Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

Your salespeople are translating backward. They’re teaching customers operational language instead of translating customer needs into operational action, and it’s costing you deals.

When rental companies become show companies, the sales process breaks. Instead of sales translating customer needs to operations, operations dictates a solution that sales must teach to customers. The customer has to learn your language to buy from you.

That’s backward.

The Breakfast Taco Problem

I once walked into a Salvadoran restaurant looking for a breakfast taco. The menus were written in Spanish for people who understood Salvadoran cuisine. The server didn’t speak enough English to answer my questions, so I had to point at pictures and hope for the best.

(I got a fantastic tamale, but that’s not what I ordered.)

This is how most AV companies sell: showing customers pictures of speakers and mixing consoles so they feel confident they’re in the right place, but still making customers work in the company’s language rather than their own.

The customer doesn’t care about your griddle and pan. They just want tacos.

Translation Goes One Direction

The difference between selling and order taking is important here.

When you’re selling, you translate from customer language to planning language. You listen to what they need. You may teach them enough to make informed choices (“Do you want this cheese or that cheese?”), but you’re not asking them to learn your operational vocabulary.

You take customer language and convert it into actions your planning team can execute.

Order takers work differently. They force customers into operational language, e.g., “We’re sending eight speakers that need to be flown, so we’ll need rigging.”

The customer thinks, ‘I don’t care. You’re making tacos. Why are you telling me about your kitchen equipment?’

Order takers want precision in operational terms. Salespeople understand customer needs, create a scope in customer words, then hand that scope to the planning team to figure out the “how.”

The “How” Doesn’t Matter (Yet)

How you’ll get it done doesn’t matter in the selling process. Selling is about meeting customer needs. “Can you deliver what I’m looking for?” “Can you make recommendations?”

Your salespeople take that conversation to your planning team and say, “We need sound for 500 people. Two screens. IMAG. Recording, but they don’t know why they want recording yet, so we’ll need to make suggestions.”

Now, planning worries about parts and pieces.

The problem starts when you need operational details to create a budget. If you’re counting widgets, truss bolts, pick points, and motors just to get to a price, you’ve lost the plot. None of that matters to the customer unless it affects price.

Rental Think Gets in the Way

We need simpler tools to translate scope into budget. The rental solution asks for too much detail, takes too much time, and locks you into an inflexible solution that should come from more capable systems.

The standard hierarchy of products (packages, systems, and kits) needs translators along the way.

Your customers don’t need to know what’s in a kit. They need to know what you’re capable of doing. They may never find out that capability came from a particular kit. They may know it came from a video recording system, but they don’t know the role four Decimators play in that process.

We don’t have to teach customers the arcane knowledge of how we’ve solved operational challenges in our shop. We only need to understand what they want to do.

Order Taking Has Its Place

There’s nothing wrong with being a rental company.

The order taker’s job is to guide the customer to a solution that aligns with how orders are fulfilled at your organization. They’re selling the “how” for that project, translating your version of how to the customer’s version of how.

But sometimes, you just want a breakfast taco. You don’t know what a breakfast taco is called in Salvadoran cuisine, and you need someone who speaks your language. Maybe you need pictures, signs, hand gestures, or a walk through the kitchen.

The Right Interface for the Right Customer

The tools salespeople use are different from the tools order takers use.

Some customers need their order taken. Others need you to sell them the solution to what they’re trying to accomplish.

Sell the “what.” Deliver with the “how.”

Provide the right interface and translator, and remember what direction you’re translating in.