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!
