"You can tell a lot about what you're up against in a sales pitch by the way they serve you coffee," John Deal mumbles to me, as the others in the room noisily take their seats around the conference table at a well-known British engineering and defense contracting company on a dreary day in central England. I take this to mean that Deal has his work cut out for him, given that his prospects have unceremoniously plunked down in front of him a jug of scalding coffee and a stack of plastic cups, with no cream or sugar in sight.
Deal begins making his case to six poker-faced executives, who proceed to blast him with an array of questions that cast doubt on his product, his business plan, his prospects for survival, and possibly his sanity. Every sentence seems to start with, "What I don't get is," or "The sticking point with me is," or "But how can you possibly...?"
Forty-five minutes later, however, the managers have changed their tune. Now they are asking about partnership opportunities and setting up more meetings. Someone has produced cream, sugar, and real coffee cups. It seems like a stunning turnaround to me, but on the train back to London, Deal is less sanguine. "On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means they're handing you a check on the spot, and 1 means they've thrown you out," he says, "that was a 5." Having already seen Deal in action several times, I get his point. Hard-nosed investors, wary customers, skeptical potential partners, distracted politicians -- Deal has an uncanny ability to convert them not merely to interested players but to enthusiastic supporters. And though not all of them are ready to hand over checks, some seem pretty close.
Deal, the co-founder and CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, is pitching what have long been some of the hardest-to-move products on the planet -- nuclear power plants. And he is selling the hell out of them, having already racked up more than 120 deals. This in spite of the fact that his technology faces daunting regulatory hurdles, doesn't exist even in prototype, is less efficient than other nuclear designs, and comes from a tiny start-up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that competes against some of the best-established names in the world, including Toshiba and Westinghouse. Some of the orders come from power producers so eager to buy that they have gone beyond the letter of intent standard for a design-stage plant to handing over escrowed deposits.
It doesn't hurt Hyperion's appeal that its generators boast a small, unusually simple, and safe design that promises to be easy to manufacture, ship, install, and operate. In many ways, it more closely resembles a large diesel engine than a conventional nuclear generator. At about $70 million, a Hyperion plant doesn't exactly go for small change. But its price is a small fraction of that of a conventional plant.
Still, watching Deal work his prospects is to understand that even a great product doesn't sell itself: It takes a great salesperson to create the desire to buy and overcome a blizzard of potential obstacles. And by nearly all accounts, Deal -- who has been known as Grizz since a close encounter with a bear during a boyhood hike -- is particularly adept. "If you listen to 22 pitches today, the one you'll remember tomorrow is Grizz's," says Sherman McCorkle, the CEO of Technology Ventures, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit investor/start-up matchmaking firm. McCorkle has helped funnel more than $1 billion to high-tech companies, and he has been listening to Deal's pitches for one company or another for nearly 20 years. "He takes ideas that seem very risky and paints pictures of how the risk can be mitigated to lead to success," says McCorkle. Mehar Karan Singh, the former chief executive of the Indian subsidiary of multinational elevator manufacturer Schindler and now a real estate developer and health care financier looking to bring electricity to rural India, puts it even more simply: "Grizz creates a vision and then carries people with him."
That, in essence, is what all salespeople are charged with doing -- whether they are hawking nuclear power plants or Web-based software or widgets. It's a tough job, made all the more difficult by the fact that the rules cited by successful salespeople -- listen more than talk, understand your customer's needs, be well informed -- are so basic as to be meaningless. Indeed, those and other maddeningly familiar maxims form the basis for what Deal jokingly refers to as his sales "Grizzdom." The difference is that Deal executes these basic rules with extraordinary insight and flair, relying on a complex brew of talent, discipline, and improvisation.
Another day, another meeting. Today's is taking place in a handsome conference room in a clubby London hotel off Trafalgar Square. Deal, 46, is wearing a fleece vest over a shirt and gray slacks. With his reading glasses perched on top of his thinning but attentively arranged hair, he comes off as a kind of adventurer-professor à la Indiana Jones. To look at Deal, you might think that he doesn't much worry about his appearance, but this outfit has been carefully chosen, he tells me later. Today's prospect is in the construction business, in which many executives chafe at having to wear a suit. What's more, Deal's shunning of standard business attire is designed to subtly signal that he is different from the buttoned-down salarymen his large competitors likely have been sending. "I'm not a midlevel manager from GE, and I want people to know it," Deal says.
He is meeting with Nic Barnes, an IT executive with the Mace Group, a London-based construction management company that works on projects worldwide and has annual revenue of more than $1 billion. One of Barnes's specialties is constructing large-scale data centers, and he's interested in exploring new options for meeting the outsize power demands of such facilities.
