Few people have ever been able to summarize business situations like the late Peter Drucker. I believe I am now on my 5th year of regularly reading through “The Daily Drucker”. And his “The Effective Executive” holds the top spot on many professionals’ lists of best business books ever written. He once made a point about the “unquantifiable” impact that professionals can have beyond the actual measurable activities and objectives of the organization. The high performing technical seller will take the initiative to seek out these “unquantifiables” on their own, but often they are directly presented to those willing to step up and take responsibility.

I used to work in restaurants as a dishwasher and cook when I was growing up. Occasionally when it would get extremely busy (known as a “rush” to those in the industry), the wait staff would ask for assistance in clearing tables (aka “bussing”). The response from those of us working in the back was quite often “not my job, man”, only spoken loudly and rapidly over the din of the kitchen with a slight Caribbean accent, as in “NOTMYJOBMON!”. Typically the requester would simply glare at us and proceed to bus the table themselves rather than deal with some obnoxious male adolescent. (Then again, since many of the requesters were adolescent females, occasionally one would feel compelled to lend a hand, but that’s another story and completely beside the point). Refusing to help deal with a customer’s need is somewhat amusing when you are a high school kid working a part time job for extra cash. Not so much when you are representing an enterprise technology supplier in relationships between your company and your customers that are often worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to both parties.

I always advise technical sales professionals that they should be doing whatever is necessary to develop new sales opportunities and to ensure that the customer’s technology investment is providing them with business benefits. It is often easy to look at a given situation and say, “that’s marketing’s job”, “that’s what the support center is for”, or “that’s not in my job description” even though the individual knows that getting engaged and taking responsibility will lead to a positive business outcome for both the supplier and the customer. It is the technical seller’s equivalent of “NOTMYJOBMON!” and in many ways it is similar to what psychologists refer to as the “bystander effect” – it assumes someone else will address (or at least is responsible or better qualified for addressing) the customer’s need. I have two rhetorical “coaching” questions that I ask whenever I sense this sort of attitude:

1) What if your competitor is the one who steps up to address the customer’s need?

2) How much career growth or fulfillment do you expect to receive by deflecting responsibility to someone else?

Like much of Drucker’s insight, the rejection of “NOTMYJOBMON!” seems both simple and intuitive. In fact, to quote Drucker more directly, he once stated quite simply that, “the purpose of business is to create and retain customers.” Put in the context of a customer-facing sales organization, this translates into two priorities:

1) Generating revenue by providing customers with solutions.

2) Increasing customer satisfaction.

In fact, this is true for those in all customer-facing sales roles, technical or otherwise. It is everyone’s job.