About this episode

Ron Whitson discusses four essential human skills for sales engineers, emphasizing empathy, humility, and storytelling.

This episode is the second of two conversations with Ron Whitson, and it picks up where part one left off. Ron returns to walk through the remaining four of his seven timeless behaviors for presales and solutions consulting professionals: show empathy, have a conversation, practice humility, and tell a story. Each behavior sounds intuitive on paper. Ron's job, and he does it well, is to show exactly how technical people get each one wrong in practice.   The empathy conversation goes further than the standard put-yourself-in-the-customer's-shoes framing. Ron draws a clear distinction between being in service to your audience and being focused on your own performance, and flags a specific mistake that catches a lot of experienced practitioners: when someone shares something and you jump in with "the same thing happened to me," you think you're building rapport. You're actually discounting them. The humility section is one of the most candid stretches of either episode. Ron talks openly about the early-career arrogance that came with knowing every piece of software on the market, and the slower realisation that telling an audience "I don't know, let me find out" can do more for…

People in this episode

Host: Ben Pearce

Guest: Ron Whitson

Topics covered

• sales engineering
• human skills
• empathy
• humility
• storytelling
• presales
• solutions consulting

Keywords

• sales engineer
• empathy
• humility
• storytelling
• presales
• solutions consulting
• technical communication

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