How to market to engineers

I didn’t study to be an engineer (thanks to a guidance counselor who thought I should be an estate agent), but I’ve been working hand-in-hand with engineers and technical buyers for the past 15 years. The result is that I’ve become one of them. We engineering-types look at marketing from a totally different perspective to consumer marketing.

For instance, you can’t really sell to an engineer. We don’t really care about your perceived benefits and shiny brochures. We care about cold hard facts. And we love details. Give us charts, calculations and case studies over shiny ads and you stand a better chance of getting us to buy from you.

And engineers will only buy when they need to buy. No amount of persuasion is going to convince us if we don’t need what you’re selling.

For marketers, engineers must be a nightmare. We hardly ever respond favorably to sales pitches and ad campaigns. Marketers must hate us. But they could improve their chances by making their presentations more engineer-like. For example:

Let us contact you. Feel free to advertise in the Yellow Pages, in industry directories and online. Be there when we need you, not when we’re busy with something else.
Be relevant. If we need to buy a forklift truck, we’ll need detailed specifications, an unbiased comparison of your products related your competitors and a couple of financing options. We probably don’t need a 3-hour presentation. Just the facts.
Don’t rush us. It can take months or even years for a project to move from the proposal stage to construction. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to buy.
And finally, shut up. This one is hard for many marketers and salespeople to grasp. We don’t always have the answers to our problems. But we do have loads of questions. If you stop trying to sell to us for a moment, you’ll be able to answer our concerns clearly and concisely. Once you’ve given us enough information to make a decision, be quiet. We’ll do the rest.

If you can abide by these simple rules, you’ll find that we keep coming back for more. If not, you have a bunch of competitors out there. Maybe they’ll listen.

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