The Power Of Customer Stories . And The Sales Engineer

As a former IT Executive, I’ll tell you a sales secret. One of the best ways to get your message across is to tell me a customer story. Speaking about other customers, their successes and your experiences makes you appear confident, knowledgeable and authentic. Most sales organizations have official references – complete with a glossy brochure accompanied by a PowerPoint slide with logo – and all blessed by legal. And they are totally ineffective!

They are ineffective because they are sanitized. They are ineffective because they are impersonal, and they are ineffective because they are not your own words. As your customer, I want you to bring me some value, tell me something new I cannot read on your website. A corporate reference slide designed by some person in HQ does not do that. A personal customer story does.

So what about using all those unofficial customer stories? The ones that are lying around, uncollected and mostly unused, in your head and in those of your colleagues? Why not collect them and share them to boost your sales performance by removing some risk from your customer’s buying process?

 

How To Get Started

Ask your more experienced and tenured colleagues to share some of their customer stories with you. Don’t just limit yourself to sales and sales engineers, reach out to people in your services or installation teams and ask about their customer experiences too. These people are a walking encyclopedia of customer stories, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons they have been so successful for so long. At your next regional meeting, ask everyone to write down a story as his or her homework.

Unless you are new to your company, you probably have a few stories you can use from your own customer base as well, if only you took the time to think about them. Perhaps next time you visit a customer you can ask them to give you some quantifiable benefits or ROI they have received from your solution. If you don’t ask you don’t get.

Even as a new hire you can say “a colleague of mine told me about one of his customers who ..”. Just put it in your own words.

What Kind of Stories Do I Need?

I classify them as ‘conversational stories” in that you should be able to establish the relevant details in 45-60 seconds. That equates to a maximum of around 160 words. Go any longer and you’ll lose the flow and the customer attention. Imagine you are sharing the story with the customer over a cup of coffee. Michael Bosworth, in his New Solution Selling book lays out a framework for a customer story that may help you – adapted here for the world of the Sales Engineer.

Step	Content
Situation	Customers name, industry and job title
Critical issue	The pain of the person or company
Reasons	The business reasons for the company’s issue biased towards your eventual solution
Vision	In the words of your customer, the capabilities he said he needed to solve the problem; “he told me he needed a way to..”
We provided	If properly described in the vision, just say “we gave him those capabilities”. NO PRODUCT NAMES!!
Result	Some specific measurements

“The Operations Director of a large fleet rental company couldn’t accurately track the mileage and maintenance records of the cars in the fleet and provide that data to his clients as they had no central recording and maintenance system. This was causing massive maintenance costs and lost business as their competitors could supply the data and pointed out this competitive difference. He engaged with us because of a recommendation from one of his management-consulting partners. The director said he needed a way to provide online access and reports to his fleet customers. We provided him with a web-based online system which cut down his maintenance costs by $11m and allowed his sales team to retain 100% of their corporate customers.”

Every Story Has A Happy Ending

 These stories take less than a minute. They can cut days out of your sales cycle as you establish “credible” and “low-risk” as two adjectives the prospect now links to you and your company. A quick customer story can often be a great response to a “can you do..” question in a demo, especially when asked by a mid-level manager. Instead of showing the “how”, you talk about how some other customer did the “how” and speak to benefits instead of features.

Switching personas from a former IT exec to a former presales leader I can tell you this approach absolutely works. Many of my customers now have collections of these unofficial customer reference stories. It works for them too. One of my former SE’s jokingly called my collection “Tales From The Book Of John”. Imagine my surprise when three months later the CFO of our company called me to ask if he could “borrow” some of my stories. I told him yes – as long as they never ended up in a PowerPoint deck!

CALL TO ACTION: Write down your informal references, ask your colleagues to do the same – and share them for success.

“Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story”

Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister, UK.

Handling That "Why Are You Better Than Your Competition?" Question

We’ve all been in that position when the customer directly asks you a question like “why should I buy from you?” or “why are you better than your competition?” It was certainly one of my favourite questions as a CIO and it still a question that I am asked today running the MTS business.

 Typically responses fall into two categories. Either you get a “let me tell you why my competition is terrible and why you cannot trust them” or “let me tell you why we are so amazing and marvelous”. Think of politicians as a proof point for that! Although both answers can be effective depending on the circumstances- and I’d always prefer the positive to the negative – there is a third approach.

 I’d like to think of this as the consultative / trusted advisor type approach that can be very effective in the hands of a knowledgeable and empathetic Sales Engineer. My suggestion is a response more like:

 “Well, Mr. Customer – I’m not really an expert on my competition as I know my own product much better. What I can share with you are the top three or four reasons that my customers have told me why they choose to do business with us. Will that work for you?

 “OK. So what my customers tell me is that   (list of features-advantages-benefits that make you look good and aren’t so great for your competition). How do you feel about those items?”

 Put that into your own natural words, adjust for local culture and make sure you have three or four really good items to share with the customer. Note that I say Features-Advantages-Benefits and not just Features. Think Value!! (Time, People and Money). The rest is up to you. The reason it is so effective is that you are referencing, even indirectly, what your customers think and not what you think.

 

“It is not your customer's job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don't have the chance to forget you”

The 3 Big Lies About RFPs

Answering RFPs is one of the relatively ugly costs of doing business. There are many myths circulating about RFPs, and in particular the best way to win them. Many of them are wrong. Completely wrong and out of date! Since the burden of responding to RFPs usually falls to the SE Community (who call them Really Fast Paperwork), it’s time to look at some of these myths in more detail, and debunk them once and for all. The Big Three RFP lies are:

a) 9/10 RFPs are biased towards one vendor;

b) If you don’t write it you won’t win it

c) You have to answer (and win) every request.

Believing these three alleged facts will cost you money, an ever-expanding amount of time and resources, and decrease the morale of any SE team whose job it is to respond to an RFP. You may not agree with my point of view, but it will make you take a fresh look at how you answer.

1. 9/10 RFPs are biased. Usually the losing sides make a statement like “it was clearly rigged for our competitor”. Here is my analogy: I train a youth football (soccer) team. We are one of the best teams, we play in a very competitive league and we win most of the matches we play. Sometimes we do lose. When we lose, the parents blame the referee for making a bad decision or favouring the other team. Yet sometimes we make mistakes and play badly (the children are 11 – it happens!), sometimes we lose to an inferior team that just does everything right and beats us, and sometimes we are simply beaten by a better team. In the eyes of the parents – it is always someone else’s fault – never their own children.

That is exactly the same view that sales and presales teams take when they lose an RFP. Over the past year I have spoken with more than fifty IT and business executives about the RFP process. Their responses match my own experience as a former CIO – “John, we never ever bias an RFP. We can’t afford the consequences if we are caught. There are so many other more subtle ways of influencing a decision if that’s what we wanted to do.”

A slightly more accurate version of the myth is that “9/10 customers are already biased towards a particular solution”. RFPs are rarely biased, people are. I do not believe the number is as high as 90%, I think it is more like 50% based on my data so far. Where that impacts the RFP is actually in the scoring process. Read on:

“This is what we do if we absolutely have  to change a score. Every factor has to be scored on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and then weighted. Making the determination of a 1,a 2 or a 5 is fairly clean cut. The difference between a strong 3 and a weak 4 is unclear and a matter of opinion. Upgrading a few 3’s to 4’s for your favorite can make all the difference in the selection process for getting to a short list. No one will ever know!”

2. If You Don’t Write It, You Won’t Win It. Seriously? How many RFPs have you written for your customers in the past year? It just doesn’t happen anymore.  You can certainly nudge and push an RFP by suggesting during discovery meetings that some feature/function should be made a requirement, and although I still suggest that every SE team has a standard list of questions to supply to a friendly coach in a pre-RFP stage those questions are rarely used.

   Think about the creation of an RFP and the history of the RFP process. The basic internal purpose of an RFP is to gather some momentum and collaboration inside the customer to get a project started. It is as much political and psychological intent as it is purchasing intent. It is often the first chance that business analysts have to document requirements they have gathered from the business and the technical users. Once the document is created it is then a common set of requirements that everyone can judge vendors by – to apply a sense of fairness. It is the way to get legal, finance, purchasing and everyone else on the same page.

Now go back 20-30 years. When an IT department wanted to purchase some technology to solve some user’s business problem and needed to issue an RFP – what happened? It was a long drawn-out process. Analysts were tasked with investigating the market and determining who even had something close to the requirements. They had to rely on vendor literature, analyst reports from Gartner, Aberdeen, Giga and the like, plus personal experience. When the RFP was issued, the customer did not know that much about the technology and the solutions. Contrast that with today’s version. The customer is far more educated, thanks to Google and vendor’s websites. They scour user group boards, Facebook and Twitter to research the popularity of a solution before the (electronic) RFP even hits your salesperson’s inbox.

The only way you can “write” an RFP in 2015 is to virtually write it through the internet, social media and good-old fashioned personal contact. You are still persuading, influencing, placing and educating (think PIPE!) the customer – but in a far more indirect and subtle way. When you discover text in an RFP apparently ripped directly from your competitor’s website – it’s usually because of a lazy analyst, not brilliant competition.

Personal example – I actively encourage people to write positive reviews of my book. I do this to make sure that when someone searches “sales engineering books” MTS comes up #1 in the list because of great Amazon rankings – and also to counter the negative review a competitor placed online.

3. You Have To Answer Every RFP. Says who? Usually Sales! I routinely ask presales leaders what percentage of RFPs they know they will never win – but answer anyway. The answer is a staggering 25-33%, which is an amazing waste of resource. In Winning The RFP Game I lay out a number of steps a SE team can take to increase both their win rate and their internal efficiency.

In business, one of the fastest ways to go out of business is to say “yes” to everyone. As an individual, you learn to control your time and prioritize your efforts towards those activities that have the greatest payback (subject to managerial preference). When you personally say “yes” to everyone you rapidly run out of time, perform poorly and are heavily stressed. A sales and presales team – working together – cannot afford to say “yes” to every RFP.

Now let’s talk about winning. This is a strange statement to make in a sales situation – but you don’t always have to win the RFP. It depends on the type of RFP. When the RFP is issued to determine who will source a project – go for a win. Yet more than 50% of RFPs are issued as a gating process – which means they are used to reduce a large field of vendors (often 8-12) down to a short list of 2 or 3 who will go to the next stage of demo/present/propose. If all you need to do is to clear the gate that’s a different process. Know the difference.

 

In Summary

Just because you lose an RFP doesn’t mean it was biased. Sometimes you just lose – far more often than you think. That is because the 1990’s viewpoint of “you gotta write the RFP to win it” no longer exists except in the minds of salespeople and sales trainers. It is now a far more subtle form of influence. So when you do receive an RFP, make sure it is really worth answering and perform due diligence and discovery on the document before you open up the laptop to respond. Fewer, yet more targeted RFP responses will lead to more revenue, not less.

The Challenger SE Part 2 - Don't Call The Baby Ugly!

The Challenger Sale has really had an impressive impact on the high technology salesforce. More than 50% of my clients have either formally or informally adopted it as an overlay on top of their current sales process. Yet looking back at implementation over the past two years I’ve noticed one persistent problem in both the sales and pre-sales utilization of the “Challenge” – and that is what I now label as “Calling The Baby Ugly”

The Ugly Baby

You would never, ever, tell parents that their baby is ugly. You always look for something positive to say and provide some form of complement. Yet sales and presales alike, emboldened by the Challenger Sale, quickly launch into a description of why a customer’s processes/personnel/strategy/implementation is wrong (i.e. ugly) and then offer to fix this ugliness. Customers have invested their time, money and resources into their current situation and take pride in their work – so a full-frontal attack on the status quo rarely works.

 Customer Reaction – The Three “D’s”

 Sales takes the Challenger Sale and tries to disrupt the customer and their thought process, which can be a very unpleasant experience. You more directly you challenge, the more you need to be 100% accurate and on-point. Customers can react negatively in one of three ways:

1.    Defend – they defend the status quo and why things run the way they do. This is an almost guaranteed way to ensure that “Do Nothing Inc.” gets the deal. Nothing will happen and the harder you try to push your Challenge the stronger the defense will become.

2.    Deny – they will deny that there is a problem. Remember the rule that “it is not a problem until the customer says it is a problem”. Denial and defending tend to go hand in hand.

3.    Destroy – they will destroy your ideas and also destroy your client relationship. There is no upside to following this path.

In all of these cases you need to make a decision how to react when you start to get some pushback or objections – in almost all cases you need to proceed with caution.

Asking Better Questions – The Three Customer “C’s”

 

Companies invest a lot of time and money teaching their salesforce how to ask better questions – the problem is that the customers don’t play along.

1.    Customers rarely follow a script and allow you to follow a pre-determined line of questioning, no matter how well you prepare.

2.    Customers don’t always know what they want. So sometimes that voyage of self-discovery just gets them lost, dazed and confused.

3.    Customers don’t always tell you everything you need to know and you cannot get the whole story. Sometimes that is accidental and sometimes deliberate.

So What Should A Sales Engineer Do?

In Part 1 of this series I explained how customers believe that the SE offers more value than anyone else from the vendor organization and detailed some ways to capitalize on that. The key is to approach the customer with some humility and deference. (Sometimes you have to approach the challenge head-on and directly – possibly with the classic Wall Street Managing Director or the Executive who says you have two minutes – but let’s say for now that is a corner case and not the norm). How do you take this approach?

Step 1 – Will The Customer Listen To Me?

 

Many SE’s use that Trusted Advisor term, which in this case means will the customer listen to, and accept, my advice? We’ve all been in the position when we have given someone really good advice and they have ignored us. If you have that T/A relationship with the customer, life is easier. If you don’t, you are explicitly going to have to ask permission. As an extreme, contrast the Global Account SE who lives and breathes one large client, compared to the inside SE who may deal with 8 clients a day!

 

Step 2 – Asking Permission

 

Customers accept negative news much better when presented in a positive manner. That means keeping the results and outcomes in mind, rather than focusing entirely on the current problems. My preferred approach is to preface the Challenge with a softening or even self-deprecating statement. Set-up examples might be:

“Can I share something with you about how Customer “X” dealt with a similar situation? I’m sure it’s not an exact match as I still have a lot to learn about your company, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile”

“Can I ask you something off the record?”

“I understand the company has a lot of time and effort vested in this current process and its serving you well. Would you be interested in learning about some ideas..”

“How about we take a break, go grab some tea/coffee, as I’d like to run a few ideas by you about alternative ways to..”

Step 3 – Make The Challenge

The challenge needs to be made from a twin basis of success and facts. That means speaking about how other customers have overcome similar obstacles and the results they achieved rather than diving down into the details of all the current issues. You also need to be clued into the non-verbal signals from the customer. Often the best approach is to get them out of a “sales environment” by moving to the cafeteria, or at least closing down the laptop.

The more people you have in the room, especially once you get past five, the lower the probability of Challenge success. That may sound counter-intuitive as you’d think your spark would have a greater chance of catching fire, yet mass psychology takes over and audiences conform to the norm. So the Challenge works better in small groups and one-to-one. Note that Rep + SE versus a single non-executive customer also isn’t a good situation as that also leads to defense.

Step 4 – Support The Challenge

Once the customer opens up to the Challenge, provide specific examples (evidence and impact) and back that up with numbers (usually time, money or headcount). Remember you are trying to spark curiosity and get a “tell me more” response and not trying to close the deal or stun the client with your intelligence!

Summary

 

The introduction of the Challenger Sale presents a great opportunity for the SE team to reassert themselves back into the customer relationship and break away from being a technical resource. There is a crisis in sales right now as reps struggle to cope with the better educated buyer, to ask more insightful questions and to truly provide value , so ….

“Never let a good crisis go to waste..”

-      Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago

Objections And Questions And Answers .. And Sales Engineers

I've always had a problem with the skill of "Objection Handling". Let me clarify that - not with personally handling whatever a client may ask me, but in the actual labelling of the task. Here's why.

I think "Objection Handling" is a salesperson activity. As in "I just gave a great pitch, and if I can hammer through these last few objections I'll get the deal!" It sets up the entire activity as something that is a little confrontational, maybe defensive and certainly becoming "us" (vendor) against "them" (client with money).

Sales Engineers Don't Handle Objections, They Answer Questions

What I've come to realize over the years, based on listening in to thousands of sales calls plus my own experiences in selling MTS services, is nearly 90% of the issues a customer may raise are ...  simply raised because they want an answer to a question. In fact you can turn any objection into an implicit question. Even the classic your solution costs too much (nicely handled in this Visualize Blog Post) can be reframed as "help me to understand the value of your solution and why I should care?"

I feel this approach has a few benefits.

1. It ensures that in the customer conversation you listen to understand, instead of listening to respond. A crucial part of active listening.
2. It reminds you that you have to understand why a customer is asking the question. And if you don't know - bounce it back and find out!
3. It positions you as the customers advocate and a step closer to that "Trusted Advisor" status.
4. You'd be amazed at what you can learn about a person and the company based on the questions they ask. (Hmm - think about that during your next Discovery call.)

There are some warnings too.

1. See point #2 above. If you don't know why a question is being asked - that is a danger signal in itself.
2. Make sure that you share just enough to answer the question. For many technical SE's it is viewed as an opportunity to show how smart you are. Not the purpose of the meeting! It really isn't.
3. Don't stray into other areas. Stay away from sales-type responses (for example, the standard SE response for pricing is "I Know Nothing")

So give it a try. Think "Answering Questions" (with Short Amazing Answers) instead of "Handling Objections" and see the difference it can make.
 

Check The Calendar!

For those of you whose fiscal year ends Dec 31^st, or even if it is just the end of the quarter it is time to check the calendar. Last week I sat in on a North America business review for a technology company that was focused on closing as much as they possibly could in their Q4. “Drain The Pipe” was the phrase of the day.

Except ..

50% of their deals were going to close between December 20^th and December 31^st. (15% were closing on December 25^th!)

90% of those late December deals were scheduled for a Proof Of Concept or heavily customized demo between now and December 20^th – (which is 35 actual days and in reality 32 or 33 business days because of the US Thanksgiving Holiday).

The math didn’t work.

First – given the timing of the holidays, a massive proportion of the buyers, recommenders, approvers and signers will be celebrating the holidays and taking off the entire week of the 23^rd and most likely the 30^th and 31^st as well. No-one is going to be there to complete the sale.

Second – looking at the number of days required to either run a POC to completion or create a custom demo (it’s a highly configurable system) , there were too many days and not enough SE’s – by an overage factor of 100%.

Something had to give. In the end we scrubbed the pipeline, developed some prioritization guidelines and “borrowed” a couple of engineers/consultants who could quickly configure a number of similar demos. They’re still 20% over.

The message – you may the greatest goals in the world for this quarter – but are they logistically and socially achievable? It’s not just the responsibility of sales to look at these things. How does your calendar look for the next 7 business weeks?

(And then next quarter we have the Chinese New Year ….)

PreSales Engineers, White Boards, and Mojo...

As an IT executive I suffered through far too many really awful PowerPoint Presentations. That was back in the days when everyone threw in a piece of clipart (remember the duck with sledgehammer?) and bullet points had to twirl, whirl and fly in from all sides of the screen.

Sadly, many sales presentations haven't improved since then. Mostly it isn't even the "fault" of sales and presales engineers, they just use what is given to them. Since customers universally say they want conversations instead of presentations - it's time for a change. And that is where the Lost Art Of White Boarding comes into play. Drawing pictures was once natural for us, yet we've grown out of that skill. Yet if you can make a customer say "I see what you mean" - you're on your way to the sale.

Last year I wrote up a study on The ROI Of WhiteBoarding. Give it a read. Because recently, a startup, Zamurai, has developed a fantastic mobile whiteboard application. I stopped by their offices and had a conversation with Michael Parker, one of their founders. This is the short 2 1/2 minute version of that conversation.

 

 

First Or Last ?

You are involved in a four-vendor bakeoff. You have the opportunity to choose whether you present first, last or in the middle - what do you choose?

In the absence of any other data, I always say "go first". Why? Here is my logic. For even more details visit the MTS Website.

Now let me walk you through my reasoning. Firstly I look at the experiences and habits of other very successful sales organizations. The example that comes to mind is Siebel Systems in the late 1990’s – no matter what the situation was, Siebel always found a way to go last. There were often suspicious circumstances surrounding their request due to passing away of some distant relative, travel plans or vacations. However, better than 80% of the time the Siebel sales force went last to show their stuff. This pattern was echoed by Oracle and Sybase in their hey-days. My friends in the consulting and media/advertising business also tell me that they always prefer to go last.

Secondly is the matter of education versus selling. I have often found that the first vendor is often placed in the position of having to educate some of the people in the room about everything, ranging from the general marketplace to specific product functionality. Although that may appear as consultative selling, it detracts from your overall message as it can make your solution hard to use or understand. On the other hand, you can make the point that you get to set the stage and drop competitive landmines for the following three vendors without having to defuse any yourself. Should you have an extremely strong product and are confident of your superiority then going first is the place to be. It allows you to cover off the checklist and agenda items requested by the client, and then add in a few extra credit items of your own. When going first, work with your inside coach to make sure that some general literature is made available to everyone before to mitigate the educational impact discussed previously.

The third point is differentiation. Going last as vendor 4 of 4 means that you need to shake things up and present a little differently. I like the image of Mental Velcro. Can you tune your session to such a degree that it just sticks in the customer’s mind? Proceeding with the standard corporate overview, followed by this is what we know, this is how we’ll fix it, here is the product/solution/services , here are the financials and this is why we are different and unique is NOT going to make you different and unique. So going last will allow you to make points that the other three vendors cannot immediately rebut, plus your pitch, if sufficiently different yet still laser-focused on solving their business problem, will remain in their brains as the selection committee sits down to rank the four performers.

Finally, unless there are exceptional circumstances around timing, customer attendance or your own team’s availability, I have yet to come up with a defensible position as to why you should go in the middle. Good selling!