I find that I am both fluent in English, and Geeky Technical. I can swing both ways and talk fluently to the technically abled. But I also have the ability to speak non-technically to those clients or prospects who aren’t in on the industry, terms or really the technology.
I think the hardest part is determining the technical level of the person you are speaking to. It is very easy to alienate the person you are speaking to. Underestimating a technical person is sometimes worse than having to roll back the tech speak to someone who doesn’t understand. Just throw another analogy in there.
I know that as a female in a very male dominated industry, if I have to call someone from outside of our company, client or supplier list, I get given the technical run around. I don’t know if it’s the way I sound, but I pretty much know what I’m talking about – and it’s hard to get this point across. Sometimes I will try to emphasise the technical words and knowledge that I have, but that doesn’t always work and I leave the call very frustrated.
I find that to really get some points across to clients you have to start personifying computers. Things like “the computer just can’t know that Mt Gravatt and Mount Gravatt are the same, because it doesn’t have eyes and a brain, it only knows that they aren’t exactly the same” have uttered from my mouth on more that one occasion. And it seems to get my points across.
I think it is extra hard when you are trying to explain about data and what you can do with it verses maybe logic or hardware issues. As long as I have data in a structured format I can display and search for it in a large number of ways. But that doesn’t mean that any of the computer processes know what they are doing apart from matching ‘stuff’.
In the end I think it is just about judging your audience and hoping you take the right tact when you speak to them. But if you’re a guy, and you work in this industry, stop writing us girls off. We get it.
About Fred
