A Purposeful vs Performative: A Business Outlook

Gyaan (Hindi): Knowledge. In pop culture, the word is also used to mean ‘highly opinionated knowledge that is likely trivial, unnecessary or even corny’. Hope that sets the tone for this post. It’s closest english equivalent could be ‘unsolicited advice’

If you work in the software consulting industry (like I have for most of my career), you would agree that coding/programming is an important but a small part of the overall job. Consultant engineers are expected to contribute to some flavor of sales (technical or commercial), to external or internal stakeholders. And just like many techies, I don’t consider myself adept at the art of sales. However, my modest sales experience in the past few years has taught me some very valuable lessons. One of which is:

The worldview of sales and engineers/product teams is vastly different. Neither perspective is inherently right or wrong, superior or inferior. These distinct viewpoints simply represent two unique lenses.

The two lenses seem to converge, one seems Performative while the other feel Purposeful.

Let’s take an example. Say there is a meeting of consultants from company A with a prospective client for a new project from company B. This the first meeting and it includes client stakeholders (B) and the consultant team (A) comprising of sales, engineering and product skills. In this ensemble, usually the sales members of company A have the highest leverage (since its the first meeting). The meeting runs for a couple of hours and the overall feeling of company A team is mixed: engineering and product are optimistic, while sales is mixed or pessimistic.

In the retrospective of the company A team, it becomes apparent that the sales team felt that they weren’t able to “impress” upon the clients; there was no “wow” factor. This is an example “PERFORMATIVE” thinking, and is typically the sales outlook of the world. The judgement is solely based on how the perception or reaction of the potential clients was, regardless of the undercurrents. On the other hand, the engineering & product team felt they presented the most realistic view. Their definition of the “wow” factor was presenting the most factual picture. This is what I like to call “PURPOSEFUL”, no frills.

Since this was the first meeting with the prospective clients, I believe the sales perspective perhaps was right here. Selling doesn’t necessarily happen on facts. It is a delicate & artistic performance, that swings between courtship and authority. One can neither seem too desperate, aggressive and boastful, nor too introverted and shy. The point to take home here is that the entire sales judgement is based on the reaction of the clients, a very subjective metric.

Let’s add a twist here; say the clients from company B revert saying they were impressed with the proposal and the presentation, and would like to award the deal to the consultancy A. How do you think the sales and product/engineering react to this? It’s a win for the consultancy, sure. But in my opinion, the win would completely change the perspective of the sales team and the “purposefulness” and the “performance” perspectives have overlapped.

I have strong and borderline controversial opinions about the subject, but will refrain from imposing it here.

Such contradiction is not just present in business, but everywhere. News, Politics, Family relations etc. all need both performative and purposeful actions at different times.