You are here: Home / Archives for Soft Skills / Sales

SEs Unique Value

January 20, 2009 By

Have you ever felt like you were tasked with selling something like this?

Watch the full Onion spoof. It is hilarious (and props for the special effects!).
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

When you are speaking with a customer and you feel like this, you are either:

  1. Selling the product to an unqualified customer (defined as: outside the target market segment)
  2. Selling a product that does not meet a market demand

The scenario is almost always #1 (we hope). There isn’t much you can do about #2, but we recommend you switch the product you sell. So let’s only focus on #1.

Product Management is responsible for defining a persona, observing a need, and then solving that need. A persona is an extrapolation of themes observed in the market. It is fictitious by definition and will never perfectly match your customer.

The first implication for your role is that you provide value by helping Sales qualify. This means you assist in reviewing prospects for potential matches to your target business segment. The better you help determine fit, the quicker the sale can be closed.

But, what if you are in a position where you have a very limited customer list and product portfolio? The real value you bring is your ability to show the customer that your square peg fits into the round hole better than anyone else.

In essence, your true value lies in your ability to craft general market solutions to specific customers.

So next time you’re feeling a little down because the product doesn’t have the features you think it needs, come back to this post. Realize that this imperfection is what makes your ability so critical to your company. Finally, re-watch the video. Be thankful you don’t have to sell THAT thing!

Filed Under: Career Growth, Marketing, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales Tagged With: , ,

The Organization of Last Resort

January 6, 2009 By

Yes, I’m talking about the SE organization in most companies. The SE org is a nexus in terms of capability and communication. We are able to relate to people, comprehend our technology/services, and match technology/services to business problems better than the competition. Not only do we interact with virtually all internal departments, we also interface deeply and continuously with customers.

This is a good thing right?

Absolutely, but there is a catch. Sales is in the (enviable?) position of being exposed to all of the internal and market shortcomings of its company and product. When Sales makes demands things usually happen. Those demands much of the time fall to the SE to provide resolution or workarounds.

What I’ve seen is that in very small companies the SE wears many hats. And this only slightly improves as a company grows. Product Managers invariably run into the same problem, but there is usually a high ratio of SEs to PMs so you can see where many requests end up.

I think that in any given day we could fill up our calendars working to solve perceived problems elsewhere in the company. Oftentimes we fall in that trap—I know I do. It’s in our nature to want to solve problems and be helpful.

But should we indulge ourselves for our customers and shareholders?

My answer today is much more of a resounding no than it used to be. In my earlier years I was more about highest and best use of my time from a shareholder perspective. I have gradually shifted to a sales territory perspective, which means the highest and best revenue for your sales team.

It isn’t because I caught the “not my job” syndrome, quite the contrary. I think it has to do with a slightly better understanding of human nature…

  • If you solve an out of band problem once, people will expect you to keep doing it. This is because others’ forget about the problem because it has been temporarily relieved.
  • It creates an inherent assumption that it is part of your job. Once you’ve assumed responsibility, it’s hard to back out of it.
  • Unless you’re vying for a position in a separate department, you aren’t being measured/rewarded for it. This means it is unproductive for you.

If you are an SE manager you have to maintain a watchful eye that your team isn’t getting caught up in firefighting institutional issues. Keep them focused on solving customers’ business problems with the solutions in your bag.

If certain problems become so acute they cannot be ignored and they cannot be acted upon, assign a single czar/taskforce from your SE/manager ranks. Make sure all of them are dealing with problems the same way, carefully documenting progress, and publishing a very noticeable scoreboard of progress. Most times we cannot direct change, we can only influence. It’s a good thing we’re skilled at that sort of thing ;)

At the end of the day we should be exerting effort to be the best we can be in the job we are assigned to. Taking our eye off that ball makes us less effective in our accounts.

Sometimes this simplest of axioms captures points most clearly:

Focus on that which you can control.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales, Soft Skills Tagged With: , , , ,

The Extra Mile

December 23, 2008 By

I’ve spent the better part of the day going through my annual “virtual” spring cleaning. I was doing some maintenance on my home PC when I started receiving some weird errors I traced to a memory problem–as in the memory test was even freezing.

I have a two-year old Dell which is still under warranty for another year. I’ve always liked their service tag approach where I could look up my warranty info online. While I was there I just happened to see a Dell Chat window. I’ve had poor experiences with these things in the past but decided to give it a chance. Here is basically what happened:

I opened up the chat window and got connected to a tech in under a minute. After a brief intro to the problem we ran a few tests and found it to be one of my memory sticks. Just to be on the safe side he offered to overnight me two replacement sticks. He was very cordial and I never got a hint that he was copying and pasting from a script. After the session I received a copy of the conversation along with the tracking information.

Very slick.

This incremental investment by Dell to provide me this experience has given me a huge boost in confidence about its products. This is a perfect example of a company leveraging technology to improve interactions rather than as a way to cut contact and minimize cost.

This dilemma presents itself time and time again as SEs. Do you give the customer your cell number? Do you even leave your cell number on your office voicemail message? Do you give out your instant messaging name? Do you try to summarize a response in an email or do you pick up the phone? Do you give the customer the support escalation desk number or do you make the call for them?

Each situation is different, but here my point: My experience with Dell was only fantastic because I am so use to others’ mediocrity at best and complete incompetence at the worst. Every time you go do just a little bit better by your customer you are helping create that experience that customers crave.

When you do this consistently you are creating a value-add for your company that is extremely hard for a competitor to overcome with product features. To me, spending that little extra time to go the extra mile is time very, very well spent.

Happy holidays everyone!
Darrin

Filed Under: Marketing, Sales, Soft Skills Tagged With: , ,

Sales Engineer MBOs

December 2, 2008 By

I recently covered some of the different compensation split options available for Sales Engineers at a very high level. This prompted a few questions, mostly around the use of MBOs. As a follow-up, let me go into the various options available to SE management as well as some common pitfalls.

MBOs are targeted performance goals. As such they should always follow the SMART approach. Even though a standard quota plan is just an example of an MBO, most sales/SE managers use the term more to apply to goals other than sales targets. For this article, I will refer to it in its more general sense.

The Four Pillars

Others may group them differently, but to me there are 4 categories of MBOs for SEs:

  1. Business/financial
  2. Employee satisfaction/enablement
  3. Customer satisfaction
  4. Process (continuous) improvement

This ensures that the 3 main stakeholders in business are accounted for: shareholders/owners, employees, and customers.

Business/Financial

These are the goals that concentrate on the financial statements and address the needs of shareholders or owners. I suppose this is technically a euphemism for “shareholder satisfaction” These are also the most common compensation plan metrics—sometimes the only one (over 70% of SEs have a bonus plan tied to sales/revenue). This is even more so for AEs. Here are some options that may be available depending on your company’s revenue reporting capabilities:

  • Percent attainment of quota
  • Number of new customers
  • Number of tradeshows attended
  • Percent time spent in customer-facing activities
  • Percent growth in pipeline
  • Percent growth in average opportunity size
  • Percent decline in average opportunity age
  • Percent decline in assigned opportunities without SE involvement/tasks
  • Percent growth in deals won with SE involvement or specific activity (e.g. POC)
  • Percent growth in deals won vs. competition or specific competitors

Employee Satisfaction/Enablement

There is a host of revenue generating activities that are not specific to one’s own accounts. Creating sales collateral and supporting other account teams are specific examples. This category also applies to activities that go to morale boosters which address the needs of the employee stakeholder. Examples include:

  • Number of supplemental sales/marketing/support/implementation collateral created (and shared!)
  • Number of opportunities assisting regional sales teams in your personal niche
  • Number of posts on company bulletin boards or other social networking contributions
  • Number of published trip/win/loss reports
  • Number of informal training sessions (e.g. lunch and learns) delivered

Customer Satisfaction

Goals in this category encourage positive and long-term relationships with customers, which is in everyone’s best interest. These can include:

  • Number of repeat customers (renewals)
  • Number of published case studies or customer references
  • Percent achievement on customer sat surveys
  • Number of customer requested product features submitted to product management

Process (continuous) Improvement

Each of the other categories addressed a specific business stakeholder. Process improvement is a very broad category that concentrates on the foundational goals that generate continuous improvement in each of the others. This is best illustrated by the concept of moving the fulcrum over, or sharpening the saw in Covey terminology. It covers everything from contributions to business process improvement to personal development. Examples include:

  • Number trainings attended
  • Acquisition of a new skill or certification
  • Percent of activities documented in CRM
  • Contribution to special projects
  • Time management goals

Flexibility

Each of these basic options can be tailored (and weighted too) in numerous ways limited only by your creativity and ability to get at the data. You can focus these goals on specific products, business segments, or even competitors so that they align to company strategy.

Pitfalls

With the ability to be flexible also comes the possibility of actually lowering productivity if you aren’t wise in how you approach them. Some of the most common pitfalls include:

  • Not keeping them SMART. The biggest culprit here always seems to be measurability. In many cases a desired result is qualitative. In these cases I employ “correlated result” approach where I seek out measureable events that typically lead to (or are correlated with) the desired result I am after. Example: It’s difficult to measure someone’s product knowledge, so the measureable result is attending a training, passing a specific test, etc.
  • Not publishing continuous results. We all need immediate feedback to make the biggest impact on results. If you’re only reviewing quarterly or (gulp) annually, you’ll find the process very ineffective and discouraging.
  • Reliance on manual compilation. If you need to manually jump through hoops to get the data you need it is that much harder to integrate them into daily practice. Automate the process whenever possible.
  • No scoreboard. Even if you just keep it in your team, your people need to benchmark. Friendly competition in my experience is good. The best will benchmark against themselves. Keep it updated frequently.
  • Tedious recordkeeping. If your SEs have to spend an inordinate amount of time entering data so that you can report on it, your program is destined for failure (or minimally noncompliance).
  • Unintended consequences. Over reliance on these metrics leads to pressure to game the system. Communicate the spirit of the goals and the behavior you are wanting to see.
  • Top down only. When each of us is involved in setting our own goals, we feel natural ownership. Involve your team in the creation process, even if by a committee that standardizes them for the entire organization. No taxation without representation!
  • Not communicating the why. If your SEs don’t know why something is important, you will have a difficult time getting ownership of the number.
  • Metric overload. Anything over 10-12 goals starts to become overwhelming. Keep is short and sweet.
  • Business only. We in Sales are naturally focused on business results. Over-weighting your goals in Business ignores other stakeholders and ultimately leads to lowered effectiveness.

Hopefully this gives you a head start on crafting your own MBO program. By no means is my list comprehensive and should be thought of as a starting point of discussion. Mastering Technical Sales also has a balanced scorecard that may be helpful that matches fairly well with this post. I’m also working on a template for me to use personally that I will include here in the future.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Compensation, Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales, Soft Skills, Terminology, Time Management, Training Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Carrying Buckets

November 25, 2008 By

Once a company expands its portfolio to 2 or more products, a question arises: Should sales (and SEs) be specifically incentivized to sell all of them. And, if so, how?

You run into ethical issues if you have competing products (such as stocks in a brokerage or mortgages for a loan broker) that encourage sales to put themselves ahead of the customer. We’ll assume your company has a portfolio of mostly complementary products and simply want reps evenly focused on all or other specific products.

Incenting SEs

Ways in which I have seen this done—both directly and indirectly—include:

  • Directing specific incentives for sales reps – SEs typically have to, or should, follow the reps lead with a customer
  • Quota buckets – Having separate quotas for each product
  • SPIFFs – a bonus for specific sale or activity
  • MBO – a bonus typically not tied to specific quota attainment

While these are usually monetary based they could also be tied to awards or rewards such as club attendance.

Trouble Spots

Here are a few things to avoid when leveraging the options above.

  • Not inclusive – Only incenting reps has two problems. 1) it creates a dividing line between reps and SEs, and 2) it can create animosity when SEs are doing a lot of the specific work to drive the desired behavior and are not seeing any of the direct reward.
  • No alignment – Don’t have competing objectives. The simplest way to ensure rep/SE alignment are to have comprehensive programs meaning both take part in the same programs rather than creating separate ones. I’ve seen misalignment more often than one might think.
  • Not immediate – Year long programs don’t yield the results and focus that quarterly programs do. You need long-term programs to maintain momentum and continuity, but always try to attach quarterly milestones. This way the SEs receive immediate reward and the positive reinforcement.
  • Not realistic – This is especially important for shorter-term programs. If your average sales cycle is 9 months for a product you’re promoting, don’t set the 1st quarter SPIFF on revenue goals of the product. The SPIFF money will only go to those that already have the sale in their pipeline. It also negatively incentivizes sales teams to push the sales cycle which may be poor for customer relations.
  • Too complex – The bigger the product portfolio the more temptation exists to build in qualifiers and rules to address every situation and product. Keep the programs extremely simple and make the purpose behind clause easy to understand and clearly mapped back to corporate strategy. People are very willing to accept these decisions as long as they understand the reasoning behind them.

Finally, make sure all details are well communicated and understood as early in the term as possible. Poorly defined compensation plans are one of the biggest morale killers in a sales/SE force I have seen.

Filed Under: Compensation, Management, Sales Tagged With: , ,

Opportunity Lost

August 1, 2008 By

I know I owe everyone some book reviews, though I’ve been so busy in other matters that those will have to wait. In the mean time, I do want to keep things rolling so here is a thought for the day based on recent experience.

Yesterday I had to cancel two home-based services, my internet access through Cox and my phone service through Vonage. Let me start with Vonage.

I made a call into their main customer service line. I was presented with a lengthy options menu which finally led me to the option of being able to cancel my service. I waited on hold for about 6 minutes and then was disconnected. I called back and went through the same procedure and was connected to a service rep in about 5 minutes. Being overly polite the entire time intentionally in the hopes it would speed the process I made the request to cancel my service. Then the loss prevention scripting began.

They wanted to know why i was cancelling and I was honest about it (had nothing to do with their service which was I happy with, I just decided to only use my cell phone). After making me repeat my reasoning 3 different times they began offering discounts. I went through 3 rounds of offers to try to get me to stay. Finally comes the (and I quote): “Mr. Mourer, I now have the cancellation button on the screen, before I ask your permission to press it, I want to review the reasons you want to cancel your service today.”

Still remaining calm, I politely interrupted the rep and gave her my permission. While it was “cancelling” I was probed yet for more information. 32 minutes later after being connected for the 2nd time the call was complete.

—

Let’s contrast this with Cox. I call the main service number and am presented with three general options. I pick service changes and get transferred to someone in about 3 minutes. The person asked for account information, proceeded to start cancelling my service and asked me why while that was happening and I gave him my reason. After about 2 minutes on the phone he asked me if there was anything else he could assist me with and bid me farewell. Total time about 7 minutes.

—

There are some lessons to be learned here for companies everywhere:

  1. Treat your customers the way you would like to be treated, even if they are departing
  2. Instead of using it as an opportunity to cajole customers into possibly staying (which I’m sure only a very small percentage do), why not use it as an opportunity to build a stronger long-term relationship
  3. Whatever you do, don’t kill any future opportunity of a business relationship
  4. And IF you kill it, be absolutely damn sure that it’s not such a bad experience that other’s feel compelled to write about it publicly (or record it) which does FAR more damage then the few extra customers you keep

The net of this semi-rant is this. I will gladly become a Cox customer again. I will NEVER become a Vonagecustomer again. In fact I will now go out of my way to tell people to avoid them, that is if they’re around much longer.

One last request: As easy as Cox made it, make it easier. Let me cancel my subscription from my online account. It would give me even more warm fuzzies and it would save you costs.

The moral of this story for SEs is this: Always take every opportunity to better your relationships. Sometimes saying “no” to moving an opportunity forward builds trust which can translate into even more business in the future. If a customer says no to a deal, don’t burn your relationship by trying to cajole the customer. Be professional and recognize the potential in every situation.

Filed Under: Marketing, Sales Tagged With: ,

Virtual Lab

July 3, 2008 By

   In the last of my three-part series on the SE lab, I want to cover the concept of lab centralization and virtualization. Once a sales organization reaches a certain size it stands to gain from economies of scale in various areas, labs being one of them. Because of the length of this entry I have divided it into 3a and 3b.

When a sales organization is small, for the most part the SE’s lab is his/her own set up at the office or at home. When the organization grows to the point of supporting regional sales teams with several SEs per region, it usually makes sense to create regional labs where SEs can experience the benefits I outlined in my previous post. When the organization grows large enough, or has extensive technology requirements, it makes sense to take the lab to the next step.

Creating a central lab environment has several benefits:

  1. Focused investment – Budget can be pooled within the organization to invest in hardware that would not be feasible at the regional level.
  2. Better management- Pooling resources allows for the possibility of dedicated personnel to managing the environment, meaning SEs don’t have to.
  3. Formal strategy – A project of this size will require proper planning and maintenance to ensure success. This is often a problem that afflicts regional labs.
  4. Higher utilization – Better resources mean more value for the SE which lead to increased adoption.
  5. Remote access- SEs can leverage the environment from home and at the customer site which may be invaluable for proof of concept.

If you are in the business of selling software, you can also heavily benefit from virtualization. While up to this point I have used lab in a very generic sense, a central lab can be used specifically to enhance product demos and as proof of concept.

Demos
With everyone having access to the same virtual environment, SEs can use this as a launch platform for creating enhanced demos that would not be doable with a laptop. SEs should be able to share these demos with others. Having a standard demo catalog with the best of the best content is a great way to drive additional revenue. SE management/enablement and marketing can also leverage the work that SEs create and incorporate them into the master library. If you really want to get fancy, you can start tracking this in your CRM to statistically determine which demos work better than others. This is all part of building a repeatable sales process.

Proof of concept
Some companies use evaluation and proof of concept interchangeably. Sometimes a customer just wants to kick the tires without an SE. Sometimes the customer needs to see the product in action to validate the technical specs and sales presentation. Allowing SEs to build a environment that matches the specific requirement of the customer can be a huge time saver for both sides. It also reduces risk to the opportunity be being able to run the POC in a controlled and familiar environment.

Microsoft goes even further and has integrated this strategy into their corporate marketing efforts on their website. With many of their products, you can register onlineand get access to a virtual environment with a demo script to evaluate the product remotely–without an SE! This can take a huge load off the channel or SMB SE’s shoulders. It also gives your corporate SEs an alternate option of letting a customer self evaluate in a controlled and scripted environment. This is especially useful for opportunities that you would not deem appropriate for a full SE-led evaluation.

Training
One other very valuable use of this type of platform is as a training aid. Instead of trying to get access to a classroom with a purpose-built set up, or messing around with virtual machines on laptops, you can configure the labs ahead of time, virtually, and allow students to access them through the browser on their laptops. Whereas the demo and proof of concept provide additional revenue opportunity, this is an easy way to demonstrate cost savings to the company.

In the follow up post I will detail the process and considerations for building out a virtual lab.

Filed Under: Demo, Lab, Management, Marketing, Proof of Concept, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales, Training Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »