Wall Street Journal - Students Struggle With Words

Todays Business Education section in the Wall Street Journal is titled "Students Struggle With Words: Business Schools Put More Emphasis on Writing Amid Employer Complaints".

The main point is that the course teaches students to unlearn bad behavior - such as using complicated words over simple ones. I call this "decomplexification". This is a bad behavior I see all the time in customer facing product/solution decks. A corporate recuiter is quoted as saying "MBA candidates tend to talk about their analytical methods to show they are good at their job. What we really want to talk about are the implications of the research."

In the words of a naval officer friend of mine , "Be Brief, Be Bright and Be Gone". Give it a read!

Making The Most Of Your SE Investments

Last month I participated in a webcast sponsored by the Sales Management Association about "Making The Most of Your SE Investments". The program featured Sean Cullen from SAP and John Littleton from Cisco plus yours truly - all giving their different perspectives about the efficient running and operating of a modern presales organization. We also had a healthy Q&A session - bearing in mind that most of the audience was sales and operations managers!



Big thanks to Bob Kelly, chairman of the SMA, for allowing me to hotlink straight to the webinar. While you are there check out the rest of the SMA program website.

February Newsletter + Content Scheduled on Tuesday 8th

The February Edition of the Mastering Technical Sales Edge newsletter will be published on February 8th. This month I'll be looking in detail at two aspects of how to make your presentations better - going back to the series about The Perfect Pitch.

The lead article deals with How to Practice a Presentation/Demo, and the inside page provides some interesting ideas about how to apply the theories of imrov to the craft of an Sales Engineer. You'll learn some intriguing team games and icebreakers for those quarterly team meetings.

My review book is Drive by Dan Pink. It's a fascinating look into what motivates us and why - I found it to be a great read and highly recommend it. You'll probably want to give a copy to your boss and to your compensation analyst!

Handout Happiness and Horrors

Back in September 2010 I wrote an article about Handout Happiness, which dealt with best practices for hand-outs and that eternal question of “do I hand-out my handouts before or after the presentation?” The topic has been getting some play around the globe. Oliver Adria of ReThink Presentations over in Germany riffed on the slide-ument model of handing out a hard-copy of the slide deck before the presentation – he’s not a fan. (I’d recommend his weekly newsletter – it’s short, sharp and to the point).

Meanwhile – Olivia Mitchell from New Zealand writes a Speaking About Presenting Blog. Also back in the summer of 2010 she published 13 Best Practices for Handouts – many of which are amazingly similar to Oliver’s and mine – proving that handout horrors are global!

I believe that handouts can be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of any SE – particularly when conducting a remote demo or presentation – if only they were used correctly. Check out my article, and Oliver’s and Olivia’s and decide for yourself.

Now On Google Books

For those of you who have been asking about the electronic availability of the MTS Book - Good News at last. Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineers Handbook is now available at the Google Bookstore. Also - according to my publisher - it is now with Amazon in the process of being Kindle-ized. Stay tuned.

Welcome to 2011

OK. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to increase my blogging frequency over 2010 - which shouldn't be too difficult. First up for 2011 is the January website update and newsletter. The newsletter will be distributed on Wednesday January 5th due to the holiday in the US.

For a sneak preview of the content I'm featuring an updated list of Sales Engineering New Year Resolutions for 2011- all focusing on your personal Performance, Promotability and income Potential. After five years of Newsletters and Talking Points I'm finally touching on the art and science of Discovery. I reveal the one thing you need to know about Discovery - which is Care's First Law. The January "Ask John" deals with the topic of handling high salesrep turnover and what to do when you are introducing the ninth salesrep to handle an account in six years (hey - maybe the sales manager should actually be doing that?).

All the best for 2011 from Mastering Technical Sales

Newsletter & December Content

So much for my 2010 New Year resolution of becoming a better blogger. Oh well - there is always 2011. The Mastering Technical Sales Edge Newsletter for December will be distributed on Tuesday December 7th. To get an early view of the content you can visit the MTS website where it is already posted.

The lead article for this month is "So You Really Want To Be A Sales Rep?" which looks at the pluses and minuses of moving across from Pre-Sales to Sales; also known as Going To The Dark Side. There are many things to consider before making the move, or even planning for the move - not least of which is truly assessing your motivation.

I also have a section about "The Overview Presentation - Why It May Be Killing Your Sales". I personally hate overview presentations as they are usually boring, too shallow and in a single customer situations it usually implies that soemone failed to perform adequate discovery.

With the holiday season approaching - Ask John provides my answer to "what are the top 3 books that a presales manager should give their teams for Christmas/Hannukah etc.."

Enjoy the read - and I'm looking for feedback and ideas for 2011 about articles, services and new offering I can provide to you all.