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!

The First Law of Business Value Discovery

Twenty-five years ago, a bunch of Sales Engineers sat in a bar (this sounds like a joke..) and came up with a number of rules and principles to guide them through the Business Discovery Process. Over the years I’ve added to and refined that list and it now forms part of our Business Value Discovery (BVD) workshops. Of course – the most important of all these rules is the First Law – and that’s the one I want to take you through.

It’s not anything like “ask open-ended questions” or “challenge the customer” or “link your technology to the business” as they deal with the how of BVD, instead it focuses, just as you should, on the customer outcome, or the what and why. The long version is:

“Every technology purchase is driven by a single business number. Either that number is too small and someone want to make it larger, or it’s too large and someone wants to make it smaller.”

The key to being a world-class Sales Engineer is uncovering

(a)    What is that number?

(b)   Who cares about the number?

(c)    Does it need to be made larger or smaller?

(d)   What’s the economic value to the customer of that change?

(e)   Is it important to change that number NOW?

Think about some of these situations. A number may be too large and needs to be reduced.

1.       Cost Of Goods Sold

2.       Response Time

3.       Online Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

4.       Backup Time

5.       Personnel

Or a number may be too small and need to be increased.

1.       Market Share

2.       Success Rate

3.       Upsell Ratio

4.       Gross Profit

5.       Employees With A Specific Skill Set

Here’s the call to action. Think about the last dozen sales transactions you have been involved with – either as a sales rep, presales engineer or services person. What was your customer’s number? How early in the sales process did you uncover it? Is there any common theme across your customer base?

Understanding and then satisfying the First Law Of Business Value Discovery allows you to focus on outcomes and results instead of features and functions. First things first!!

 

(Note to true engineers: Yes - I know I conflated law, rule and principle)

June , WTF, And Other SE Things

The monthly website refresh has happened and the June newsletter has been distributed. The main topic this month is the "WTF" Presentation - or Wonderful Technical Features pitch that almost every SE has to give multiple times every quarter.

I decided to write this (and have a little fun with my inter-dimensional reverse dynamic network backup and data regeneration feature) because I have just seen a ton of these truly terrible product-oriented decks over the past 2-3 months. There seems to be a disconnect between Product Management/Marketing and the Sales/Pre-Sales team over what is needed. As an SE, sometimes you have to talk techie and satisfy the IT gurus in the room - that's part of the job - but doing it with a boring, unstructured and almost illegible deck isn't the way to go.

 

And many of the "three-hour-tour" demos I have seen are not much better! The article lays out three quick and very simple ways to change the WTF so that it is a little more fun and memorable for everyone. If your PM group generates WTF's pass them the article - and if they don't - be thankful!!

 

We also look at harnessing The Power Of Three's (note the "three" in the WTF article) as a way to help your customer actually remember what you are showing them. If they don't remember it, they won't understand it and if they don't understand it they most certainly won't buy it.

 

We also make a quick pitch for the MTS Video Series - it's just under 2 hours of video that covers six major SE concepts and is really "The Best Of John".

 

Enjoy!

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.