Bullets

I was flying out to California today - minding my own business on the plane. Then the two folks next to me crack open their laptops and start working on a presentation. Curiousity being a natural human habit, I kept sneaking a peek at their efforts.

Finally the guy (VP of Sales for a SAP VAR) challenges me and says "so what do you think?".

Never one to be a shrinking violet I responded with "it looks really boring and you have wayyy too many bullets". His companion smiled and then she gave me a quick smile.

"How would you do it?" she asks

So I tell her. We cut and paste the eight bullet points on each slide into the notes. We insert a couple of appropriate visuals and include a small amount of text relating to the two most important points on each slide. Voila. It's cleaner - and even the sales guy nods in approval.

So Marcus and Heidi - if you are out there - let me know how the big presentation goes today in Palo Alto.

Hope Floats

We are in the business of selling hope!

So said a relatively well-known politician speaking to a collection of business-finance-economics students at a local college last week. I'm not sure how to categorize my initial reaction - except that i resisted the impulse to hurl my shoes at him. Yet after a few minutes I thought .. "well, yeah!". It's really a classic case of current state (misery), desired state (happyness and security) with hope as the bridge to get you there.

Of course, when you look at the bridge of hope in more detail ..

My point is that using good ol' Solution Selling terminology - we are in pain. Some of us have latent pain, most have real pain, and a distinct few have the vision as to how they may overcome their pain. So Selling In a Down Economy does need to focus on economics, tangible ROI, extensive differentiation - but don't forget to throw in that little shining nugget of hope.

March Content

The March updates to Mastering Technical Sales were published over the weekend. You will note that I am doing a lousy job of updating the MTS Blog. So March will be better!

New content includes

The Stress-Free Demo

BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front

Ask John - Rewards with no cash.

Last month's talking point Selling In A Down Economy is still generating a lot of interest and is the most downloaded file from the site this year.

Over the course of March I'm going to be updating the Leadership section, as well as working on a project I'm calling S3e - Solution Selling for Sales Engineers.

Stay tuned.

New February Material

The MTS Website was updated over the weekend with some new material.

Selling In A Down Economy : A guide for Sales Engineers to make the most of the current economic state, featuring six strategies for success.

Customer Stories: "Tell Me A Story" : We all know customer stories are important, but how do you go about informally collecting them in a sales organization, and how should they be structured?

Follow The Money : A handy-dandy one-pager which lists all the really useful sources for gathering key business initiatives and financial metrics for publicly traded companies.

Enjoy - and as always I would be interested in your thoughts and feedback.

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!

Fixing The Garage Doors

Last week one of the large springs on my garage door broke – resulting in much wailing and grinding of metal as the one remaining spring took up the load to lopsidedly raise and lower the door. I know from previous experience that (a) I have to replace both springs and (b) it is a much easier job to do with help. Replacing the door springs single-handedly is about a 90 minute job, replacing them with my son’s assistance would be a 15 minute job. Swallowing my male pride I asked for help and everything went smoothly – plus now my son knows how to replace a garage door spring (or how much to reasonably pay someone else to do it for him).

The moral here – mentoring can help both sides of the relationship, AND, sometime admitting you really need help of any kind can make you stronger, wiser and save you time in the long run. Think about that the time you are gamely struggling through a RFP, a new demo or a troublesome installation.

Tough Talk For Hard Times

Thomas Hoffman's cover story in the Jan 19th edition of Computerworld is subtitled "Nine Ways To Get More Out Of Software Vendors in 2009".

Now, I'm all for customers driving a fair and reasonable bargain and always asking for a little more. Indeed, in these hard times I am all for the customer and the software supplier to renogiate a contract if both sides get something out of it. Yet this article takes us back twenty years to when a vendor was exactly that - a vendor. No thoughts of partnership, trusted advisor or strategic supplier - just a miserable old vendor. It is a very one-sided view of the relationship with nothing in there for the vendor, except, eventually, some revenue. I thought we had gotten past that by now.