Making Mistakes

I just finished Alinia Tugend's Making Mistakes as the review book for June.


It was tough reading. The basic premise is that mistakes are good - as long as they are non-fatal, are found and corrected rapidly and are learning experiences. This is all dependent upon the prevailing social or corporate culture that we live in. So far , so good - although like many business books nowadays it has one central theme and just beats you over the head with it for several hundred pages.


My viewpoint on mistakes, as far as the Sales Engineering community is concerned, is that they are healthy. Einstein was once quoted as saying that if you didn't make mistakes you weren't really learning and trying. Yet as SE's - we demand perfection - perfection of ourselves, perfection of our software/hardware and perfection from the rest of the team. Not too realistic. Throw in a demanding sales manager and that's not an environment that is going to be adaptable to change.


As a manager I always tried to differentiate between a MISTAKE - such as failing to prepare adequately before a demo or missing a key business issue, with a mistake - such as a slide that didn't get quite get the point across, or pressing the wrong button on a screen. Why is this of interest to me? I'm in the business of making people change - change the way they perform Discovery, change the way they present, change the way they design PPT, change the way they structure and design demos. None of that is going to happen without a few mistakes in front of the customer - yet in the long run my customers tell me about increased win-rates, fewer demo do-overs, better POC conversion rates etc - all because someone was wiling to take a (measured) chance.


The morale of the post is try something different. Practice it, think it through, and then add it to your customer-facing repertoire. (And when it works - share it with your peers). It's what will make you a better SE.

A Vent: The Player/Coach

I just read a job posting that is looking for a PreSales Engineering Manager - responsible for 10-12 individual contributors in a more or less central location. The job description looks fairly standard - then I got to the piece about "this is a player/coach position - the manager will have an individual quota as well as the team quota".

So let me get this stright - this poor guy/gal is supposed to not only develop, mentor and manage 12 pople - but they also have to go out and "sell" stuff themselves. Amazing. This is an organization which probably still hasn't fully recognized the potential and the promise of dedicated presales leadership. I can guarantee that somewhere in the org there is a person saying "well -this position takes away a direct customer-facing SE; they'll have to contribute something."

Why does this drive me nuts? Well - one is the disparity; you rarely see a sales manager position beng advertised as a player/coach if they are managing a dozen reps - and secondly - what this org will get is exactly what they are asking for - a manager instead of what I suspect they need - which is a leader.

Maybe it's just because I'm cranky at the end of a long day, but .. 

Something Old, Something New

I’ve been following a number of interesting discussions on LinkedIn over the past few weeks. Many of them are on the same theme as this one – which is “What Are The New Rules of Selling…?”. My response is that other than some technology differences in speed-of-interaction – there are no new rules. They are the same old rules, just rediscovered. If you converse with your customers instead of preach to them; if you discover how they buy instead of forcing the sale; if you focus on value instead of features; and if you focus on results instead of products and solutions – in short, you understand your customer – that’s selling! Old or new.


I often say as a senior IT executive that I never ever bought a solution, I bought results and outcomes. I preferred conversations that focused on revenues, expenses and risk. So I chuckle when I read about the newest Value-based selling, or Curiosity-based selling or any of the other New-old methodologies. In essence, as pre-sales engineers we understand this – it’s rare to find an SE who wants to conduct less discovery and needs analysis; not always something you can say about our sales brethren.




What other sales ideas have come back into fashion?

May Content and Updates

The website has been updated for May.

This month features Baseball Bats and Breadcrumbs as the lead article. This peculiar title is a result of some frustrations I used to experience as a senior IT executive, so it is written from that viewpoint (and thanks to Mike Lohr from Tripwire for "tripping" that memory last month). I talk about how you need to blend directness (the baseball bat) with some subtlety (the breadcrumbe/candy) when presenting.

The second article deals with how to set up Presenter Mode in PowerPoint. When following the rules of decomplexification that I preach, you often have to cut and paste text from the slide into your notes. Presenter Mode allows you to access those notes, plus a bunch of other useful stuff, when you are making your PowerPoint Pitch. Every SE in the world should know how to do this!

Ask John looks at my response to an interesting question from Lacey down there in New Zealand. She has been looking ta improving her time management and asked how I started the day. Not that I am a time guru in any shape or form - but it's always interetsing to see how someone else does it. Especially as I tend to break a couple of the weel established rules about handling your time and email anyway.

This months book is "Proactive Selling" by Skip Miller. At first I thought it was going to be another formulaic sales methodology book - but it wasn't; well - at leats not entirely. I learnt three interesting things from the book which made it well worth the $12. It gave me another way of suggesting how accounts can be prioritized from the SE viewpoint, a reminder about PowerHour (which I talk about in my Ask John column anyway) and then an intriguing analogy about speaking Spanish, Greek and Russian to Techies, Managers and Executives.

Enjoy the read and good selling!

The Multimedia Marathon - Do The Math!

Those of you who have ever attended one of my workshops know that my primary message revolves around simplification and focus. I was recently working with a highly analytical and technical SE team so I challenged them to do the math. We looked at a standard one hour sales call and calculated the amount of information that would typically be relayed. Here is what we came up with.

Presenting/Telling:      10,000 Words
Presenting                   30-40 PowerPoint slides   =or=
Demoing                     30-50 distinct screens

Now put yourself in the place of the customer. How, out of all those words and screens, do I figure out what is most important to me? How good a job are you, as the Pre-Sales Engineer, doing in guiding your customer towards the technical and business nuggets of gold they need to make a decision to buy your stuff?

If your #1 value proposition and differentiator in how you fix their #1 business problem takes you 25 words to explain - then the statistical change of that being top of mind with the customer is 25/10,000 or 0.25% if you don't help it along.

Scary odds!

WhiteBoarding The Chinese Way



  Proof that presales is presales the world over! I just finished a workshop in Beijing with 25 Chinese presales engineers. I feel that I learnt as much as they did about whiteboarding in their particular business environment. For example - I learnt that Chinese customer are as tired of PowerPoint as the rest of us; I learnt that whiteboarding is easier and faster in Chinese script; and I learnt that you don't draw the competitors solution in red as that is a lucky color!



 We also developed a neat trick of putting current state within the top third of a poster board along with some economics, the bridge in the middle third and the desired/future solution state in the bottom third. To make the comparison even more forcefully at the end, fold the paper to eliminate the middle 1/3 bridge and directly align and compare the current and desired state data. Different colors, comparative numbers = awesome presentation results.

Great job everyone!

April in Asia

I'm just starting my Asian tour - a week in Singapore and then four days in Beijing. Both are new cities for me so I'm looking forward to some business and pleasure during the ten days. The April MTS content has been posted on the website and the newsletter will be distributed on Tuesday April 5th morning (EDT).

This month I came up a dozen great ideas for SE's at the start of a quarter. Since most companies have just finished Q1 (with notable exceptions) it's typically an occasion for a few days of down time before the constant drumbeat of presentations, demonstrations and POCs start up again. So it's a great time of the year for an SE to not only catch-up on overdue tasks, but to plan ahead for some self-improvement. Read The Quarter Is Done - Now What? for some ideas.

I've also heard a lot this year about the constant drain that internal meetings take on the time of an SE. Some of these meetings are beyond our control and are scheduled by people several levels up the food chain - but hey - some aren't. You can get control back over your week by shaving some minutes from each meeting - here are some ideas to do that - beyond the standard "set an agenda" stuff.

This month's Ask John deals with an SE who has just been given a team lead position in a new small business "run-and-gun" operation and the difficulties he is facing in getting the reps to focus on the requirements given the in-and-out nature of the business.

Finally , the course highlighted for the month of April is a management workshop designed to help SE Managers mentor and give feedback to their teams. It's the #1 job of any manager to develop and serve their staff - not something that too many SE managers always focus on given the revenue demands.

Good selling!