Learning about Mastering Technical Sales? If yes, then this book is a must read!!! Mastering Technical Sales by John Care and Aron Bohlig covers the full spectrum of what Sales Engineers need to know in order to be successful in their technical deals. It starts by covering fundamental concepts around:

-Qualifying Leads
-Determining Go/No Go strategies for RFPs
-Needs Analysis Tactics
-Delivering the Perfect Pitch
-How to Avoid ‘Dash to Demo‘
-Remote Demonstration Tips
-Objection Handling
-Branding
-Channel Selling with Partners
-Hiring SE Talent
-Time Management & Metrics

This book is a must-have in any Sales Engineer or SE Managers collection!

Looking to Improve Your Sales Demos?? Effective sales demonstrations are one of the most important pieces to progressing your opportunity forward in the sales cycle.  Software vendors who already have an in-house demo environment for their Sales Engineers may feel that they have all of the bases covered…. Wait, you may also want to consider that you software solution may be a point solution in the grande scale of all of the business applications required by an organization.  In economic times that are much more difficult to sell in,  it is even that much more important to show off much more compelling demos.   SO….. a great hosted service for companies looking to demonstrate their software solution integrating to other systems is Skytap.

Skytap offers web based access to vmware images and data centers so that your Sales Engineers can book configure a custom environment for their demonstrations.  Take a look at your Sales Engineering organization and spend some time looking at Skytap to help improve your sales demos!

The past 12 months have been, without a doubt, very difficult on technology sales organizations. As part of our annual benchmarks research, we went out to the field and surveyed leading hardware, software, and services sales executives to see just how bad of a year it’s been, and more importantly, what leading organizations plan to do in 2010 to improve their organization.

The bad news?. . . . ½ of all sales reps in 2009 didn’t hit their quota and buyers remain dissatisfied with the quality of interaction with their vendors’ sales reps.

The good news?. . . . There is significant opportunity for improvement.

So where to start? Well, it’s all about improving sales productivity. Easy, right? Well, certainly not.

Let’s start with why improving sales productivity should be one of your top objectives for 2010, as it is for many of our study’s respondents? Here are 3 reasons:

1. The rise in sales costs is outpacing revenue growth: Sales investment is forecast to increase by 4.7% in 2010, outpacing the 3.2% growth in IT global revenue. (refer to the chart below)
2. More leads are needed to close a deal now than ever before. (2/3rds of companies experienced an increase in leads needed to close a deal during the past 6 months)
3. 72% of companies have seen an increase in buying cycles during the past 12 months; and IT buyers confirm this trend based upon IDC’s recent customer experience study. (click here to attend our upcoming telebriefing re: this IT Buyer Experience study)

• Maintain the momentum for sales productivity improvement efforts. The downturn in 2009 convinced many sales executives to prioritize productivity improvement initiatives. These initiatives are at risk in 2010 as revenue growth, albeit low, returns to the IT sector.
• Empower sales operations as the driving force for productivity improvements. Sales operations must be considered a strategic driver of process improvements across the sales organization in addition to its more tactical support function. Key areas of focus from a people, process, and technology perspective include sales enablement, customer intelligence, account planning, and pipeline health.
• Optimize sales’ time. Yes, reduce sales’ administrative time which is about 20% of the average sales person’s work week; however, focus more on improving the quality of the time invested by sales reps in preparing for customer interactions. (Sales reps spend approximately 17% of their time today on preparing for customer interactions) Customer intelligence and sales enablement are key levers to increase the quality of this time spent. This strategy is in alignment with feedback from IT buyers, indicating that over 50% of sales reps are insufficiently prepared for customer meetings.
• Improve sales enablement. Sales reps continue to find it difficult to leverage internal resources (e.g., marketing assets, subject matter experts, process training tools) to help them optimize customer interactions. Sales operations must play a pivotal role in establishing, executing, and governing sales enablement initiatives across the sales organization. Alignment with marketing will facilitate this process as they are responsible for the marketing content and asset life cycle.
• Better leverage sales automation. The successful deployment of a sales force automation (SFA) system is a foundational element for a productive sales organization. This system must be consistently deployed and adopted, including maintenance of high-quality data in the system, and leveraged throughout sales’ processes. Embed newer sales automation technologies within your SFA to increase productivity, including solutions to customer intelligence, content and asset management, and internal social media applications to better leverage tribal knowledge. (yes, that would be Sales 2.0 applications)

I invite you to comment on this topic as well as share what you’re seeing “in the field” by joining the discussion!

As someone who has been doing this for almost 12 years, I can honestly say that I spend more time at work than any cube jockey in my field.

This comes as a shock to most Old School managers, as they feel that if someone is not under their direct gaze, they are off goofing off. If you are in Sales, this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you are a Sales Engineer, you already know why, so let me explain why this is so for the rest of you. There is a reason why Sales Engineers telecommute:

1. Sales personnel are Performance Compensated. “Huh?”, I hear you say. Performance Compensation is what makes all things in Sales happen. A few examples:
   1. It weeds out the lazy/incompetent for you. If you don’t perform, you don’t get paid, and eventually you are asked to leave, as the company can no longer afford you. IOW, you are not earning your salary.
   2. Even if I could sleep 24/7, I wouldn’t. If I do nothing, then nothing gets done. This means that, just like the above, inactivity does not pay the bills, nor does it make me sit well with my VP Sales and CEO. Another way to look at it is that I can’t blame my reps, but they can blame me. We are seen as the point where “the buck stops”. No excuses. Whatever it takes. You don’t have to look after someone who is Performance Compensated because among others, their spouse is reminding them.
   3. It fosters and reinforces teamwork and cooperation. “OK, Pat. I think you’ve taken it a little too far, there.” Not so! From experience, Sales Support that is salary is virtually dismissed by the reps. But if you are comp’d on the deal as they are, you are seen as having “skin in the game”. You aren’t mentioning an idea just because it would be interesting (which would confuse the deal and lose the account). Far from it, you are mentioning only what is needed to close the deal. Why? Because that’s the only way you get paid! Others in the company soon realize that you are only “bothering” them because your work is directly responsible for their salaries.
2. Being “at work” includes far more time that you may realize. The time I spend overnight away from my family and flying/driving all over creation to get in front of customers and prospects is time on the clock. I can’t jump from my trans-Atlantic flight to London at 5:00pm because I’ll miss my soap operas. There is an easy test to see if you are still on the clock: Can you leave at will-right now? No? Then you’re on the clock. This can ruin relationships and marriages. Fact.
3. Talent can be hired from a vast pool of resources. No longer do companies have to be in expensive, dangerous metros in order to be in commuting distance of talent. That talent-and the company HQ-can be anywhere. I often work for companies that have a <some location> Branch Office, which is just one of my reps’ house/P.O. Box & cell phone. Employers can now advertise nationally for very specific talent, and have realistic expectations of getting it!
4. Those few times we are home, we are at work.A good telecommuting friend of mine, who lives in Eastern Connecticut but works for a NYC bank, once told me his work schedule looks like Tetris. In other words, people schedule meetings, conference calls, demos and sales calls at everyone’s convenience but mine. I have even had reps overbook me for their meeting, claiming that theirs was more important. This means across many, many timezones.
5. The Family thinks when you’re home, you’re not working, too! Work for you is normally shielded from the kids & wife. You leave & come back. In between you could have that other family across town that thinks you work 2nd shift. In the Sales Engineer’s world, our families might see us at weird times-like during the day. Since they only do fun things with the family when you’re home, it is a logical conclusion that you are there to do fun things! We also get it from our spouses, who will claim “Now that you’re here, I have a list of errands and chores for you”. We fight this a lot, and even my spouse slips into that mode once in a while. The great Ernie Kovacs had this problem in his home writing studio. His solution was to hand a sign on the door of his study that read simply “Not Now.”

So the next time someone says “Gee, I wish I had your job. You never go to work!”, sit them down and review how many hours you spent at work in the past month compared to them.

And for you Old School managers who still can’t get past it, look at it this way; We can’t steal stationary supplies this way!

Yeah, we’re all watching it happen, trying to capitalize on it. More information is not better information. People more & more are lazy-ing themselves out of making any risky decisions. They want the same kind of assurances a conference room full of yes men and stakeholders would give them: Blame Management. As long as there is at least 1 person to blame if it is a bad decision (that is not you), then they say yes.

But now there is/are magnitudes more info (or rather data) for a single person to go through, and even the yes-men can’t go through it if pieced up-even if it could be pieced up. So what kind of decisions are there? 3 kinds, for us entrepreneur types:

1. Personal
2. Job/Productivity
3. Commercial

Personal: What products do I buy when filling up, or going to the grocery store? Think “consumer”.

Job/Productivity: What stock should I buy/sell? Which job is best for me to move to (a combination of Personal)? Where should I be investing? Is my 401k performing properly/well for this market?

Commercial: (think “provider”) Should I buy more widgets and stock-pile, or will their price go down in a few weeks and I should buy then? Is my company’s valuation going up or down? Where is productivity/efficiency (think “BI”, or “Green/Yellow/Red”, or “Executive Dashboard”, etc.)?

In all three “horizontals”, the data & information available to use in making these decisions is doubling every few months. It used to be that storage (cost) was the holdup, but now it is simply what some early adopters called “data mining”, which is a very poor way of going about it, but it is buzzword-worthy.

So what would you do (on any of the 3 levels) if you had all the information you needed, but it was somewhere in a mass of data that has more words than have ever been written by all humans across all time, and is getting bigger every day? You would want only one thing, and that one thing is the target of anyone ahead of this curve:

Making data into usable, actionable information.

If you didn’t know this 2-3 years ago, you’re already too late.

pat

:)

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140317134550-5858595-5-ways-to-do-nothing-and-become-more-productive?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0

A colleague turned me on to an article here that talks about 5 stunningly awful mistakes for demos. I don’t think these are all that bad, and certainly not stunning, but I’ll include the 5 here, as we have a few more practical ones to add after:

1. Misunderstand the customer’s needs: Harbor Cruise Don’t make a demo in the hope that your customer will eventually see something of interest. Inexperienced salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for doing their homework. Jaded sales engineers offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from their sales colleagues. Do the research to figure out what your customers need in advance. Continue reading Sales Engineering Mistakes →

Wendy Russell (the above is not hers) covers most of the mistakes we can make if we lack experience or plain common sense. I’ll comment on her bullets:

I Thought You Were Bringing The Extra Lightbulb

I have never had to bring a projector to present to a large audience. I leave all that up to their IT/AV people, and if all else fails, I always start on time speaking to the audience directly while it is remedied, instead of the the ultimate faux pas of turning your back on your audience.

Information Underload

If you simply memorize, not only does it show, but you are ‘deer in the headlights’ when there is a question. You must be the MASTER of your material, such that you can give the info in any order, with any media, while still ‘working the audience’.

What’s It All About?

“This is the opposite of Information Underload. You know so much about the topic, that you jump from here to there and back again talking about everything there is to know about your brand new widget, and no one can follow the thread of the presentation.

Corrected Presentation Technique #3
Use the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple Silly) when designing a presentation. Stick to three, or at the most, four points about your topic and expound on them. The audience will be more likely to retain the information.”

When You Don’t Have Content, Dazzle Them With Complicated Diagrams (Ignorance)

Oh, the stories I could tell you…

Did You Bring Your Glasses?

Small fonts kill it! If you can’t say it in 3 bullets, then you don’t understand what you are talking about. Try to remember that you are not consulting or teaching!

Divine Design

A whole topic here I could spend hours on… because it took me years to master. What seems like high contrast on your LCD screen will not look the same on a projector-especially one that is not 100% color matched to your design screen (and none of them are the same color as your design screen).

What to do? Well, I have yet to see a projector that failed to make white look like white, and black look like black. You take it from there…

Do Not Animate.

Anything. Nuff said.

(note: some of my looping demos for booths are exceptions, but technically these aren’t the same as presentations)

There are more, such as body english, dealing with sharks, snipers, and elephants (the salesie types out there understand this), being too much sales ENGINEER, or too much SALES engineer, etc. but these are a few high points to think about…

As always, keep your horror stories coming!

pat
:)