Why I Don't Have A Corporate Overview

Interesting call yesterday. A reader had invited me to participate in a webcast with some of his manager peers to discuss their Professional Skills needs and a potential customized class they wanted me to develop. I’d fully prepared beforehand, researched the company and discussed the call format with my coach.

After the basic introductions, the senior manager present said:

Cust:      “John – why don’t you start off by presenting your Corporate    Overview?”

John:     “Actually I don’t have one. I have never needed to build one.”

Cust:      “Surely you must have needed one in the past. How do you let people know about all the things you do?”

John:     “Well, that’s what I use my website and the book for. In fact – I believe starting off with a Corporate Overview is wrong because it’s all about me. You are the customer, we should start with you. How about you tell me about what you do in the Professional Skills area now for your SE’s, how that is working, and what could be improved upon? For example – what do your sales partners think about your team?”

They talked for 50 minutes and all I had to do was affirm, reconfirm and ask them to explain a few acronyms. I uncovered some major pains, and pointed out a few items that they hadn't even thought about.

So my customer got a free preview of how I wanted them to sell. No customer wants to hear “Who We Are And What We Do” until they know that you care and that you understand them.

If your customer sessions start with “Hullo, I’m Joe, your account executive. Our company was started in 1995 by our three founders and we went public in 1999 and are now listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker symbol BOZO. We have 600 employees in 19 different countries serving over 60,000 users. This is a picture of our new corporate headquarters. Now for the next three hours here is my pre-sales engineer who will take you through every module of our product.”

Think again.

Between the July 4^th Independence Day Holiday in the US, and a 17-day European Tour I am making in July – the month is going to be a little hectic. So the July updates have already been applied to the Mastering Technical Sales site, and the newsletter will be released on Tuesday July 10^th.

The July lead article is The PreSales-Sales Partnership. It’s an edited transcript of a Q&A session I held with about 20 presales managers at a recent sales kickoff. At the end of the piece I’ve included a page relationship summary sheet – that should help you judge the quality of the partnership between Sales and PreSales. It’s important, as without an effective partnership, everything and everyone suffers.

That’s followed by an updated version of 31 Great Tips – a TipA Day To Keep The Webcast Blues Away. It’s a collection of “great ideas” taken from my Remote Demos and Presentations Workshop. Unless you’ve already been through one of my Perfect Pitch Workshops I am sure you’ll pick up a few ideas from the sheet.

Ask John revolves around Presales Readiness for new product launches. So many companies are focused on just “getting the product out” that they neglect the sales and presales personnel who actually have to sell ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is! I encourage a more aggressive approach in demanding training and collateral before product release and setting up a stakeholder go/no-go meeting to get some leverage.

The July SE Book Of The Month is “All-In”. It looks at how some of the best and brightest leaders around the globe have motivated their teams – big and small. Once you get past some of the “well, duh..” obviousness there is actually a god concept hiding underneath it.

As far as the European Tour. I’ll be in Amsterdam on July 5^th, and will be zipping through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and St. Petersburg, Russia over the course of 14 days – featuring some work and some play.

Its Black And White

My wife and daughters will readily volunteer that I am one of the last people in the world who should give out fashion advice. However – here is my case why “Black Is The New White” – at least for PowerPoint presentations.

 After every single speech or seminar I give – people comment on my use of slides with a black background.

“It’s Different”  

“They Got My Attention”

“Very impactful to drive home your key points.”

“They look SO much better than our boring standard white slides”.

You get the idea. So here, with apologies to my friends all over the globe in Corporate Marketing, is my reasoning.

1. White is jarring on the eyes. It is bright; it tires the eyes and psychologically fatigues the brain. A common trick we “black hats” use is to sneak in a slide with a white background after 10-15 dark slides – the audience gasps in horror and covers their eyes.

2.  In a dark room (sales kickoff, big seminar event), the use of white hurts even more because of the contrast with the surroundings.

3.  Pictures and images display so much better – as they usually blend in better with a dark black/grey background than a white one. That means no ugly white border strips.

4.  Look at me! Maybe this is the trainer’s ego – but I want the audience focused on me, once they have read the minimal text on the slide and processed the image. Bright white light attracts the eyes away from the speaker.

5.  White=Bad. Many presentation gurus and bloggers equate white slides with the Pavlovian experience of previous really awful PPT pitches. The last bad PPT was in white, so this one must be bad too. Sometimes you do just need to be different and give the brain a chance

6.  It works for Apple. OK – that may not be a completely valid argument, but they are doing pretty well with it.

Think About It.

Give Black A Try. Maybe for an internal presentation when you don't have to worry about branding - see what happens.

The June MTS Newsletter

The June Newsletter is being released on Tuesday June 5th.

The lead article examines "Moving Beyond ROI". Even though we have been trained to look for key business issues, financial returns, economic buyers and speak a little less about our technology - there's more to making the sale than a simple ROI. Customers buy for two reasons - economics and emotion. If you have the economics but forget the emotional side of the sale - you'll probably lose.

Then continuing with my theme in May of "Pick Up The Phone" - I look at some of the reasons why you need to take your hands off the keyboard and actually speak with someone. It may be internal, like a rep or support analysts, or it may be external such as a customer contact. There are times when you can cut through all the broken processes, CYA and other emotions with some good ol' fashioned conversation!

Ask John deals with "My salesrep used to be in pre-sales; and is driving me crazy!" Enough said.

Book Of The Month is "The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook" by Green and Howe. It's a good read. I've started work on a Trusted Advisor class fopr several clients and it was great research material. Worth the read if you are being told to become the Trusted Advisor" to your client. (My entire recommended reading list is on the website).

Good Selling!

Pick Up The Phone!!

“So then I sent the rep an email…”

“I’m waiting for support to respond to my status update request”

Whenever I hear a phrase similar to these in one of my consulting engagements, I know I’m close to finding a problem, or at least uncovering a major symptomatic issue. Let me explain ..

After four months of travel in 2012 running enablement and training workshops, May has been kinder and gentler and I have been working on a couple of “take-home” consulting opportunities. Both involve some badly broken internal processes at a couple of mid-sized companies. These processes were affecting both the effectiveness of presales and ultimately the win-rate of sales. You know when a process is so badly broken that the injured parties readily admit that they spent more time trying to fix the blame as opposed to fix the process, which is why a third-party comes in to obtain resolution!

In both cases, email was to blame, and the people who relied upon it as their primary communications mechanism. (I am going to write a longer article about this topic but I need to get it off my chest now). Instance #1 involves a company with incredibly poor Discovery habits and instance #2 a company where presales spends 35% of their time bailing out customer support. Repeatedly, an email was

A)     left unanswered

B)      sent solely as a CYA (Cover Your A$$)

C)      incomplete and poorly written

D)     partially answered

My response in both the situations was to say “pick up the phone!”.  An email is linear (in the good old days we’d call it half-duplex) as only one party can communicate at a time. An email can’t contain (much) emotion – I don’t feel there is much room for smiley-faces in business communications unless you really know the other person. A phone call allows you to get all your questions answered (you’re in presales – you know how to ask questions and get them answered!). Plus a phone call leaves no audit record other than that the call was actually made. So you can say things in a call you cannot put in an email.

So if you are frustrated in some internal process (or even in a customer communication) see if email is in the communication chain. If it is – ask yourself what would happen if you picked up the phone rather than send another email?

Maybe things would magically get better.

In my two engagements, the discovery rate doubled and presentation standards have improved dramatically in just three weeks for one customer, and the other customer reports that post-sales time has decreased from 35% to a still-high 22% and is trending downwards.

The No Discovery Demo

This month's lead article is the Zero-Discovery Demo.

We’ve all been in that situation when you walk into the conference room, or start-up your webcast, and you have no idea what the sales call is about or what the customer really needs. It is variously known as the “spray and pray”, the “dog and pony show” or “the three hour tour”.

 We also know that although it is usually a complete waste of your time, these calls do happen in real life and the professional SE needs to be prepared to deal with them. So, two days from now you are visiting a customer and the only information you have is the name and address of the company and the guidance of “they just want a general overview of our products and what we do.” What happens next?

My article gives you some tips and techniques to gain some additional information so you can at least pretend to be a professional - so I won't repeat them here..

One other interesting question, put directly, is "Who Is To Blame?". Is it

1. The Salesperson who thinks Discovery is a 2-line email with the prospects name, location and time of the meeting?
2. The Customer who won't share information with a vendor in case it gives away some negotiating power?
3. Your Manager who tells you to "suck it up" and make the call?
4. You - for participating in the call, despite knowing what will eventually happen?

The answer, I believe, is all of the above. And .. the situation can be fixed by some behavior modification. As far as management and the salesrep are concerned, I prefer the personal analogy with plenty of guilt. I used some variation of:

a) "You know, I coach a girl's 12 year old travel soccer team. I spent more time scouting and preparing for their next game than we have preparing for this call."

b) "It's like sending your children to school in the morning in their underwear, with no book bag and no money for lunch. Plus... it's snowing."

c) "If you tell me to "Bring My 'A' Game" one more time on a call like this, we're both going to end up with an "F: - for Fired!"

For the results-oriented rep, I'd compare and contrast either them against a very successful rep who did allow Discovery before her calls, or even directly against one of their own calls when we were properly prepared.

My point is .. you can't sit back and just enable the behavior. Even if you do go through with the demo/presentation (and do it with a positive attitude), there needs to be some consequences. Don't whine, don't complain, just point out how it can be done better. Ultimately it puts more money in the reps pocket, and more money in yours.

Sales Engineer Budgets And Headcount

After the usual compensation questions, the #1 question I hear from SE leaders is “what is the correct sales/SE ratio?” The answer, like most things in life, is “it depends” – but here are a couple of thoughts that may help.

1.       The SE Budget. My preference for setting an SE Budget is to base it on a true budget and not on a headcount number. That is, I’d rather be told I have $10m to fund an organization than be told I have a target headcount of 50 people. The monetary number (as long as it is reasonable) gives me far more flexibility in my hiring profile. Look at it this way – suppose I am told I can go out and hire two additional people – the usual response is to hire the best two SE’s I can find in the marketplace and bring them in as master/senior/principal SE’s. Yet it may make more sense for my overall business to hire five recent college graduates into an associate position – and it will cost me the same in terms of cash. Headcount gives no flexibility – budget does.

2.       The Sales/SE Ratio. Back in June 2010 I wrote “How Many SE’s Does It Take ToSell A Solution?” It was intended as a primer to walk you through the growth of a typical SE organization. However, it was still based on the fallacy of a Sales/SE ratio. The problem with a ratio is that unless you are a small single-product company it really doesn’t work too well. Sure – it’s a good starting point, yet the correct number of SE’s should be based on a return on investment as opposed to meeting a ratio or adding quota.

As an example: One of my customers re-aligned their Americas SE team, and decided that for global accounts the ratio would be 1:1, Strategic accounts and Federal got a 3:2 ratio, corporate/middle market was 2:1 and everything else (SMB, telesales and partners) was 5:1. These numbers were dictated by finance, and where they got them from I have no idea (and nor do they!).

So what is a better way? Base the ratio on how busy and how productive your SE’s are. I use a baseline figure of 60% customer-facing time (carefully measured, including prep time) as a metric for SE’s. If a team is consistently below that number, they are not busy enough, and if they are over 60% then they are running hot. Now – running hot is not the same as being efficient, so you need to look at what they are doing and the revenue generated. That is ROPE – Return On Presales Effort. All things being equal, if your North-East group has a ROPE of $2.3m and the South has a ROPE of $1.4m – I’d add SE budget to the North-East.

More later – obviously the art is in determining if all things are equal, and what to do if they are not .. so stay tuned.