Creating Exceptional Relationships with Product Management – A Vague Understanding

April 3, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

I just recently published an article in the Pragmatic Marketer magazine for product managers entitled How to Turn Sales Engineers into Your Biggest Fans. I thought it fitting to write the corollary article for how we can best interact with PM.

Having been a student of both professions for quite some time I have observed many points of contention between the two roles—beautifully illustrated at The Cranky PM here and here. There are three areas in particular that I feel cause the most frustration:

Vague understanding of the PM role
Lack of and/or disregard for formal process
Poor resource utilization

Because these are lengthy topics I will address each area one post at a time.

Understanding

It wasn’t until I began reading PM blogs, books, and even attending a few training sessions, that I developed a keen appreciation of PMs as I had come to for SEs. In this case I am as guilty as the rest of us in what I describe…

Let me begin directly and work back from there: as an SE you are not responsible for setting or determining product direction, product quality, or product marketing. Yet that never seems to stop us from getting frustrated, stressing out, and trying our best to influence product direction based on feedback from OUR ultra-important customers. I wrote about this at length here for additional detail.

We do have a crucial responsibility, however. We have the responsibility of providing customer/market feedback to the company in an unbiased manner. That means we have an obligation to do those things we dislike even if it is not demanded of us. This includes trip reports, honest win (and loss!) reports, and forwarding on the 150 feature suggestions we hear every day.

The critical difference (and source of so much stress) is that we have the incestuous need to expect a direct response and action based on that feedback. Shouldn’t we get something back?—we think to ourselves. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we need to expect it. Our responsibility ends when we have provided our feedback to the appropriate location. We get paid enough to worry about our sales cycles, let someone else worry about the roadmap!

Finally, if you’re reading this blog you’re already a few steps ahead of your competition as my anecdotal research suggests less than 30% of SEs actively subscribe to blogs/feeds. Do yourself a favor and read a couple of books and subscribe to some PM blogs to round out your knowledge. I guarantee not only will it make you a better SE but it will begin to lead to some great relationships with your product managers. Here’s a few sources to get you started:

Books

Blogs

Courses

After you’ve had a chance to do a little digging at the links above I’ll continue on with part II next week. If you have strong feelings or feedback on the subject I encourage you to weigh in over in the comments section on the site.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: Marketing

You can’t afford to suck at design

March 31, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

Usually I don’t insert entire outside posts but I think this one from Seth Godin is exceptionally relevant to our industry:

—
Why aren’t you (really) good at graphic design?
Ten years ago, you had a wide range of excuses for being a lousy visuals person. Starting with no talent, leading to no skill and going from there.

But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful powerpoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it’s as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.

No, you and I will never be gifted designers or breakthrough designers. But there’s really no reason not to be really good.

I put together a page with some blogs, books and sites you can check out. An hour a day for a month and you won’t have to hide your face in shame. Sure, hire the very best in the world when you need a breakthrough. But you don’t have to pay for better-than-mediocre design. You can do it yourself.
—

I have heard more than once that you should leave marketing materials to marketing. I disagree. It is your responsibility to develop your own keen sense of design. Too often you need to create custom material for your customers. If you show slides like the one below to your customers, I guarantee you’re leaving a hell of a lot of money on the table. I know I’d have a tough time buying from you.

ppt-image

You can see a short list of my design resources here and here.

Filed Under: Demo, Marketing, Presentation, Soft Skills Tagged With: Demo, Marketing, Presentation, Soft Skills

Getting to Know the Locals

March 17, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

Many of us have fairly large territories or at least occasionally find ourselves presenting to prospects in cities far away from our own.

Here is a Protip® for connecting with your remote audience (virtually or in person). The night before, go online and scan the local newspaper and TV station websites. It doesn’t have to take more than 20 minutes. Check the business sections for anything noteworthy that may relate to your product, service, industry etc. It not only demonstrates that you’re well informed but can be used as a rapport builder with your audience.

People genuinely like doing business with others like them. This includes community. Just like making an attempt at a foreign language while traveling, spending a little extra time to get to know more about your customer will be appreciated.

Filed Under: Sales, Soft Skills Tagged With: Demo, Presentation, Soft Skills

Why you will be outsourced

March 10, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

You can relax a bit. It won’t be for a long time and won’t be as bad as you think. A more accurate statement is that the role of sales and sales engineering will eventually be handled mostly by firms that specialize in the sales function.

Why have I recently come to this conclusion? The long-term trend suggests that relentless focus on cost reduction will force companies to eventually outsource everything but their value creating operations. Sales can generate additional revenue but is not a value-creation activity–it’s value transference. If you disagree, think of how much revenue you can produce without something to sell.

The marketplace will eventually produce companies that are very efficient at providing sales forces to other businesses. At this point Sales becomes the value-creating activity for these new companies.

Don’t let the slow, monolithic beasts of today’s outsourcers fool you. As businesses become better at measuring their own operations by using correct metrics, we will get better at constructing mutually beneficial agreements. Today’s outsourcing agreements are hundreds of pages and provide each party an outline of the minimum duties they can get away with performing.

We will get past this phase of infancy. It just may take us another 10-20 years. From what I am seeing now, though, I believe economic pressures will exert a huge influence on removal of value transference activities.

[EDIT: note I said outsource, not offshore. No, I do not believe face-to-face sales can be fully replaced]

[EDIT: Reader JP pointed out a great example of company doing just this for SE work - http://pre-sales.com. Thanks!]

Filed Under: Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales Tagged With: Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales

Review – Great Demo!

February 24, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

In a departure from the pure SE-specific book reviews I decided to tackle a book I came across a while ago and wanted to get around to reading. Great Demo! is a book that provides a process for delivering highly targeted demos to your customers.

As part of the review I also had the opportunity to speak to the author—Peter Cohan—about the book. Most of that conversation has been summarized in the Q&A section.

Note: There are chapters on presentation and evaluations but I left them off the review as I feel these sections are better covered in other, more specific texts.

Great Demo!
Paperback: 308 pages
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (April 5, 2005)
ISBN-10: 059534559X

Content Review

What is Great Demo?

In a very congruent fashion Cohan begins the book with the premise that a great demo begins with the last thing first. That is to say you should begin your demo with the most compelling screen, report, data point, etc. right up front and then build out your story from there.

Once you’ve shown the best screen, circle back around and briefly show the audience how you were able to arrive at that screen

Then, end by circling back around one more time in greater detail with the entire demo not lasting more than 30 minutes. In our conversation he noted we are victims of momentum which cause demos to always grow longer. Resist this temptation.

In my experience the related concepts of getting to the point and performing brief demos are of extreme value but are unfortunately rarely practiced in software sales.

In speaking with Cohan there were two things that brought him to this idea. Because he got his start as a chemist he spent a lot of time reading research papers—many with no “executive summary”—having to skip to the end was frustrating. The other “ah ha” moment came (like me) as a customer buying software. Both of us having wasted so much time in demos both realized a highly targeted message is best.

Why Do Demos Fail?

Here is a very long list of reasons why demos fail. It includes the themes of lack of qualification, technical preparation, or “story.”

I have to apologize to my former reps because I’m pretty sure I did every single one of them over my career.

What Happens if the Demo Fails?

The key take away is that the cost of an ineffective demo costs far more than at first glance. There is the obvious set back in the current opportunity, but there are also opportunity costs, travel and other expenses, your time, your customers time and other future prospects from that company.

If you are selling anything more involved than simple utilities, it just doesn’t take much to break the 7 figure mark.

Your Customer

If beginning with the end is the first tenet of the book, I would classify this as the second. Cohan spends a great deal of time on the topic of identifying critical business issues (CBIs) and specific capabilities (your ability to solve the CBI). The real insight here is that you should be looking at specific CBIs and mapping them all the way up to the CEO (The Chain of Pain).

Example: If a sales rep isn’t making his number, it impacts the district number, region, and overall revenue. Spend time quantifying and qualifying that with others in your prospect so that the value all the way up the food chain is known. If it isn’t, you’ve got an early warning you may not have a qualified opportunity.

These relationships and prework are the foundation for what you focus on for your demo.

The Great Demo

The layout of the demo should be:

Present the illustration
Do it
Do it again
Q&A
Summarize

The illustration(s) are determined by the CBI and your specific capability. Stick to the most important, qualified, business issue and do not stray.

I very much like this layout and the precision of the message. The demo is definitely the worst opportunity to conduct product training!

Sales Preparation

There is a series of 7 things a rep should be doing to adequately prepare for a successful demo. These include identifying the CBIs, creating the Chain of Pain, and determining the objective and key points to be shown during the demo.

I really like how each of these are shown with examples that you can communicate to your rep. All too often we’re expected to show up and demo on the fly which leads to far less impactful demos and results in showing the canned walkthrough.

I agree that it’s hugely important to keep your rep involved in all phases of the sale, including meetings where you are driving. Having clearly defined roles up front can provide excellent continuity.

Technical Preparation

Rather than go through each of the objectives and CBIs one by one, the SE needs to weave and tell a relevant story to the customer. There are 11 steps broken down in the chapter I would summarize as:

Research – Make your demo points relevant specifically to your customer
Arrange logistics – There’s a nice checklist for pre-meeting logistics
Prepare your demo script – Much more detail regarding the layout
Practice and refine – Practice to yourself and in front of sales team to get feedback
Confirm logistics – Don’t waste your effort because you forgot to confirm a projector would be available!

Managing Time and Questions

Cohan addresses answering 3 types of questions/objections.

Great Questions
These are questions that should be answered right away. They are defined as questions that lead you naturally along your demo.

Good Questions
These questions may be insightful but are not relevant to the flow of your demo. Park them for later, time permitting. It gives you a great way to conclude your original meeting slot and continue on if specific parties need a question addressed.

Stupid Questions
For our purposes, there are no stupid questions from customers. Treat them in the same manner as good questions.

I’ve always had trouble with good questions. I have a tendency to want to answer it on the spot and move on. Through many derailed meetings I have come to the same conclusion. It takes a lot of practice to catch yourself doing it and I always recommend you have your rep help catch you in the act and note it down for your post-op.

Remote Demonstrations

The best take away from this chapter is to find a way to keep your remote demo interactive. There are many good tips including:

Switching between slide view and product
Use virtual pens or other highlighting devices
Ask questions (probably more than you normally would)
Use polling and other webinar features to collect group feedback
Have a audience member drive

I would caution you (as does Cohan) about having others drive. I might actually just skip that altogether. I see the benefit but I see the risk outweighing it 99% of the time.

Becoming a Demo Master

This chapter builds on the others and provides some guidance for those wishing to refine their message. There’s a lot here so I summarized some of the salient points I found valuable.

Know thy product – Explore every single option in the product and know what they do. This involves a lot of time with the product and manuals, but it gives you the greatest flexibility when navigating your product.
Complementary products – Many times complementary products are necessary to produce final deliverable the customer is after. Incorporating this into your demo provides the customer an end-to-end view of the product.
Competition – Know enough about your competitors to steer your demo in a way that simply highlights your competitive differences. We both agree you should not tackle them head on in most cases.
Know your customers – This is all about researching more about your customers’ needs than the next guy. The more preparation here the more relevant and impactful your demo will be.
Know your peers – Find the best and brightest SEs at your company and get together for Demo Days where you can share tactics. I highly recommend this practice.

Q&A with Peter

What was your experience like in putting together the book?

I worked hard to model the book’s structure along the lines of a Great Demo! – I was trying consciously to practice what I’m preaching. The book is designed to introduce the most important concept right up front, and then enable the reader to “peel back the layers” in accord with his/her depth of interest.

Have you seen any significant changes in the SE’s role of performing demos in the last 4 years?

Perhaps the greatest change I’ve seen recently is the growing use of the web to deliver demos (WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc.) – an area where many SE’s could be more effective (even if they are very strong in face-to-face situations). I’ve focused a great deal of attention to this in my workshops.

A second change is the growing “toughness” of customers. Customers are savvier, less forgiving, and are more careful in making decisions than before. This has been exacerbated with the recent recession, as well. Demos need to be more aligned and targeted than ever!

With the current recession, what are the techniques that are especially needed today?

You need to nail the process of communicating value to your customer in tangible metrics in terms of the delta. You must create a value calculator in conjunction with your customer to ensure you are using their numbers.

Although this seems unintuitive, I have seen much better results going for more targeted deals (i.e. less suites). Right now it is simply too likely that someone in your account will put a stop to the deal because of economic uncertainly and fear. The more targeted your deal, the fewer number of people need to be involved and the better chance you have of making it through the sales process. Start small, prove your value, and scale up the opportunity from there.

Recommendation

A sign of a good professional book to me is when you find yourself nodding in agreement because the recommendations are laid out in a way that simply makes it seem like common sense. I also recognized many of the follies I, myself have experienced over the years which will make it feel very relevant to any SE reading it.

I talked at length on this site about targeting your messaging—demo and otherwise. What this book gives you is a very clear, proven, step-by-step approach for accomplishing this task with your demos.

If you haven’t been practicing these techniques I can vouch that incorporating this advice will bring rapid and substantial changes in your success rates. For those already acclimated to these principles but lack (or are not aware of) a specific approach, this process can easily still bring you a 10% edge.

I also advocate SEs to study communicating, presenting, and demoing as specific domains of expertise because they are so critical to success. When you are ready to become an expert of the art of demonstrating products, this would be an excellent place to start. In short, make sure you add this to your library. I also recommend you review his website and blog for more information on the subject.

My thanks to Peter Cohan for taking the time to address our readership here at TSE.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Demo, Soft Skills Tagged With: Demo, Soft Skills

What NOT to Say

February 3, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

I want to talk about the importance of knowing what not to say. This isn’t about fancily avoiding hot button topics, but more of a process to zero in on and focus only on what is important at the purposeful exclusion of everything else.

This theme crops up in many materials from Covey’s 7 Habits to Reynold’s Presentation Zen to Cohen’s Great Demo! to Babauta’s Power of Less to Akinson’s Beyond Bullet Points.

I tend to use an amalgamation of recommendations from these resources and others to really hone my presentations. Here is the process I use. It isn’t so much about the specific process you adopt, just that you incorporate the underlying principles.

Qualify, qualify, qualify

If Location³ is the real estate axiom, I propose Qualify as ours. Qualify way more than what superficially appears to be needed.

Uncover all stakeholders – The needs of a system administrator (for example) should align to other goals in the organization–even in different groups such as Finance and end users. Uncover all areas you may impact.
Go vertical – The goals of the sysadmin should also always align with specific goals in their management chain (misalignment is a big red flag). Work to uncover and articulate the goal as it pertains to each layer in the management chain.
Business demography – Work with your rep and the customer to determine not only who will be at your presentation, but also who is calling it, setting the agenda, and the primary audience member(s).

Prioritize

Priorities are always determined by the audience–not you. Here’s what I use to keep me on track.

Get all your benefits down on paper – Create a list of all the product benefits that you found applied during your qualification efforts.
Map benefits to stakeholder – With your list of all benefits uncovered, map them to specific stakeholders. Realistically, you will sometimes need to make assumptions.
Prioritize by stakeholder – Avoid the trap of first trying to prioritize your perceived most important benefits based on your knowledge of the product. For each stakeholder, rank the actual (or guesstimated) priority of benefits this person/group is interested in.

Focus

Up to this point we’ve been greedy with our assumptions and lists. Here we begin to prune our message until it is easily digestible by our intended audience.

Rule of 3 – Start with the top 3 benefits of each stakeholder that will be attending your presentation. Ignore the others for now.
Find themes – Because you want to maximize the value of your time with the customer, you necessarily have to service more than one master. Rarely are you only presenting to one audience type. Find broad themes across the remaining benefits you have listed.
Rule of 3 (cont) – Take the top 3 overall themes. Write each one as a separate statement that characterizes the benefit in a scope that addresses each audience type.
Add structure – Organize the 3 remaining benefits by overall priority to the group

Support

Telling your audience about the wild and wonderful benefits of your product is boring. You need to show them the “so whats” of your main points.

Rule of 3 (cont) – Find three supporting product features, proof points, sample reports, customer success stories, etc. Do this for each of your 3 main points. Beyond Bullet Points provides a sample template you can use to keep this organized.

Delivery

Start with salt – Salt your audience by demonstrating the effort required to get to the final unveiling.
Have a hook - Don’t put your hook in the middle or end. Order your presentation with the most important benefit up front and work down from there. For each benefit, begin with the most compelling representation (proof point). You want them hooked from the first second.
Mind your transitions – I always like to add a story component if I can. One example might be the day in the life of the sysadmin going back to my previous example. This forces you to make sense out of your transitions between benefits and give the audience a contextual lattice work for your presentation.

What NOT to Say?

Simple. After you’ve gone through this process you will have a prioritized grid of primary benefits, key support points, and connective story. You can then smile and blindingly ignore everything else that didn’t make the cut.

Superficially it seems like a lot of work, but try it a few times and it gets to be second nature. Plus, you can’t imagine what a stress reliever it is to be able to focus on a handful of well-qualified topics during a presentation.

Filed Under: Sales Tagged With: Demo, Presentation, Proof of Concept

How to Become THE Go-To SE

January 27, 2009 By Darrin Mourer

Every SE organization has them. The “go-to” SEs are the ones you turn to when you absolutely need something to go well. I’m certain you can think of several off the top of your head. If you want to be considered as one of them, these are the steps you need to follow.

Choose your niche

THE expert denotes a singular entity. This is true, but only as it pertains to a specific subject (see Ch 17). The go-to SE for one product is almost certainly not the same for a separate product. Or there can be different go-to’s for different parts of the technical sales cycle (e.g. presenting versus proof of concepts).

Find one particular subset of study within your organization where you are uniquely qualified to be the best in the world at something. Like any company competing in a free market, if your niche is too big you can be out-niched, if too small you risk not having the requisite demand.

Become the expert

Expert and go-to status are not the same. You need to have sufficient knowledge before you’re given the chance to leverage it.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a case for a 10,000 hour practice requirement before someone can be considered a top expert. For broad topics I can definitely agree, but regardless of the time requirement, the key takeaway is that you need to outpractice everyone around you. Expertise is not simply a bestowed genetic legacy!

This means you need to immerse yourself in your niche, reading every book, subscribing to every website, blog, and relevant news outlet. It means you need to actively seek out and connect with other experts pertaining to your niche inside and outside your company.

Even if you haven’t written the book on the subject, you need to be able to if someone asked.

Become the go-to

Thankfully if you’ve reached this phase the difficult part is behind you. Luck is 9/10ths preparation. And if have truly put in the sacrifice to master your subject, SEs and reps will find you with amazing speed and precision.

But, in the tradition of The Sales Engineer, we don’t leave ANYTHING to chance. Here is how you can accelerate your mind share in the sales community.

Seek opportunities to help – If you had to remember one this is it. Just like becoming the expert, becoming THE go-to means people can, well, actually feel like they can engage you. So prime the pump for them. Monitor your company bulletin boards religiously for topics meeting your niche. Do the research on their behalf even if you don’t know the answer. Get in touch with Marketing and see if you speak or attend specific events as an expert. Offer to do lunch and learn presentations to your local sales/SE team. This list is only limited by your creativity.
Broaden your exposure – Don’t limit yourself to internal advertising. Seek out industry associations to get involved with. Though it may not seem important initially, the difference in being perceived as an industry expert is more directly tied to your external credentials than your internal ones.
Advance your niche – The real experts contribute toward the body of knowledge on their subject. Start a blog, write whitepapers, perform original research, etc. This can be very time consuming but also extraordinarily rewarding.

Despite what you may hear, there is such a thing as job security. It just doesn’t come from a company. In lean times, the truly helpful and knowledgeable will always have positions.

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