The Wizard Of The Whiteboard 1

If you are a regular reader of the blog, or my newsletter, you know I am a big fan of Visual Selling and of closing the laptop during a sales call. So far, I’ve had over 6,000 Sales Engineers go through my whiteboard training and I often start with a quick go-up-to-the-board and draw-out-pros-and-cons exercise. One of the top items we discuss is that of credibility.

Why is using a WB related to credibility? It’s because it’s YOUR WHITEBOARD (actually it’s a jointly owned WB if you do it right – but that’s another story). Think about it. The idea goes from your brain straight to your pen and onto the board. It’s not a PowerPoint that some marketing dweeb has created that you are reusing. The degree of personalization and therefore credibility is immense. Just the fact that you can draw out the solution rather than depend on PPT gives you the aura of being a subject matter expert. Since Credibility is one vital factor in building Trust and becoming the Trusted Advisor SalesEngineer, it is an important skill to learn.

Having bad handwriting, no apparent artistic ability, no idea how to get started, or even claiming that you cannot possibly explain something so complicated as your solution on a little sheet of paper (or even an iPad screen) are NOT excuses to put down the pen and give up. My elementary school teacher would be stunned that I make a living teaching people how to draw. I could probably justify my claim that I had the worst handwriting and the least art talent in my class – yet for over 25 years in the presales business, I have readily picked up a pen and drawn “stuff”! When I joined Oracle, as a $80m company, you were required to sketch out the Oracle database architecture on a blackboard or via transparencies. If you couldn’t draw the infrastructure and illustrate it – you couldn’t do your job.

So how do you start? Remember that the best whiteboard of all is one that you plan beforehand, rather than create ad-hoc. You’d never give a demo or a presentation without running through it first, would you? Pick just a couple of PPT slides, a question you are always asked, or even a concept your audience struggles with – and create a 5-8 minute board. Focus more on imagery and icons and less on words – words kill whiteboard time. Have some fun.

(Then sign your company up for one of my classes!)

Better .. And PreSales ...

I can guarantee that whenever I run one of my Business Discovery For Sales Engineers workshops and examine the results of a "why should people buy your stuff?" exercise .. I will see the word BETTER a half-dozen times. The trouble is that hearing "better" doesn't really help you conduct better discovery!

Some examples:

1. A Business Intelligence / Analytics company promising "better decisions"
2. A Backup/Recovery company promising "better backup times"
3. A Security Company promising "better compliance"

Google will give you over 2.8 bllion hits for "better". These range from the Better Business Bureau to Better Homes and Gardens to A Better Recipe for almost anything. Who defines better?

The three basic reasons (The Three Wise Men) why people buy is to increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk. So when you say your product / service / solution makes something better - it tells me nothing (as I wouldn't expect it to make them worse!!). How am I going to be able to make "better decisions" and what will that yield me in revenue/cost or risk. Maybe I can change my product mix in a store on a weekly basis instead of a month - and capture three extra weeks of selling a hot item. Maybe I run a promotion and can tell within a day that the only people using it are my existing customers (so I'm losing money) and that I'm not gaining any news ones - so I stop the discount.

Better doesn't cut it. Any time you read the word better in one of your slides or some marketing collateral - ask yourself specifically how something is made better, and what the client gains as a result. Otherwise you have a soft and fuzzy benefit with no clear ROI. It's incredibly hard to get controllers to spend money based on those criteria. Remember the grandiously named "Care's First Law Of Business Discovery" which states that "Every business issue ultimately can be reduced to a number. That number is either too small and needs to be made larger, or its too large and needs to be reduced." The art of being a great SE is to find out what that number is, which way it needs to go, who cares about it, and how much its worth.

That's a much better way to look at better!
 

2013 New Year Resolutions

One of my New Year Resolutions for 2013 was to blog and tweet more often to both raise my social profile and to share useful content (in my opinion) with others. So here is my first contribution for 2013 - and what better way to start than to lay out some great 2013 Resolutions for the Sales Engineer, The SE Manager, in fact for anyone who deals with the complex technical sale.

Here are a dozen positive resolutions, six things to avoid - all packaged with some wonderful resolution advice from NY Professor of Psychology Peter Gollwitzer. (pdf file)

At this time of year (or next month for those celebrating the Chinese New Year) it's a great time to assess your skills and compare them with last year. What has improved - what has declined, and what haven't you even started on? One of the best things you can do is to publicize your major goals/resolutions to others so that you cannot backslide.

Here are a couple of mine:

1. I am gloing to finish the manuscript for "The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer"
2. I am going to gain one more major client this year.
3. I am going to blog and tweet more ( more = 100% increase )
4. I am going to revamp my website.

That's enough for now. What are you going to do?
 

The Fallacy Of "Fine!"

 "How did the sales call go?"

“it went fine.”

“How was the demo?”

“It was fine”

“How are we doing on the RFP response?”

“It’s all going fine”

As both a former pre-sales leader and former IT executive, the word “fine” sends shivers down my spine. Fine is supposed to be a term of praise relating to excellent quality as in a fine wine, or a fine-looking horse – however, it seems to becoming one of those indeterminate words that can be either good or bad. For those of you who don’t have English as a primary language I apologize for the nuances of the spoken word, because “fine” is downright dangerous in the profession of Sales Engineering. Let’s take a real life example.

“How was the sales call?” I ask.

“It went fine”, replies my SE.

I pause, raise a quizzical eyebrow, and use the power of silence.

After 5 seconds he continues, “Well, they seemed to like what we were saying, although they didn’t ask very many questions and I’m not sure that they 100% got our message.”

“So what are the next steps?” I prompt him.

“Well, we really don’t have any. They said they did not need any further information at this point while they were figuring out their budget. They’re going to get back with us for a demo date.”

“Just so I’m clear, we don’t know any of their business drivers, they really don’t see a fit for our technology solutions, they probably have no budget and there are no next steps that we can drive? That’s your definition of fine?”

Silence

I first learnt this lesson when I was teenager out with my girlfriend. I learnt that when she said everything was “fine” it really wasn’t – and after a while I could judge just how fine she was not by counting the number of “f”’s the word started with and the degree of snarl in her voice.  We are not that extreme in the business world, yet the next time someone tells you that everything is/was/went/will be fine – push back and ask the next question, as there is way more than meets the eye to a fine SE.

Why Selling Solutions Is Only Half The Sales Story

As a CIO, the only “Products” I ever bought cost $299 or less and got some user or department off my back by providing them with some helpful utility. More importantly, I never,ever, ever bought a Solution!

Yes. Everything that your marketing and sales enablement teams have been telling you isn’t exactly true. Surprise! Most of those “solution” methodologies miss the mark if you take them purely at face value.

Stunned Silence? So what do IT and Business Unit leaders actually buy from a vendor? There is relationship, security, relief from pain etc. .. but what we really buy are ..   results and outcomes.

In case you think I am playing with words, let me explain.

Many years ago I needed to make my programmers more productive, so we did the usual thing. That was build an RFP with our wish list, and send it out to 4-5 vendors with a really tight deadline for responses. The vendors all whined and complained, the smart ones got on the phone with some of my department heads, and the RFPS were submitted. The next week we paraded the vendors in for their pitches .. five of them .. so that by the end of the week our brains and our behinds were numb. Fortunately I had smart people working for me, they created an Excel score sheet, and voila!! Vendor #1 had a score of 73 points, Vendor #2 had 71, and the rest were in the mid to low sixties. Technically there wasn’t that much to choose between vendor #1 and #2, although #1 had a few more features and functions.

I had to make a decision – and chose Vendor #2, despite the lower score. Why? Two reasons – firstly I felt they had done a much better job of discovery, and secondly they didn’t try to sell me a solution that made my programmers 39.2% more productive. The sales team was smart and sold me an outcome. The back story is that my company was coming out with a new product, and that IT was on the critical path as we couldn’t reprogram our internal systems fast enough to support the launch. We would delay by a month, and that would cost us $8,000,000. I was also tired of going to executive meetings about the project and having the finger of shame pointed at me. Enough! So the outcome the sales team from Vendor #2 sold me was that of accelerating development by 5 weeks so that we could launch in time and gain an additional $8m in revenue, PLUS .. my IT department was no longer holding things up and my political risk disappeared in the executive suite. Sweet indeed.

The solution was software and processes that would make my programming staff more productive (as I’d said I want them to be more productive). But the result was those magical five weeks and some major political clout.

A more mundane example is this .. an aspirin is the solution to a headache (a literal pain!), yet what I am really buying is relief from pain – the outcome is a clear head. Don't sell aspirin (and especially don't talk about dosage levels, uptake values and side effects to a man with a bad headache).

So what do you sell – products, solutions, or results and outcomes?

November Content : Webcast Demo Crimes and More ..

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone in my part of the world (Just North of Philadelphia) and the cleanup has started. Fortunately we survived with minimal damage to the house, just a few loose roof tiles and window shutters. There are trees down on roads, cars and even houses, and much of the region is still without power even after 4 days - so we're thankful that we have power and a warm house with a solid roof over our heads.

The November Issue of The Mastering Technical Sales Edge will be released on Tuesday 6th. Here is a preview of the content:

Back in the mid-90's I created a Demo Crime list and presented it to my fellow technical managers at Sybase. Many people have picked up on the idea since then, so I thought it was time to create a Webcast/Virtual Demo Crime Files list. Review the list and see how many of these heinous crimes you see committed every day ( I also provide some ideas for good, clean virtual demos as well).

Many companies hold their annual Sales Kickoff (SKO) meeting in January or February. The Corporate Sales Meetings article provides some thoughts and ideas for making it more productive from a Sales Engineering point of view. You can also hire me to conduct a presales keynote or some Professional Skills training workshops too!

Ask John deals with the perennial question of "how can I stop my salesperson treating me like just another sales tool?" . It's surprisng how often I get asked that question.

Book Of The Month is Sexy Little Numbers by Dimitri Maex. It's an interesting look at how companies can analyze their customer data and get more value from it. If you are engaged in Big Data, BI, Analytics, In-Memory Databases or regular CRM it's a good background read.

Stay tuned for two exciting pieces of news. The first is about a partnership that may extend the Mastering Technical Sales Brand on a full-time basis into Asia-Pacific; the second about the creation of a Professional Organization for Presales Engineers. Things are happening!

 

The Less You Know, The Better The Elevator Pitch

Yesterday I participated as a panel judge in reviewing the 2 minute elevator pitches / door openers of a 35 member presales team. The panel was the VP of Sales, VP and Director of Marketing, and me. The scenario was that you suddenly get two minutes alone (anywhere – cafeteria, lobby, elevator) with a relatively senior executive of a company that you have been working with. How do you make that executive curious enough about what you are doing, or what you have learnt, in just two minutes? Curious enough that they will grant you more time or another meeting?

The exercise is useful because it teaches you to condense your thoughts into less than two minutes and get a high level summary that may provoke or challenge the executive. This actual situation doesn’t happen as often as marketers  or sales trainers would believe, but it certainly does happen. (I once got 60 seconds with Bill Gates in an elevator!)

What was interesting is that there were two classes of people who excelled in this situation. The first type was exactly what you expect – the seasoned SE who is used to rapidly translating technology into key business issues and then clearly communicate. The second type – was the people in the audience who knew the least about the technology! Really! The sales operations staff and two new hires gave an awesome pitch. Why? Because they didn’t commit any of these “elevator” crimes.

1.       Taking one minute to get to the point. (that’s 50% of your time)

2.       Using techno-speak and jargon and acronyms.

3.       Failing to talk about current/future issues.

4.       Neglecting some vision phrase like ‘suppose’, ‘imagine’, or “what if?’

5.       Having so many points there was no focus

6.       Not asking any questions

7.       Failing to have a call to action at the end.

So let’s be positive instead. Next time you are asked to give an elevator pitch – give it the shaft. No executive wants to hear who you are and what you do – they want to know how you can help them and maybe learn something new. So, instead

1.       Bottom Line Up Front after the basic pleasantries.

2.       Speak clearly and concisely.

3.       Lay out the pain statement. But don’t overdo it.

4.       Help the exec imagine the future with the pain fixed.

5.       Single point, single focus

6.       Ask at least one question.

7.       Ask for a next step.

Is that a lot for two minutes? No. When you plan ahead you may even have 30 seconds left over. Give it a try.