The Lab Day
As an SE, I always highly valued my lab days. To me, a lab day was simply a day that was informally spent learning about technology. Though it could take many forms, this most often meant investigating aspects of our products I wasn’t familiar with, getting hands on installation time, and sharing experiences with other SEs. Having done this for many years, I have formulated some tips, tricks, and best practices for getting the most out of this time.
Benefits
The benefits of implementing a regularly scheduled lab day were huge to me. The primary ones included:
- Sharpening the saw - …as Dr. Steven Covey would say. Staying current with your products and supporting technology allow you to remain sharp in front of the customer. Credibility takes a hit when you have to say “I’ll have to get back to you on that” for the thirteenth time.
- Customer follow up - My rule of thumb is to always answer a customer question within 48 hours. For the more detailed questions that you need to proof out yourself, it ensures the customer doesn’t wait more than a week.
- Housecleaning - Use the lab to physically separate yourself from your daily sales routine and tasks to allow you to wrap up weekly loose ends with minimal interruption.
With the benefits clearly in mind, here are some tactical recommendations you can implement to get the most out of this time.
Frequency
Though once a week always worked best for me, make sure you’re getting one day out of the field for research at least once every two weeks. Any longer than that and things start to suffer: Customer questions go unanswered or you can’t provide the depth they need. You’ll find yourself getting dull and having too many follow up questions from meetings.
Scheduling
Mondays or Fridays work best; pick the day that isn’t typically used for team calls and other administrivia. Once you have the day selected, make sure it is marked as out of the office in Outlook. I find that is a stronger indicator than just blocking off the time. Make sure you stick to the date as much as possible as one of the next steps is to encourage others to do the same and this make synchronization easier. Fridays always worked best for me but your mileage may vary.
Communication
The first person you need to involve is your manager. Most enlightened SE managers clearly understand the need, but if they don’t you may need to perform a little justification. You need your manager on board first in case you run into difficulty with your rep(s). In my experience there is a wide variance in the response you can expect. If you clearly can state the benefits from a customer satisfaction and revenue case, most reps won’t take too much issue with it assuming you are performing your job duties well. When you invariably get a new rep I would state this right up front as your method of operation and not leave it to debate. For the few times you run into vehement disagreement, let your manager and the sales manager work it out.
From a scheduling standpoint, my recommendation is to always enforce use of your free/busy status to schedule meetings. This is even so much more important if you support more than one rep. If you get them in this habit for day-to-day meetings, they will learn to respect your time when you book your lab day, which will minimize headaches on both sides.
Involve Your Peers
One of the greatest benefits of having the lab day is being able to get a few of the SEs on the team in the office at the same time. There is a distinct educational element that happens when you get together that is hard to replicate. This is especially true when you support a wide product portfolio and you can’t be an expert on everything. This point is very important for SE managers as well. SEs that are in contact with others in their region tend to exhibit higher performance and higher levels of morale that stem from a sense of teaming.
Set an Agenda
I learned this one from a good friend and colleague of mine. Every time we ever got into the lab he had a distinct picture of what he wanted to accomplish that day. It kept us on track and we seemed to veer of course less frequently. Setting the agenda ahead of time even allowed us to ensure we involved others that may have had an interest in the topic (specialist SEs, services, etc.) or been critical to our success.
Control the Environment
In a related post I will dive into the intricacies of managing an effective lab environment. For now, the SE should be cognisant of a few items.
- Keep the environment scalable and modular as hardware tends to come and go frequently.
- Have a process where you can reset the environment quickly so you don’t waste time on repetitive tasks.
- Leverage virtual machine technology wherever possible. If you have quality laptops you can then take what you create on the road with you to the customer if needed.
- Limit access where possible to discourage interruption. Having a room full of SEs is more temptation than some reps can handle.
I would even extend that last bullet to the SE group. Some interruptions are unavoidable, but try to come to an understanding about limiting email and cell phone calls. Having to switch gears frequently, especially inside a group, really dents the usable time in the day.
Recommended Activities
There is a wide range of activities that you can pursue during this time. A few of them really stand out as having a lot of value for me:
- Install and tune the product - It’s one thing to memorize technical specs and value props, but having a tactile understanding of the product allows you to make mental connections between features/benefits and customer needs that may not present themselves otherwise. This is especially important for visual learners.
- Run through highlighting the features of the product - This is practice for demos and product trials. If you have formal guides that have been created for product walkthroughs, this is your time to absorb and practice and learn (read: make mistakes).
- Create your own guides - If this hasn’t already been done for you, plan and document your demos and trials so that you are creating repeatable technical sales process. Sharing this information with your peers will absolutely skyrocket your credibility and will make getting assistance from other SEs and PMs a breeze.
- Test customer scenarios - In a small company the SE usually ends up doing some QA work for scenarios that were not tested in the lab. Oftentimes you’ll get questions like “does product x conflict with product y” or “what is the performance hit on this arcane OS or platform”. Since not everything can be tested, and because some of these are gating questions to the sale, this is a great opportunity to provide a better answer than “it should work” or “let’s test during the trial.” Plus, the more time you can demonstrate to a customer that you spent working on the project with their interest in mind, the more compelled they will feel to buy the product.
- Explore new segments - For bonus points, try to evaluate the product to see if there are other customers (or divisions within existing customers) that might benefit from your product in some way. How does the product fit in with where you believe the industry to be going? How does it address customer pain points you are hearing? Write up your findings and present them to product management/marketing as whitepapers or additional sales collateral. Not only is that a fast track to promotion, but it’s essential you build your personal network before you ever need it. See Never Eat Alone and Meatball Sundae for more detail as it pertains to relationships and ability to market/sell.
Implementing these recommendations not only should get you an approved lab day, but can hopefully allow you to get the most out of them. 20% time out of the field is a big number. Make it count.
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