The Challenger SE Part 2 - Don't Call The Baby Ugly!

The Challenger Sale has really had an impressive impact on the high technology salesforce. More than 50% of my clients have either formally or informally adopted it as an overlay on top of their current sales process. Yet looking back at implementation over the past two years I’ve noticed one persistent problem in both the sales and pre-sales utilization of the “Challenge” – and that is what I now label as “Calling The Baby Ugly”

The Ugly Baby

You would never, ever, tell parents that their baby is ugly. You always look for something positive to say and provide some form of complement. Yet sales and presales alike, emboldened by the Challenger Sale, quickly launch into a description of why a customer’s processes/personnel/strategy/implementation is wrong (i.e. ugly) and then offer to fix this ugliness. Customers have invested their time, money and resources into their current situation and take pride in their work – so a full-frontal attack on the status quo rarely works.

 Customer Reaction – The Three “D’s”

 Sales takes the Challenger Sale and tries to disrupt the customer and their thought process, which can be a very unpleasant experience. You more directly you challenge, the more you need to be 100% accurate and on-point. Customers can react negatively in one of three ways:

1.    Defend – they defend the status quo and why things run the way they do. This is an almost guaranteed way to ensure that “Do Nothing Inc.” gets the deal. Nothing will happen and the harder you try to push your Challenge the stronger the defense will become.

2.    Deny – they will deny that there is a problem. Remember the rule that “it is not a problem until the customer says it is a problem”. Denial and defending tend to go hand in hand.

3.    Destroy – they will destroy your ideas and also destroy your client relationship. There is no upside to following this path.

In all of these cases you need to make a decision how to react when you start to get some pushback or objections – in almost all cases you need to proceed with caution.

Asking Better Questions – The Three Customer “C’s”

 

Companies invest a lot of time and money teaching their salesforce how to ask better questions – the problem is that the customers don’t play along.

1.    Customers rarely follow a script and allow you to follow a pre-determined line of questioning, no matter how well you prepare.

2.    Customers don’t always know what they want. So sometimes that voyage of self-discovery just gets them lost, dazed and confused.

3.    Customers don’t always tell you everything you need to know and you cannot get the whole story. Sometimes that is accidental and sometimes deliberate.

So What Should A Sales Engineer Do?

In Part 1 of this series I explained how customers believe that the SE offers more value than anyone else from the vendor organization and detailed some ways to capitalize on that. The key is to approach the customer with some humility and deference. (Sometimes you have to approach the challenge head-on and directly – possibly with the classic Wall Street Managing Director or the Executive who says you have two minutes – but let’s say for now that is a corner case and not the norm). How do you take this approach?

Step 1 – Will The Customer Listen To Me?

 

Many SE’s use that Trusted Advisor term, which in this case means will the customer listen to, and accept, my advice? We’ve all been in the position when we have given someone really good advice and they have ignored us. If you have that T/A relationship with the customer, life is easier. If you don’t, you are explicitly going to have to ask permission. As an extreme, contrast the Global Account SE who lives and breathes one large client, compared to the inside SE who may deal with 8 clients a day!

 

Step 2 – Asking Permission

 

Customers accept negative news much better when presented in a positive manner. That means keeping the results and outcomes in mind, rather than focusing entirely on the current problems. My preferred approach is to preface the Challenge with a softening or even self-deprecating statement. Set-up examples might be:

“Can I share something with you about how Customer “X” dealt with a similar situation? I’m sure it’s not an exact match as I still have a lot to learn about your company, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile”

“Can I ask you something off the record?”

“I understand the company has a lot of time and effort vested in this current process and its serving you well. Would you be interested in learning about some ideas..”

“How about we take a break, go grab some tea/coffee, as I’d like to run a few ideas by you about alternative ways to..”

Step 3 – Make The Challenge

The challenge needs to be made from a twin basis of success and facts. That means speaking about how other customers have overcome similar obstacles and the results they achieved rather than diving down into the details of all the current issues. You also need to be clued into the non-verbal signals from the customer. Often the best approach is to get them out of a “sales environment” by moving to the cafeteria, or at least closing down the laptop.

The more people you have in the room, especially once you get past five, the lower the probability of Challenge success. That may sound counter-intuitive as you’d think your spark would have a greater chance of catching fire, yet mass psychology takes over and audiences conform to the norm. So the Challenge works better in small groups and one-to-one. Note that Rep + SE versus a single non-executive customer also isn’t a good situation as that also leads to defense.

Step 4 – Support The Challenge

Once the customer opens up to the Challenge, provide specific examples (evidence and impact) and back that up with numbers (usually time, money or headcount). Remember you are trying to spark curiosity and get a “tell me more” response and not trying to close the deal or stun the client with your intelligence!

Summary

 

The introduction of the Challenger Sale presents a great opportunity for the SE team to reassert themselves back into the customer relationship and break away from being a technical resource. There is a crisis in sales right now as reps struggle to cope with the better educated buyer, to ask more insightful questions and to truly provide value , so ….

“Never let a good crisis go to waste..”

-      Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago

Sales Engineering in Japan

Last month I spent a few days in Fukuoka, Japan and then in Tokyo. During that time I was interviewed by Keiichi Takagi on behalf of ITPro - the biggest online tech magazine in Japan.

They were interested in learning not only about Mastering Technical Sales, but why there was such a market for specialized professional skills training for presales engineers. This kind of training is extremely uncommon in Japan, which is why it generated so much interest.

For my Japanese readers - the native text of the article is here http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/atcl/interview/14/262522/092600039/?ST=selfup&P=1

For everyone else - here is the interview in English/American.

Q: What is the Mastering Technical Sales? How is it difference from others?

Mastering Technical Sales is unique because the role of the Sales Engineer is unique. If you think about the complex technology sale, there is usually an account manager who has the relationship with the customer and discovers a sales opportunity. The salesperson then has to bring someone technical with them to present, demonstrate and generally explain how the product or service actually works and how it will fit into the customer’s environment. That person is known as a Sales Engineer.

There are thousands of companies and thousands of books which claim to train and to optimize the salesforce. They all focus on the quota-carrying salespeople. We focus exclusively on the Sales Engineers who make up between 20 and 35% of a typical high-technology sales organization. It is an growing market and the SEs we work with are always very appreciative of the services we provide.

 

Q: What is the reason you wrote MTS in 2002?

A: It really started back in 1999. As a Sales Engineering leader I was frustrated because there was no specific professional skills training for my SE (Sales Engineer) team – all we had was sales training. I was sitting in a large windowless room in Atlanta, Georgia with my team of 40 SE’s and about 100 salespeople. We had a week of sales process training. It was boring as only about 25% of the content was useful to my staff and I felt we could learn it three faster than the salespeople!

 

I sat in my chair and said “why are we doing this? Someone should write a book about being a Sales Engineer!”. One of my young engineers looked back at me and replied “if you are so smart, who don’t you write one?”  That gave me the idea and I started to write the book the next day.

Q: Then, what is the reason for having revised the book in 2009 and again in 2014? What is the difference between a decade ago and now?

A: Much has changed about the basic SE job, the technology we use and the technology we sell.

First - fifteen years ago, is you know all the technical details of your product and could explain or demo them to technical people – that made you a great SE! Now that is a basic requirement of the role. SE’s are expected to have far more business expertise and to be able to link their technology back to the business benefits. There is now as much attention paid to the “sales” as to the “engineer”.

Second – with the introduction of virtualization, the usage of webcasts and cloud-based solutions I feel the technical side of the job has become a little easier. Virtualization allows an SE organization to create and to package up demo systems which can be easily reused and distributed. Webcasts allow a sales team to be far more responsive to their customers and to handle a multi-national customer base. Many companies now have large teams of “inside SE’s” whose primary role is to discover, qualify and demo over the phone/web. And then the cloud has allowed companies like salesforce to sell SaaS based solutions. Now almost every company has some form of cloud-based system which supports public, private or hybrid cloud hosting.

Finally that cloud base makes things like Proofs Of Concepts and general installations much easier to control for the SE. You can set up a demo system for a customer in a couple of hours, compared to the days or weeks it used to take when you had to go visit the customer on premise with a bunch of CDs, tapes and manuals!

Q: I'm going to ask you to look at the future. Will the role of SE change?

A: The role of the SE is already changing very quickly within the mid to large sized vendor. Smaller single product companies still focus on their technology and the technical advantages that brings to first movers who adopt their “solution”. The larger companies are asking their SE’s to become far more business oriented because that is what their clients want. A few years ago we helped run a survey of almost 1,900 senior level IT executives across the globe. They were asked “what are the skills you value most in a vendors presales team?” The #1 answer was “someone who understand my business”, followed by “#2 - someone I can trust”, ‘#3 - someone who can design innovative solutions with my staff” and “#4 - someone who can clearly and effectively communicate with me”. The #5 answer was “someone with deep technical skills”.

The demand now is for SE’s who can put together the technical skills with the business oriented skills and be able to speak technically to the IT audience and in value terms of revenue, cost and risk to the business and IT leaders. That is a hard profile to develop and even harder to hire in the general market.

 

Q: How about your business? How will you develop MTS for the future?

 

A: Business right now is wonderful. Professional skill development for Sales Engineers is a very underserved market – not just here in Japan, but everywhere in the world. My personal mission is to improve the profession of the presales engineer and to actually start a professional organization for all 250,000 of us in the trade.

We will continue to supply the basic skills every SE needs – through Discovery, Effective Demonstrations and Presentations, Webcasts, White Boarding, Handling Questions, The Executive Connection. I don’t think that will ever change.

We have spent a lot of time over the past 18 months working on some advanced material around “The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer” – in fact that is the title of my next book. Since customers feel that SE’s contribute more value in the sales process than the Account Manager, we are focusing on the skills a SE needs to become that Trusted Advisor, to the point where we can now measure a “trust score” between an SE and her client.

We are also expanding the reach of MTS. We started in the US, expanded into Europe, and now thanks to our partnership with Up2Speed in Singapore we have a large Asian presence. We can now deliver most of our material in Mandarin, Korean and Japanese (plus Australian!). As an example, last month we ran a couple of white boarding classes here in Tokyo for a client. I saw a video of the session. I cannot speak Japanese, but it was apparent that everyone was enjoying themselves in the class and were learning new skills.

 

Q: How you see Japanese IT companies? Please give us your advice, how SE can contribute in order that a Japanese company survive in global competition.

A: I’m still learning about the Japanese market and culture. This is only my second trip to your country so I still have a lot to learn. I think you can probably teach me more than I can teach you!

That philosophy applies to Japanese SE teams as well – there is a lot they can learn from other parts of the global SE organization, and there is a lot the global SE teams can learn from Japan. As they say in the USA – you need to “share your toys”. Over the years I have seen some great ideas and tools developed within Japan – like custom demonstrations, great competitive ideas and partner enablement. I’m also learning as I conduct more research about the Trusted Advisor” that it is a well-developed concept here in Japan, perhaps more than in any other part of the world.

I think everyone needs to be more willing to share, and that is one of the advantages of being an SE – in that we tend to share far more than salespeople or development teams ever will.

Q: John, any final thoughts for us?

A:  Yes. I have two for you. First I just have to say how excited we are about the Japanese market and the opportunity to work with the entire Japanese SE community. Turing the role of the SE from a job to a profession is important to me. Secondly, (and this isn’t a very Japanese thing to do), is to encourage every SE out there to understand that they are a very valuable part of the sales process and that they “own the account” as much as the salesperson does. Don’t just sit by the phone or wait for your inbox to light up with a task and be reactive to what the salesperson wants – make your own contacts and network within the customer!

Good luck and good selling!

Pricing And The Sales Engineer

This month’s MTS Edge newsletter features a lead article about Pricing And The Sales Engineer. Judging by some of the emails I received it is a very contentious subject. My view, and it’s a simple straightforward one, is that SE’s need to stay as far away from pricing as they can – at least from the customer viewpoint. So let me explain that in a little more detail.

First, on the scale of things that SE’s do and Account Manager’s do – pricing should clearly be the sales role. Yet in many companies it isn’t. SE’s are asked to put together configurations, and then to price them out – leaving the salesguy with not much to do in that area except apply specials and discounts and get approval (yes – and I know that is not always easy!) That kind of behavior is prevalent in hardware companies, in companies that deal with a lot of RFPs and in subscription model type environments.

There is enough for SE’s to do during the sale without having to get involved in complex pricing and configuration. Yes – the SE should validate the configuration and make sure that it is technically accurate and does the job for the customer, but they shouldn’t put the initial configuration together or price it. If your pricing and config is so complex that sales cannot do it – how can a customer ever hope to understand it? So if a rep (or a partner) can’t do pricing and config I think it is the role of sales management to teach them – not of the SE to bail them out. Contentious - yes. A little “not my job: - yes. But an appropriate use of resources and applying skills strength to strength. I've seen some SE teams spend 30% of their time on this task.

That said – any senior and experienced SE should understand the pricing model of their services/solution/product. Just as you can usually tell in the first 15 minutes of a call whether you are a “good fit”, you should also know an approximate deal size that you are looking at. As far as the customer is concerned you know nothing, but behind the scenes it helps you to be honest and do the right thing for the customer.

Just my thoughts.

The Solution Selling Empire Strikes Back

I had a quick trip out to Las Vegas this week for a fun ½ day whiteboard class with a new client, and decided to use the air time to clear out some of my backlog of business books. It was either that or dive into Book 5 of “Game Of Thrones”.

So I picked “The Collaborative Sale” and here is my review and my thoughts – in a longer version than the website or the August newsletter – and written from the Sales Engineering viewpoint.

Classic “Solution Selling” has come under fire and criticism since the publication of The Challenger Sale and the July 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End Of Solution Sales”. The Collaborative Sale by Eades and Sullivan is basically a somewhat artificial and heavy 210 page defense of Solution Selling. Updated and modernized, it pushes the concept of collaborating with your customer to end up with the correct “solution”. You do this, as a seller, by adopting one of three personas – the Micro Marketer, the Visualizer and the Value Driver.

My issues (or pains) with this book is that:

#1 – It is extremely salesrep focused, to the point of placing the rep at the top of the pyramid and everyone else subservient to him/her. I may be biased based upon my target audience of Sales Engineers, but this book seemed worse than most in assuming that no-one else really matters and that the rep solely sets strategy. We all know that doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) happen and that on many occasions the old-hand SE has to introduce the new rep to the politics and history of the account and then continually course correct.

#2 – The basic strategy of artificially adopting and shifting persona seems like you are not being true to yourself or the customer. It’s hard to become the “Trusted Partner” if you aren’t being honest with the customer – they’ll see through it. The personas need to become learned and natural behavior rather than forced tasks and interactions.

#3 It is fixated upon Buyer 2.0 and that’s already last year’s model. Much of the statements about Buyer 1.0 and implicitly Seller 1.0 are straw men designed to make a case, rather than be rooted in reality. The market, the competition and the buyer are constantly adapting, and you need to do that as well.

#4 The coaching strategy is based upon weaknesses and gaps rather than building strengths. Any manager who approaches account reviews with their reps in terms of “what did you do wrong” isn’t going to get too far. Imagine if your manager started with “let me tell you the 10 things you did wrong in that demo”.

#5 I feel (and this is just a feeling and is never explicitly stated) that the importance of Discovery in the Collaborative Sale is diminished on the basis that the customer is already 50-60% of the way through a deal and you are always in catch-up mode. My take is that Discovery is becoming even more important rather than less for the SE community. Sales should take it that way as well.

 As an SE I don’t feel there is much to gain from this book versus good old The New Solution Selling (which I do recommend) unless your company is actually adopting this process. There are changes in promoting customer alignment rather than control and the sections on technology you can use to create a self-brand are interesting, but that’s about it.

I do know that SPI (the folks who own Solution Selling) run great classes with role plays and practical examples that have to be far more on target than this book which focuses on the what, but never on the “how do I do that?”.

This isn’t a book for the SE library. The Challenger Sale is more applicable and on point than the Collaborative Sale.

The Third Edition Is Available!

The Third Edition of Mastering Technical Sales was sent out to bookstores on July 1st. Allowing for the US July 4th holiday the books should be available from Amazon and (my publisher) Artech House during the week of July 7th. The Kindle ebook version will take another week or two.

Since the 2nd edition was published in 2008, a lot has happened, both in our knowledge and the technical SE field in general. We added 4 new chapters around Business Value Discovery, WhiteBoarding, The Trusted Advisor and Building ROI Cases and we also updated practically every other chapter with revised content reflecting our international and non-software experiences over the past six years.

I'm thrilled to announce that the book has received a number of large pre-orders from technical SE teams and that I'll be doing several internal video interviews for various clients. As a little bit of blatant self-promotion - if you are interested in a large bulk order or making the book part of your onboarding program (which dozens of companies have already done) please contact me and I can link you up with my publisher. I am also working on getting a Chinese version available later this year.

What's next? Work is already underway on The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer. That's an eBook intended as an extension to MTS that deals with the often fuzzy topic of what it takes to be a T/A. It's written from an SE point of view, and includes some unique measurement capabilities for Trust - so you can judge how well you are doing!

Thanks for reading and please be sure to give me any feedback about the Third Edition that we can include in the Fourth!!

The MTS Sydney Edition

Welcome to the Australian version of the blog, live from Sydney. This is an exciting couple of weeks as I'll be down under conducting a number of dinner speeches, meetings and training workshops. That also means that the May newsletter was delayed a day because of time zone issues - it should be out 8am on Wednesday 7th May East US Time.

This months lead article is The Challenger Sales Engineer - where I give six great reasons why the Sales Engineer is the perfect person in the sales team to execute on the Challenger premise. It's something that every good SE has known for a long time, but often a lack of courage, permission and corporate culture gets in the way.

Article #2 is an update to "The Stress Free Demo" and examines a dozen things the SE can do to reduce the possibility of things going wrong in 'the big demo". It's amazing how much relates to planning and preparation!

Book Of The Month is Gerry Weinberg's Becoming A Technical Leader. It's written more from an It-problem solving point of view, but has some great insights in dealing with and motivating the "techie". And there is a varying percentage of techie in every Sales Engineer.

Also - a reminder about The SE Manager Pocket Guide if you didn't download it during April, and also that I finally released my video series "The Consultative Sales Engineer".

Good Selling!

Technical Trials and Tribulations

So this has been an interesting 10 days in that a strange bug effectively killed our website. I learnt a couple of things:

1. It's an important part of the business.
2. It badly needs to be updated and modernized.
3. Yahoo (my hosting service) has terrible technical support as I spent hours on hold and they hung up on my several times.
4. The bug was ultimately the results of some poor code from Amazon which was mis-interpreted by Yahoo Site Builder.

But enough of my problems. We are back up, and the new content has finally been posted. You'll be able to read about The Sales Engineer Advantage - why we SE's should be rock stars when in front of the customer (but aren't). There is also an interesting article on The Five SE Manager Basics (which are actually good for everyone else as well!).

The MTS Book Of The Month for SE's is Marshall Goldsmith's "What Got You There Won't Get You Here".  It's been one of my favorite books for years, and I recently had the opportunity to re-read it as part of preparation for a workshop I ran. Well worth your time to pick up a copy and learn about the 20 bad habits that may be keeping you back.

I challenge anyone to read the book and NOT see themselves in there somewhere. You really do feel like you are putting the training wheels back on your career.

More to come. The 3rd Edition of Mastering Technical Sales is nearing completion and is slated for a early July publication, and The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer in now underway as a planned eBook for later in the ear.

Plus I'm going to be in Australia or a week or two in May running some seminars and giving a couple of speeches.

Good Selling!

 

It's Not A Problem Until The Customer Says It Is A Problem, Unless ...

I had a very interesting experience this morning, listening in to a sales call initiated by one of my customers with one of their customers. My role was to quietly observe, and provide feedback on the entire process. I always enjoy these type of engagements as I get to learn about a new piece of technology, see buyer and seller behavior in action - plus it is great research and consulting material.

This call had a twist. After a little prompting the customer (a Senior IT Director) readily volunteered a couple of business issues that she had, the economic and political pain they were facing, and why they had to do something. In essence, she gave the sales team everything they needed to hear for some great Business Value Discovery.
 
"Not a problem", said the eager salesperson, "we can fix that for you".
 
(Now that surprised both me and the Sales Engineer on the call as neither of the problems were really in the sweet spot of the vendor. AND the IT Director knew that was the case.)
 
 Before the SE could jump in and qualify that response the customer replied:
 
"Wow. That is fantastic. Just to be sure, can you describe my problems to me in your own words?"
 
She was actually trying to help him, which was more than I would have done as a former CIO.  The rep didn't get the hint and plowed ahead with DESCRIBING HIS SOLUTION. Some amazing cloud-driven big-data social thingamabob technology.

She answered, "Yes, but what exactly is my problem?"

Common sense prevailed, I heard the SE typing a message in the background to the rep which said something along the lines of "Be Quiet!".

The SE took over, and gave a really nice paraphrase of the customers problems. You could hear the customer smiling on the other end of the phone. Things went much better.

The moral of the story? There are two.

1. "No problem" is a dangerous phrase and probably not one the customer wants to hear from you. At least not immediately.

2. It is a great exercise to paraphrase the key business issues back to the customer so that they know that you know.

 

Objections And Questions And Answers .. And Sales Engineers

I've always had a problem with the skill of "Objection Handling". Let me clarify that - not with personally handling whatever a client may ask me, but in the actual labelling of the task. Here's why.

I think "Objection Handling" is a salesperson activity. As in "I just gave a great pitch, and if I can hammer through these last few objections I'll get the deal!" It sets up the entire activity as something that is a little confrontational, maybe defensive and certainly becoming "us" (vendor) against "them" (client with money).

Sales Engineers Don't Handle Objections, They Answer Questions

What I've come to realize over the years, based on listening in to thousands of sales calls plus my own experiences in selling MTS services, is nearly 90% of the issues a customer may raise are ...  simply raised because they want an answer to a question. In fact you can turn any objection into an implicit question. Even the classic your solution costs too much (nicely handled in this Visualize Blog Post) can be reframed as "help me to understand the value of your solution and why I should care?"

I feel this approach has a few benefits.

1. It ensures that in the customer conversation you listen to understand, instead of listening to respond. A crucial part of active listening.
2. It reminds you that you have to understand why a customer is asking the question. And if you don't know - bounce it back and find out!
3. It positions you as the customers advocate and a step closer to that "Trusted Advisor" status.
4. You'd be amazed at what you can learn about a person and the company based on the questions they ask. (Hmm - think about that during your next Discovery call.)

There are some warnings too.

1. See point #2 above. If you don't know why a question is being asked - that is a danger signal in itself.
2. Make sure that you share just enough to answer the question. For many technical SE's it is viewed as an opportunity to show how smart you are. Not the purpose of the meeting! It really isn't.
3. Don't stray into other areas. Stay away from sales-type responses (for example, the standard SE response for pricing is "I Know Nothing")

So give it a try. Think "Answering Questions" (with Short Amazing Answers) instead of "Handling Objections" and see the difference it can make.
 

Micro-Resolutions And The February Newsletter

 

So much for the good intentions about blogging more in 2014. So .. I decided to follow the advice of the latest business book I read and reviewed .. Small Move, Big Change By Christine Arnold. She says that New Year Resolutions (or any kind of resolutions) are mostly destined to fail and proposes an alternate approach in which the resolutions are made on a smaller and more measurable scale. So instead of saying "I will do a better job of blogging in 2014" I instead created a micro-resolution which states "I will blog the day before the monthly newsletter comes out and two weeks after that."

Its measurable, very achievable, and may well turn into a habit. I like it!

The February Newsletter - which will now go out to almost 20,000 SE's across the globe, features two interesting articles. The first "Why Do Bad Sales Calls Happen" looks at poor sales calls from the SE point of view. You'll discover that although the effect is very measurable, your view of success is different from that of the salespersons. The good news is that if you decide to take action, instead of complaining, there is a lot you can do to lower the percentage of bad calls to participate it. It's not that hard!

Maybe to get those calls fixed you need to improve your email communications. That is what "BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front - for Email" examines. You'll get seven practical tips for improving email and shortening your reading and processing time. This months "Ask John" deals with the problem of reps scheduling sales calls during presales training - and how to lessen the impact.

All good stuff - thanks for reading. And we will see how my micro-resolution turns out!