Tour Guide - Introducing New Information in an Engaging Way

Central Texas is hot in the middle of summer. At two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon in late July, 1993, I stood with a couple dozen people and enjoyed the cool breeze coming from the cave entrance below us as the cable car slowly lowered us down the tracks into the tourist hotspot of Inner Space Caverns. It was my first day as a tour guide and I knew nothing about caves, geology, or tours. I was available, willing, and capable of learning so the owners gave me a shot.

By the time I completed my training a week later I knew I had found a job that I'd love and that I was good at. It turns out that being a tour guide is forty percent memorization and sixty percent interpersonal communication. It also helps to have a bit of comedic timing. Being good at giving tours, whether caves in Texas, historic sites in Boston, or wax museums in Las Vegas, begins with immediately building rapport with guests. For the tour to be a success, they have to trust you from the start and very quickly come to like you.  The fact that you've been hired by the establishment to give the tour goes a long way to establishing trust (and authority on the topic) but the liking you part is all on you. If you're good at it, by the end of the tour guests should feel like you've become friends and they could stop and say hello in a grocery store, despite the fact that they really know almost nothing about you.

By the time I left Inner Space Caverns for my next endeavor, college, I had 100% positive feedback in the guestbook (what we used before Yelp or TripAdvisor) and had become known as one of the preferred tour guides. My favorite closing line, at the end of a tour, was "If you've enjoyed the tour today remember that my name is Justin, and please stop by the guest book and share your thoughts.  If you didn't enjoy the tour, my name is Frank." As corny as it was, it always got a laugh but Frank never got a bad review.

If you've ever been on a tour of any kind you know what I'm talking about. Some are great, some are ok, and some are terrible.  You chose the tour because you were already interested in the topic. Whether the tour is good or bad almost always comes down to the guide. Working as a Sales Engineer is not dissimilar from a tour guide. You memorize information, share it with people who are interested in the topic but may be  minimally familiar with it, and very quickly must develop trust and rapport. At the end of a good tour you might get a few tips. At the end of a good sales cycle, you get a commission.

In both cases your presentations must be both entertaining (or at a minimum engaging), informative, and valuable to the customer. Much like a tour they expect to come out having learned something new and to have enjoyed their time in the process. Very often new friendships are established as well.  One other component of being a top tour guide and SE, that increases the likelihood of success, is the ability to read the room as you present, and adapt to what your presentation accordingly. For more on that see another article here on the important of Reading the Room.

Beyond what I've said already, I'm not going to go into exactly how to be a great tour guide, that is a whole other topic. I'll leave that for you to and reflect on; maybe go take a couple tours around your town and take notes on what the guide does well. I will say that SEs who embody the spirit of a tour guide will almost always be successful. Presenting, whether to one individual in an office or to a conference room of people in suits, is part art, part instinct, part God given talent, and part practice. For some, it comes naturally while for others it requires continual practice. For some it is invigorating. For others it is emotionally draining. Regardless of whether it pumps you up or wears you out, you've got to be good at it to be among the best in your field.

If you're responsible for hiring SEs you need to be very aware of this trait. If you hire SEs that are exceedingly technical but their gift is writing technical documentation and putting people to sleep in under ten minutes, you may want to reconsider your interview questions and SE minimum qualifications. Hiring SEs for their technical skill but neglecting the soft skills is a good way to make both the SE and AM unhappy. Unhappy sales teams lead to lackluster performance and rapid turnover.