Pick Up The Phone!

“So then I sent the rep an email…”
“I’m waiting for support to respond to my status update request”

Whenever I hear a phrase similar to these in one of my consulting engagements, I know I’m close to finding a problem, or at least uncovering a major symptomatic issue. Let me explain ..

After four months of travel running enablement and training workshops, May has been kinder and gentler and I have been working on a couple of “take-home” consulting opportunities. Both involve some badly broken internal sales processes at a couple of mid-sized companies. These processes were impacting both the effectiveness of presales engineers and ultimately the win-rate of sales. You know when a process is so badly broken that the injured parties readily admit that they spent more time trying to fix the blame as opposed to fix the process, which is why a third-party comes in to obtain resolution.

In both cases, email was to blame, and the people who relied upon it as their primary communications mechanism. Instance #1 involves a company with incredibly poor Sales Discovery habits and instance #2 a company where Sales Engineering spends 35% of their time bailing out Customer Support. Repeatedly, an email was

1. Left unanswered
2. Sent solely as a CYA (Cover Your A$$)
3. Incomplete and poorly written
4. Partially answered

My response in both the situations was to say “pick up the phone!”. An email is linear (in the good old days we’d call it half-duplex) as only one party can communicate at a time. An email can’t contain (much) emotion – I don’t feel there is much room for smiley-faces in business communications unless you really know the other person. A phone call allows you to get all your questions answered (you’re in sales – you know how to ask questions and get them answered!). Plus a phone call leaves no audit record other than that the call was actually made. You can say things in a call you cannot in an email.

So if you are frustrated in some internal process (or even in a customer communication) see if email is in the communication chain. If it is – ask yourself what would happen if you picked up the phone rather than send another email?

Maybe things would magically get better.

In my two engagements, the discovery rate doubled and presentation standards have improved dramatically in just three weeks for one customer, and the other customer reports that post-sales time has decreased from 35% to a still-high 22% and is trending downwards.

Pick Up The $^#@ Phone!

The #1 Trick To Improve A PowerPoint Deck

Google "PowerPoint Presentation Tips" and you will get over 47 million hits.

There is some great content out there, ranging from slide design techniques to the classic Non-Verbal Communication tips (stand up straight, look at your audience, breathe, speak slowly etc.) Yet there is one basic, fundamental rule that I see broken all the time - and hardly anyone writes about it. It's simple.

Here is the Prime (PowerPoint) Directive:

"Review your PowerPoint from 40 feet (13m) distance using a standard overhead projector or on a wide screen (60" plus) HDTV".

One of the biggest attention killers is that people simply have to work too hard to read / understand your slides. That because while they may look great on your laptop - when viewed in a conference room setting (where >80% of PPT pitches take place) you have:

1. Poor choice of colors. Red, Yellow, Green and even Light Blue may disappear with an old or underpowered projector. If they are your corporate colors then good luck.
2. Font size is too small. Dinky "product marketing" 10 point font is illegible from that distance.
3. Images are unclear. Usually because they are too small or poorly labeled.
4. Animations and highlighting get lost.

You get the idea! And why 40 feet? The most important person in the room will often sit at the back of the room in the power position. They may also be one of the older folks in the room. If your VIP cannot read your slides - you are lost.

So - call to action. From now on review all your sides using the Prime PPT Directive. If they are slides produced by another division or department - send them back if they fail the test.

Let me know how this works for you.

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”

How Can Presales Generate Sales Leads (and still stay "technical?")

This was the "Ask John" question from the April MTS Edge newsletter.

Hi John,

As part of a new sales initiative, my SE team has been asked to generate a set number of leads to “feed the sales pipeline”. We are a very technical team, with a very technical product, and are very hesitant about getting into cold calling prospects. In fact, my team is rather resentful of the request and I hear comments like “we don’t ask sales to do complex installs and demos, why should we do their job?” I believe some of my staff would rather quit and find a new job instead of being co-opted into direct sales.

What can we do to help the process along and be good corporate citizens without stepping too far outside of our collective comfort zone?

Thanks – “Steve” – SE Director, Europe, Middle East & Africa 

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the question. That is certainly a difficult and highly emotive situation to face. You can tell the team that it is everyone’s duty to help the company thrive, point out the ”Sales” in Sales Engineer and talk about teamwork and learning new skills .. but .. many SE’s either cannot (because they lack the skills) or will not (because they lack the belief) directly “sell”. When an SE’s sense of self, professional pride and credibility is wrapped around the technology they know and the application of that technology you are asking them to change a central set of their beliefs by explicitly selling that technology instead.

There is a middle ground. If you look at a classic land and expand strategy in accounts. Where land is driven by the rep getting an initial opportunity, and expand is driven by the SE encouraging utilization across the customer. Since the average tenure (length of service) of an SE team is typically 2-3 times that of sales – most customer knowledge and many relationships lie within the SE team anyway. It’s time to utilize that knowledge to your collective advantage.

Sit down with sales, and categorize your install base into three buckets – A,B and C. A means a likely opportunity to expand or a targeted account, B has some opportunity and C not so much. Make contact with your technical (and executive) contacts and go visit the customers without a sales presence. Position it as a courtesy visit, a health check (my favorite) or an “I’d love to see what you do with our stuff” type visit. Learn as much as you can, talk to as many people as you can, and get an idea of plans and actually ask your user base “is there anyone else you know that I should be talking to?” – you’d be surprised how often you (being the SE) get a positive response that sales would never get.

Also conduct Discovery in reverse and look at the business outcomes or results the customer gets from using your solutions. That’s your opportunity for an up or cross sell. Position that as a “have you considered..” or “you know, many of my other customers…”. Try very, very hard NOT to sell, but to inform and advise. You may get some CYJ’s (Can You Justs) as a result of these calls (to get a support ticket pushed or an enhancement lodged) but they are usually worth the time. Plus you’ll build an excellent set of personal technical “go-to” references.  As an added bonus be a little more aggressive at trade shows and user group meetings. Asking that same “is there anyone else you know?” question over breakfast, lunch or a cup of tea can be done in a very low-key techie way yet can provide amazing results.

Postscript: Steve asked this question back in October, and I’ve held back the question and answer so I could report specific results. Here is what happened. One SE quit anyway. No tears were shed over his loss. The remaining eight SE’s found five new large opportunities and about a dozen smaller ones during calendar 4Q2015. Three of those large opportunities and eight of the smaller ones closed by the end of calendar 1Q2016 resulting in a 22% increase in quota achievement for the EMEA region.

Mission accomplished and the outreach program continues.

So You Think You Are Fairly Paid??

Some interesting data from Payscale, the compensation software firm, about people's perceptions over whether they are paid a fair wage or not . It isn't Sales Engineering specific, but I've a few thoughts about that at the end.

This is the data from a survey of 71,000 . it shows that even if you are paid at or above the market rate, there is still a good chance that you feel you're underpaid relative to your peers. A massive 60% of employees who are underpaid say they intend to leave - compared to 39% of employees who are overpaid. (The report notes that presumably they are unhappy for many other reasons!).

The lesson for SE Leadership here is that if someone is being paid under the market rate - there is a 5 in 6 chance that they know it and a 60% chance they will take action. Even being paid at market (so at the 50th percentile) 2 in 3 SE's will still think they are underpaid. So .. if your pay package (it's more than just base salary + commission/bonus) is truly competitive - make sure the SE team knows it!! Reinforce it, with realism, at every opportunity.

And a word to the wise, don't rely on those comparison reports HR/Finance obtain from independent salary/consulting companies unless the companies surveyed are a true comparison to yours (and they rarely are). Remember that there is always some other company out there who is willing to "buy" your SE's and pay more for them. Money is one of the major reasons that SE's leave a company, Management is another, and Lack of Belief in the product is a close third.

Perception is reality!! Get real.

 

Age And The Sales Engineer

General statistics about the SE population have always fascinated me - particularly when they relate to age, gender, income and all those other "Human Resource" type metrics.

I've long maintained that gender diversity in the worldwide SE gene pool is atrocious and that we all need to do whatever we can to encourage more women into the profession. But that's a topic for another blog entry. This one is about age.

Age is neither a positive or a negative when it relates to being a superstar SE. With age comes experience and (hopefully) wisdom and a lot of knowledge gained from watching your own and other people's mistakes - and successes. With age also comes a lot of bad habits, some reluctance to change and a touch of cynicism. With youth comes the willingness to challenge the way things are now, potential incorporation of new thoughts and technologies into "the way we get things done around here" and unbridled enthusiasm.

The optimum SE team (whether its 6 or 6,000 members) has a mixture of youth and experience - and I know I am equating age and experience and that's not always the case. It's also the case that the average age of the SE team frequently matches the average age of the entire company (to within a year) - so it's interesting to note this data from Payscale showing age related to technology company.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to draw your own conclusions about the data.

 

Where's the December Newsletter ?

 

So What Happened To The December Newsletter ?

Well - As many of you have noticed - we launched a new website at the end of November and had a little editing and debugging to do after that. Like all new ventures it consumed more time than expected.

Then - I was travelling - and got into the zone for another 3 chapters of the long-awaited "Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer" eBook. Although I'm pretty good at multi-tasking many things - I'm terrible at doing it for two different writing projects. So the eBook won! The good news is that makes a 1Q 2016 release of the Trusted Advisor book far more likely.

There will be a January 2016 newsletter which I expect to get out a few days early. It will have all new content - including an article on The Piranha and The Sales Engineer and my vote for SE Book Of The Year. We're also rolling out an expanded 2-Day version of the Solutions Sales/Value Selling For Sales Engineers module, more SE Leadership classes and webinars and some other tweaks to the MTS curriculum.

Stay tuned!