Selling new technologies; making a convincing business case

Convincing someone to invest in new technologies is one of the most important tasks of technology management and arguably also the most uncertain. Despite the fact that technology managers having a wide range of methods and tools at their disposal to value technologies, the actual process of getting the buy-in and subsequent funds of the board, business units, or external customer is often an unsatisfactory process. In fact very little has been written on the sales process for new technologies. This paper argues that to complement this gap technology managers can learn from existing sales practices and processes by applying consultative sales concepts. The paper reports on an ongoing study and reviews literature on current technology development processes. There appears to be a disconnection in the communication between seller and buyer and the process of establishing what we refer to as a technology-problem combination. This notion is supported using two illustrative cases in the automotive and aerospace industry. The paper concludes by proposing a process to integrate a consultative sales approach for new technologies.