You’d be hard pressed to find an SE who thought they didn’t have enough work to do. We’re all short on time for keeping touch points with our customers and looking for ways to reach farther. I covered this conceptually with communications platforms. Today I want to highlight a particularly effective piece of content you can create for that platform—the standing tech briefing.
Staying Top of Mind with your Customers
November 5, 2011 By
Gerald Jampolsky said: To give is to receive.
As SEs we jump from customer to customer trying to bring in new business all while keeping existing customers happy, staying up on our products, and being in-the-know with industry developments. With just a fraction of your most valuable time spent face to face with your prospects, how can you keep that connection alive and well after you’ve gone. [Read more...]
Stop Charging Customers Extra
February 3, 2011 By
One thing that bothers me selling and buying enterprise software is the propensity for some companies to try to charge for every little incremental addition in the product.
Oh, you want the reporting engine, that’ll be $50 a seat extra. Two processors in that system, that’ll be a extra $1000 per agent. You want the product to actually do what it says in the PPT? Yea, that’s gonna cost you.
You get the drift.
As SEs we rarely get much say in the price point and structure. While we would love to avoid the price conversation altogether, it does come up during technical conversations. Customers have (rightfully so) gotten good at ferreting out where incremental charges come into play.
Rather than play that game and deflate enthusiasm for all the cool stuff I’m going to show them, I now use a different tactic. Between my rep and I we never go in with anything less than an all-inclusive license plan and mindset.
So when the inevitable question comes up about a particular module being extra, my answer is simply “no, we include it” and my rep can later follow up with the question “do you think you’ll take advantage of this feature?”. If the answer is no, guess what we can offer them: A discount!
If you think that’s a bit underhanded, imagine the next time you buy a car whether you’d like a sticker price to be all inclusive, letting you find ways to find ways to save versus seeing a low sticker and being hit up constantly for this add-on or fee until you’ve had enough. I think the former is a far better (and honorable) buying experience.
Is Your Rep Falling Down on the Job?
January 20, 2011 By
What do you do if your rep is pulling his own weight?
This is the gist of a question I recently received from a newer SE via email. It’s a tough question and one I don’t think I’ve addressed here before. Since the answer is involved I thought it would be best to describe my approach more thoroughly here.
First, when you’ve worked in the business long enough, this situation invariably happens. Usually it doesn’t start to manifest until you yourself have been in the role long enough to have worked with a variety of reps to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Second, when you’ve been in the business long enough, the situation will eventually reverse and, justified or not, your abilities will be called into question.
This is a face-paced, high risk/return game we’re in. Succumbing to the continuous pressure and jumping to rash decisions is all too easy a trap. All it takes is a quarter or two of missed results for the pressure to be ratcheted up enormously. It’s in your best interest to take a step back and rationally assess the situation. It takes real skill not to get caught up in the blame game.
Don’ts
- NEVER go straight to your boss or the sales manager with the issue. Put yourself in their place and ask how you’d react to that. Not positively I’m sure.
- Don’t assume you know everything the rep is and isn’t doing. I see it time and again where SEs don’t appreciate the work that goes on behind the scenes to get meetings together, remove business barriers, negotiate contract/legal, etc. Get the “my rep just schedules the meetings and I do all the work” out of your head. It’s hard to counteract the overconfidence effect or egocentric bias.
- Don’t assume your rep has the benefit of seeing the strategies and tactics other reps you’ve worked with are using. Just because you’ve seen the presentation done a dozen different ways (and have learned what works best) doesn’t mean your rep has. It could just be a simple coaching issue.
- Do not ignore the problem if you feel it is impacting revenue. At the end of the day you are paid by the company to maximize revenue for a set of accounts. You are accountable for your sales targets, even if less directly.
- Never take matters into your hands and subvert the strategy your rep has put in place. That directly undermines trust in the relationship and damages your reputation.
Do’s
- Almost without exception you should bring up the problem with your rep directly first. Start with a casual comment. Maybe something like: “Joe, I saw the PM give this presentation the other day and he skipped the 15 minute company introduction slides and the audience really seemed to appreciate it. Maybe we should give that a shot.” That sounds way better than “Dude, you’re putting them to sleep in there!”
- Escalate the directness of your comments in response to their effectiveness. Have the frank conversation and get it out in the open in a non-threatening way. For those with some difficulty with this skill, I recommend Crucial Conversations
.
- Be cautious and courteous with offering advice. Your reps will appreciate advice from you about as much as you’d appreciate their advice about being a better SE. Mileage may vary.
- If all else fails, you have to get management involved. Typically there will be a dedicated SE manager you can interface with. Only take this step if you’ve exhausted every other avenue and your rep knows you feel strongly enough involve others. The last thing you want is them getting called into their boss’s office about an issue they thought was between you two. That whole “trust” thing is kinda important.
- Even better: Offer to discuss it jointly under an “account strategy session” with the sales manager. Let the manager mediate. It doesn’t have to be a negative conversation. If you’ve done your homework, acted professionally, and still been outvoted, you’ve done your part. It’s out of your control and you can rationally decide to stay or explore other options longer term.
The golden rule should really be your guide here. Put yourself in his place, think of how you’d like your SE to react and follow that approach. The most important thing is to maintain the trust within the relationship. Your career success as an SE is ultimately determined more by whether the sales force respects and trusts you versus just how well you can demo the product.
Getting to Know the Locals
March 17, 2009 By
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.
Why you will be outsourced
March 10, 2009 By
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!]
What NOT to Say
February 3, 2009 By
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.