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.

MTS April Edge - Updated

Big Ooops. Despite checking and rechecking my newsletter I still managed to send it out with bad link. To the main article no less. If you are a reader -  my apologies for resending the newsletter, but I promise you'll enjoy the lead of "Tell Me A Story : Why Your Customer References Are Ineffective".

I also cover WhiteBoarding remotely over a Webcast (see prior blog post) and answer a question about working on an unmotivated cross-functional team. The book review is "The Challenger Sale" - one of the best sales-oriented books I have read in a while. Definitely worth the time and money to check it out.

Good Selling!

I start off many of my WB sessions by asking the participants to group together at their table and write a list of pros and cons about white-boarding. They do this on their team boards so it's an evil trick to get them up to the WB!

One of the cons I often see is "no remote White Boarding capabilities." And that's just not true. In fact - many of my customers now intentionally add in a blank whte or black slide in their PPT deck so they can "ad-hoc" a WB with a customer.

One great use for a WB is when you are reviewing / proposing an architecture with a customer. Often you need to make minor changes, add a box, reverse a data flow, relabel a component etc. The downside of using PPT of Visio is that it's difficult to do this dynamically. If you have a WB / drawing capability you can make those changes 'on-the-fly" and preevent the need for another sales call (and also misunderstandings and errors). Since no-one over the age of 12 can draw anything remotely artistic with a mouse I've been experimenting with tablets and drawing programs.  

My personal preference is the Bamboo Connect Pen & Tablet. It allows you to concurrently control your mouse/pointer with the standard mouse and the pen - and you can sketch/overwrite things on both PPT and the webcasts whiteboard. You can also modify Visio by allowing pen mods or dropping the diagram into a PPT deck.

For "start-with-a blank-page" type remote WB's then I'd look at the Papershow. It's a USB pen
that utilizes a special pad of lined paper. It's advantage is that you can see what you are writing and you can pre-draw in pencil (i.e cheat) on the pad before you draw it for real. It projects really well over a webcast. The downside is that you have to go through some complex hoops to do this for an existing PPT slide so it takes away much of the spontaneous aspect of your pitch.

Bottom Line - don't give up on dynamic drawing just because you're on a webcast. If nothing else - it will brighten up the presentation just because it is different!

The Executive Connection II - Denial

My children used to come home from elementary school and tell me that “denial” was a river in Egypt. Groan as much as you want, but it’s also one of the major reasons why Do Nothing Inc. wins so many of your sales deals.

As a Sales Engineer, you can talk, present, demo, whiteboard and architect your solution until you are blue in the face, but if the customer doesn’t acknowledge that they have an issue that needs taking care of – it’s going to be a long and pointless meeting. We like to speak about the great things that our company, our product and our solutions can do for the customer, but if the customer doesn’t accept they have a pain – nothing will happen.

I believe that customer denial is worse than customer inattention because it doesn’t matter what you say –it’s not important to the customer. So how do you get the customer’s attention? The standard SE practice of linking business pain to your technology solution and proving that you are uniquely qualified to do this will not work. Yet that is what usually happens – and the salesperson and SE keep going down the path of logic, business reason and all the aspects of selling solutions. The more the customer resists – the harder they push. The more the customer resists – the more people they speak with to make that customer change her mind. But if the customer is in denial then it just won’t help.

Back to getting the customer’s attention – what does work? Easy – you talk about two things.

1.       You talk about someone else’s pain who the customer can relate to.

2.       You forget about the customer’s pain and focus on the beautiful gains instead. But – do it along the lines of discovering what other things the customer will be able to do (or fund) once they address the pain you don’t want to talk about.

Sound a little confusing? It is – welcome to denial. More on how to make the Nile flood and create fertile selling grounds in the next post. (You knew that pun was coming…)

The Executive Conversation

A short snippet from a role-play last week in a workshop. As background my customer prides itself on the blazing-fast speed of its solution and always likes to lead with that fact.

I’m playing the part of a CIO from a medium-sized business. I just asked the Sales Engineer to make a case for the value his solution will bring to my business. I'm in full "Simon Cowell" mode and decide to make things as difficult as possible for the poor SE.

SE:          "Well – our product is twice as fast as the nearest competitor’s is."

CIO:       "That’s great – but I don’t have a performance problem right now."

Silence. Crickets chirping..

The moral of the story is that “it is only a problem if your customer says that it is a problem”