Wisdom Through Beach Reading

I spent most of last week visiting St. Kitts and Nevis down in the Caribbean.  Relaxing and not working – a very pleasant experience. My intent was to sit on the beach and catch up on all my reading using my trusty Nook. All went well until mid-week, when I discovered that Barnes & Nobel will not let you purchase and download any eBooks if you are physically outside the US or Canada. At that point I was out of easy beach books, all my wife had to offer were romances, so I turned to the collection of business books I had stored and dived in. That’s a long way of saying I will be reviewing several books this month.

I started with David Siteman Garland’s Smarter, FasterCheaper. It’s a book reminiscent of one of those self-improvement shows on American TV at 4am and put me to sleep faster than sunshine and a few rum punches. It should be titled Boring, Verbose and Obnoxious – now I have to admit I only got ¾ of the way through it and there could be amazing pearls of wisdom in the last ¼, but I doubt it.

Next was John Medina’s Brain Rules. I quote John several times in my seminar so I enjoyed reading the whole book in which he cites 12 rules for the brain to function perfectly. It’s relevant to the SE because it deals with teaching and remembering – both on the giving and receiving end.

Finally I’m partway through Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and I’m really enjoying the book. It’s effectively an introduction to negotiation and seems to apply both professionally and personally. I have already made notes about how an SE can better negotiate with a salesrep, a sales manager, their immediate manager and the customer - never mind friends, family and significant others! I think it’s going to be the best of the three.

The moral of all this is having spent six weeks reading about mistakes and how to correct them, I neglected to be fully prepared for my vacation and ran out of trashy beach reads so was forced to start thinking about business again. A steep price to pay!

Thoughts for July

I've spent a lot of time the past six weeks thinking about mistakes, errors and omissions - especially as they relate to the role of the Sales Engineer. During that time I read Alicia Turgends "Better by Mistake" (which was just OK) and Atul Gawandes "The Checklist Manifesto" (which is July's highly recommended book). All that thought prompted me to write the Talking Point for this month which is Eliminating Mistakes In The SE Sales Cycle - A Quest for Perfection.

There are really two major forms of mistakes we make as an SE - the first comes from ignorance when you simply don't know something (and you may or may not know that you don't know it - if you follow me!). The swcond is where you definitely know something, but you show poor execution. You may forget to take a vital step or choose to ignore it. Each of these manifests itself in an error that slows the velocity of a deal through the sales cycle.

So I'm a big believer in process, checklists and pre-launch charts. Not to the extent that they take up hours of time and pages of dead trees - but certainly to the extent that they catch the obvious errors which we and others have made. (Ever given a demo and forgotten to sign-on, or cache some data, or clean out a screen, or link to the wrong database etc?)

So the July call to action - especially for smaller SE teams - is to build simple one-pager checklists and drive mistakes out of the cycle. And for larger companies - look at the checks and balances that you have, because over time they become too brdensone and then people skip them anyway!

Good Selling!

Making Mistakes

I just finished Alinia Tugend's Making Mistakes as the review book for June.


It was tough reading. The basic premise is that mistakes are good - as long as they are non-fatal, are found and corrected rapidly and are learning experiences. This is all dependent upon the prevailing social or corporate culture that we live in. So far , so good - although like many business books nowadays it has one central theme and just beats you over the head with it for several hundred pages.


My viewpoint on mistakes, as far as the Sales Engineering community is concerned, is that they are healthy. Einstein was once quoted as saying that if you didn't make mistakes you weren't really learning and trying. Yet as SE's - we demand perfection - perfection of ourselves, perfection of our software/hardware and perfection from the rest of the team. Not too realistic. Throw in a demanding sales manager and that's not an environment that is going to be adaptable to change.


As a manager I always tried to differentiate between a MISTAKE - such as failing to prepare adequately before a demo or missing a key business issue, with a mistake - such as a slide that didn't get quite get the point across, or pressing the wrong button on a screen. Why is this of interest to me? I'm in the business of making people change - change the way they perform Discovery, change the way they present, change the way they design PPT, change the way they structure and design demos. None of that is going to happen without a few mistakes in front of the customer - yet in the long run my customers tell me about increased win-rates, fewer demo do-overs, better POC conversion rates etc - all because someone was wiling to take a (measured) chance.


The morale of the post is try something different. Practice it, think it through, and then add it to your customer-facing repertoire. (And when it works - share it with your peers). It's what will make you a better SE.

A Vent: The Player/Coach

I just read a job posting that is looking for a PreSales Engineering Manager - responsible for 10-12 individual contributors in a more or less central location. The job description looks fairly standard - then I got to the piece about "this is a player/coach position - the manager will have an individual quota as well as the team quota".

So let me get this stright - this poor guy/gal is supposed to not only develop, mentor and manage 12 pople - but they also have to go out and "sell" stuff themselves. Amazing. This is an organization which probably still hasn't fully recognized the potential and the promise of dedicated presales leadership. I can guarantee that somewhere in the org there is a person saying "well -this position takes away a direct customer-facing SE; they'll have to contribute something."

Why does this drive me nuts? Well - one is the disparity; you rarely see a sales manager position beng advertised as a player/coach if they are managing a dozen reps - and secondly - what this org will get is exactly what they are asking for - a manager instead of what I suspect they need - which is a leader.

Maybe it's just because I'm cranky at the end of a long day, but .. 

Something Old, Something New

I’ve been following a number of interesting discussions on LinkedIn over the past few weeks. Many of them are on the same theme as this one – which is “What Are The New Rules of Selling…?”. My response is that other than some technology differences in speed-of-interaction – there are no new rules. They are the same old rules, just rediscovered. If you converse with your customers instead of preach to them; if you discover how they buy instead of forcing the sale; if you focus on value instead of features; and if you focus on results instead of products and solutions – in short, you understand your customer – that’s selling! Old or new.


I often say as a senior IT executive that I never ever bought a solution, I bought results and outcomes. I preferred conversations that focused on revenues, expenses and risk. So I chuckle when I read about the newest Value-based selling, or Curiosity-based selling or any of the other New-old methodologies. In essence, as pre-sales engineers we understand this – it’s rare to find an SE who wants to conduct less discovery and needs analysis; not always something you can say about our sales brethren.




What other sales ideas have come back into fashion?

May Content and Updates

The website has been updated for May.

This month features Baseball Bats and Breadcrumbs as the lead article. This peculiar title is a result of some frustrations I used to experience as a senior IT executive, so it is written from that viewpoint (and thanks to Mike Lohr from Tripwire for "tripping" that memory last month). I talk about how you need to blend directness (the baseball bat) with some subtlety (the breadcrumbe/candy) when presenting.

The second article deals with how to set up Presenter Mode in PowerPoint. When following the rules of decomplexification that I preach, you often have to cut and paste text from the slide into your notes. Presenter Mode allows you to access those notes, plus a bunch of other useful stuff, when you are making your PowerPoint Pitch. Every SE in the world should know how to do this!

Ask John looks at my response to an interesting question from Lacey down there in New Zealand. She has been looking ta improving her time management and asked how I started the day. Not that I am a time guru in any shape or form - but it's always interetsing to see how someone else does it. Especially as I tend to break a couple of the weel established rules about handling your time and email anyway.

This months book is "Proactive Selling" by Skip Miller. At first I thought it was going to be another formulaic sales methodology book - but it wasn't; well - at leats not entirely. I learnt three interesting things from the book which made it well worth the $12. It gave me another way of suggesting how accounts can be prioritized from the SE viewpoint, a reminder about PowerHour (which I talk about in my Ask John column anyway) and then an intriguing analogy about speaking Spanish, Greek and Russian to Techies, Managers and Executives.

Enjoy the read and good selling!

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!