Cool Under Fire - AKA Emotional Maturity

One morning, around 10am, I got a call from the account manager (AM) I was paired with. She asked if I was able to go onsite with a customer immediately. The answer, as always, was yes; then I asked why. As I changed from my 'work from home' attire into one of my 'in-person with the customer' outfits, she gave me the download. They were experiencing an enterprise wide outage, thousands of employees were sitting around unable to work, and there was a minute chance that our equipment may have contributed to it. The chance was remote but since I lived fifteen minutes away from the customer, and she was hours away, she wanted one of us onsite to show solidarity with the customer and be immediately available to engage internal resources if that proved necessary.

The problem, at least for me, was that I had only worked for this company for two months, was still going through the mandatory training and onboarding process, and knew relatively little about troubleshooting our products. Essentially, aside from asking if they had rebooted the device, there was nothing I could contribute and I knew it. This is particularly troubling considering that often customers consider the Sales Engineer 'the smartest person in the room'. I was also going to see a customer with whom I had no relationship. I had met only one of their staff and that was only a few days prior. I also had no idea who was going to be in the 'situation room' when I arrived. It was a terrible place to find myself. 

If they really had an outage, and it was really our fault, I was walking into the proverbial lion's den. The risks were high. Not only did I risk making myself look like a fool but, if handled poorly, I could damage the reputation of my company with a customer who had a multi-million dollar installation of our equipment. They were also due for a refresh over the next year, meaning that another million or so dollars in potential sales were at risk. This customer also directly influenced the buying decisions of over fifty other customers and potential customers. Saying that there was a lot on the line is an understatement.

On the drive over my AM had texted me headshots of the major players in the customer's leadership team. When I entered the situation room I knew exactly who was standing at the end of long conference room table, face red, and fists balled leaning on the desk hovering over a conference room speaker phone. It was the CIO. This situation had already escalated as high up the org chart as it could. Seated along both sides of the table were every senior leader of every department in the organization, some I recognized, most I didn't. Behind them, standing along every wall, were their subordinates. There were over thirty people in a room designed to hold ten. When it comes to sales engineering, this was the big leagues.

The CIO looked up as I entered. He virtually shouted at me, in an overly loud and highly agitated voice, "who are you?" I answered evenly, "My name is Justin Bera, I'm the sales engineer assigned to your organization from <my company>".  His response was direct, brutal, laced with expletives, and could easily be perceived as a personal attack. I won't quote him directly here but the summary of his tirade was, "How could you be stupid enough to work for a company that sells such unreliable and worthless equipment? Do you have any idea what you've cost our organization, our users, and our customers? There is no way you're getting out of this with your job."

By the conclusion of his remarks almost every face around that table had gone pale. Expressions ranged from sympathetic rage with the CIO, to cowering to avoid the shrapnel, to shame that they worked for a guy like this. I stood at the end of the table, my bag still on my shoulder and my keys still in my hand, and  simply took a breath. "Mr. CIO", I responded evenly and with no emotion, "I don't know any of the details of what is happening or why its happening, but I'm here to help get it resolved. I intend to stay until then and until we determine the cause as well as how to avoid this in the future. If there is someone who can bring me up to speed I'll let you know what I can do to help." 

A voice piped up on the conference phone, apparently whomever he had been talking to or waiting on before I entered the room had come back. His attention turned to the phone and one of the senior network engineers along the wall pulled me aside and brought me up to speed. I spent six hours in that room with him raging the whole time, working with other engineers to determine the cause and how to fix it. Turns out the problems they were experiencing had nothing to do with our equipment though I did play a role in helping them find a solution.

What would have happened if, rather than taking a breath and assessing the situation, I had made a snarky comment or attacked the CIO in return? What if I had defended myself, called him out for inappropriately attacking me, defended my company, or simply turned and left the room? Would I have been justified in any of those responses? Maybe. Would that have strengthened the relationship with the customer? Would it have built trust? Would it have demonstrated our commitment to their success? Would it have landed us the million dollar refresh and strengthened our reputation with the other customers they influenced? The answer, to all those questions, is no. Sales Engineers, and often SE leaders, find themselves from time to time in front of angry customers. It is par for the course. Just because they express themselves with emotion doesn't mean that SEs can. 

An SE is expected to be even tempered, long-suffering, and able to see through another's emotional outburst to find the important data points that will allow them to move forward; progress toward the ultimate goal. SEs and their leaders require emotional maturity to be highly successful in their field. I would argue that all sales professionals should develop this, but SEs in particular need this because they often find themselves in the thick of stressful and potentially disastrous situations. If you are an SE, ask yourself how cool under fire you are. If you're an SE leader who hires SEs, you need to understand the emotional maturity of those you interview. This can be difficult to discern, however, take the time to get to know the candidate and you'll get a feel for it. An SE with a high emotional maturity can do wonders for customer relationships. An SE with a low emotional maturity can completely destroy them.