. You can imagine how terrified we were, even more so than my first deal with MICO. What saved us was, that despite our fear, we went in with a swagger – we went in like leaders, not salesmen. (Also, we were young and cocky and I guess that helped a bit.) But we’d done our homework, we’d spent the preceding couple of years learning the customer’s business, inside out, so we didn’t go in to sell or demonstrate, we went to lead. From the front. With ideas. We went in believing we knew more than the customer – and very fortunately for us we were able to prove it.
In concept selling, conviction is half the game but the other half is proof. The bigger the claim, the more you will be asked to prove it. With every single one of my concept pitches, including that first one, I was greeted with skepticism, confusion, doubt, and outright disbelief. But that’s ok – it’s only natural. So now I go in knowing I will have to prove my statements, up to the hilt.
That’s the model I’ve followed ever since.
To sum up, if I had one piece of advice on how to sell concepts it would be this: do your homework, then go in strong.
Doing the homework means studying the customer’s business, industry and market. You have to know more than the pundits, the gurus, the analysts, and the customer himself, which takes a lot more than you might think. But after that comes the really hard part: Going in strong. Because you have to stand neck to neck with someone who has 20-30 years of experience under his belt and has been running a successful organization for a couple of decades, and you have to look him in the eye and tell him he’s dead wrong.
And then you have to tell him why.
Scary?
Yes! But worth it – for me, the rush of turning skeptics into believers is like nothing else.
I’d love to hear your stories and thoughts on how to sell a new idea, do leave me a comment below.
Related Posts

Implementing Agile Project Management in Engineering Projects
A quick look at the Top 3 global project management trends A project’s success criteria is being determined by ROI and ROCE rather than the traditional three-factor approach of Time, Cost and Scope. Projects are…
- 13 Sep 2020


Cash Flow Risk Factors in Construction Projects That Can Be Minimized with Technology | Part 2
In the previous blog post in this series, we talked about how the risk of delayed conditional payments can be minimized with better documentation management. Here we will focus on how an early-warning system can…
- 24 Aug 2020
Featured Posts
Implementing Agile Project Management in Engineering Projects
- September 13, 2020
- [rt_reading_time postfix="mins read" postfix_singular="min read"]
Cash Flow Risk Factors in Construction Projects That Can Be Minimized with Technology | Part 2
- August 24, 2020
- [rt_reading_time postfix="mins read" postfix_singular="min read"]
Cash Flow Risk Factors in Construction Projects That Can Be Minimized with Technology | Part 1
- August 12, 2020
- [rt_reading_time postfix="mins read" postfix_singular="min read"]
Subscribe to Our Blog
Sign up for our regular updates on project productivity, delivered straight to your inbox
Archives
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- January 2022
- November 2021
- October 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- June 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- December 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- January 2018
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017