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!

Profiling The Sales Engineer

Over the last year I've been involved in several personality profiling exercises conducted with teams of Sales Engineers. Right now one of my customer projects is developing an interview/personality profile for potential new hire presales engineers.

Most profiles seem to be built either on the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) system or on DISC - although it seems to me that DISC is easier for people (i.e hiring managers) to pick up and understand than MBTI. I also discovered an interesting variant on DISC that involves colors instead - so someone is a high Red instead of a high D - which is Dominant (quick , fast, get to the point type of person).

Although there is obviously no perfect profile - it is apparent that some personality trends lend themselves better to some types of SE jobs over others. Even if it as simplistic as different behaviors for strategic, big account solution-sell SE's versus transactional run-and-gun SE's.

I've settled on using DISC with the colors variant for those who are more visually driven - and my question is - are there any SE organizations out there who have profiled their teams? And would you be willing to share your results if I share the data I've gathered over the past 5 years with you?

A Brief Debrief : Self-Improvement for the Sales Engineer

Last week I wrote a guest article for executive recruiters J. Patrick & Associates. It's a simple method for Sales Engineers (in fact, for anyone) to get feedback about their performance and improve themselves. As I state in the article I have always been amazed how little time is spent on the debrief after a sales call. And usually what is covered are the sales essentials like next steps, follow-up.

So how is an SE supposed to get better? especially when you get feedback like 'great demo - John'. Well - what exactly was soooo great about it. Read the T3-B3-N3 summary methodology and find out how you can get better with just a few simple questions.

Shooting MTS Videos

For the last couple of days I've been in Boston shooting a series of video vignettes for one of my newest customers. I now have the greatest respect not only for the professionals behind the camera and sound equipment, but also, and it pains me to say this, for all the product marketing folks who have produced videos over the years for me when I was running a presales team.

It's hard work! Mainly because you have to generate all the energy by yourself as there is no audience to feed off and interact with. Two days of doing this feels like a full week on the road running seminars. To date I've cut "White Boarding 101", "The Perfect Pitch" and "Telling Stories" - all designed for the Sales Engineer. Tomorrow's session is specifically for Managers. I must admit I could really get used to being called "The Talent"!

What have I learnt? For as much as I talk about simplification, presentation mechanics and using PUNCH in your pitches - that's all doubly important when cutting a video. It's a humbling experience - particularly when watching the playbacks. If you think you're an ace, A+ presenter - try shooting video.

What's an SE Worth?

The lead artice for this month is "What's An SE Worth?". It looks at different ways of calculating the ROI of a Sales Engineer. I believe it is impossible to calculate the ROI of an entire organization, but it is possible to calculate the ROI of the last, or better yet the next, SE hired.

With the help of some friends (Sean Culen, Mike Lohr and Jim Sargent) out there in SE-land I look at the costs, the direct and indirect benefits of an SE. Mix that in with a sneak peek at my ROPE (Return On Presales Effort) methodology and you get a pretty good idea on the return for making your next hire - as well as some compelling soft benefits for the SE org that most HR/Finance folks never think of.

By using a mix of potential revenue, pipeline, utilization, revenue/head and winrate across the dimensions of geography, solution and actual activity you begin to see a different view of the economics of the SE.

The ultimate answer is - unless your sales are in the tank - there is usually a compelling economic case for one more hire.