Your Engineers Do Not Need a Sales Pitch
Years ago, one of our technicians wandered into the office on a Monday morning with a puzzled look on his face. He had been at the local pub over the weekend, catching up with a mate who worked for an electrical services firm. The mate had spent part of the evening complaining about their dinosaur office computers and asked if he knew anyone decent they could buy some gear from. Our technician came straight to my desk. “Hey Nick, who should I refer this bloke to for some hardware?” I blinked at him for a second. “Mate, that would be us. We literally design, build, and deploy entire networks for a living.”
Nick Clift
9/30/20263 min read
Years ago, one of our technicians wandered into the office on a Monday morning with a puzzled look on his face. He had been at the local pub over the weekend, catching up with a mate who worked for an electrical services firm. The mate had spent part of the evening complaining about their dinosaur office computers and asked if he knew anyone decent they could buy some gear from.
Our technician came straight to my desk. “Hey Nick, who should I refer this bloke to for some hardware?” I blinked at him for a second. “Mate, that would be us. We literally design, build, and deploy entire networks for a living.”
A huge grin appeared. “Oh yeah, good point.”
It still makes me smile, but it also taught me something I should probably have understood already. From my perspective, the connection was immediate: someone needed help with their office technology, and that was work our business could do. But our technician had not made that connection, even though he was part of the team delivering the work.
He was not avoiding the opportunity. He was trying to help his mate find the right person. He simply did not have the full picture in mind. That is a different problem from unwillingness.
It would have been easy to turn the moment into a complaint about engineers not thinking commercially. The more useful question was whether we had helped our own people understand what the whole business was capable of. Working inside a company does not automatically give someone that understanding.
Our technician gave the business owner a call and had a straightforward chat about their daily setup headaches. That conversation became a full infrastructure overhaul, including a new server, core network, and twenty workstations. The important part was how it began: no rehearsed pitch, no attempt to manufacture urgency, just somebody recognising a problem and having a sensible conversation about it.
Talking about your services can be an act of helping, rather than an act of selling. That distinction matters to people who would rather solve a technical problem than persuade anyone to buy something. If we make every conversation sound like a sales exercise, it is understandable that engineers might keep their distance.
The lesson is not that your engineers should spend their weekends searching for opportunities. People are allowed to enjoy a pint without considering whether the person beside them qualifies as a prospect. The point is simpler: when somebody genuinely asks for help, does your team recognise when your own business might be able to provide it?
This is part of what interests me about sales and operational maturity in my role at Morphability. Sales is connected to the problems clients need solved, while operations is connected to the work that solves them. When those conversations become too separate, people can lose sight of the relationship between what the business promises and what it delivers.
A technician does not need to understand every commercial detail to recognise a useful connection. But they should have a clear sense of the kinds of problems their business helps with, including the ones outside their usual part of the working day.
Owners can support that through conversation rather than scripting. Talk about what different parts of the team do and explain the client need behind the work, not just the name of the service. Give people space to ask, “Do we help with that?” It is a question worth welcoming.
An elevator pitch may sound polished in a meeting and strangely uncomfortable everywhere else. Most people do not talk that way. Nicknames, everyday language, and a slightly meandering explanation often feel more human because they are more human.
If you want someone to describe the business naturally, help them understand it naturally. What problems do clients bring? What can the team take responsibility for? When is it sensible to introduce someone who can explore the need properly?
You do not need to turn engineers into salespeople. You need to make sure they can see the full picture and know how to help when an appropriate conversation comes along. That Monday morning reminder was useful because it challenged an assumption I had made as an owner: the business was obvious to me, but it was not equally obvious to everyone inside it.
When did you last sit with your team and talk about the full range of problems you solve, without turning it into a sales briefing?