You are here: Home / 2012 / Archives for March 2012

Selling Your Relevance, Not Your Product

March 30, 2012 By 8 Comments

Have you ever listened to yourself speak with your prospects and customers? If you’ve gone through any type of sales training, the goal of your discussion usually is finding out what your prospective customer “needs”. Then it’s supposed to be a straight-line shot to showing them why your product or technology is the only solution.

So what?

That’s the spiel your current and prospective customers are expecting to hear.

If you are an engineer, and your current and prospective customers call you directly (trying to avoid this commoditized sales scenario), listen to yourself as well. If you’re an engineer, the customer has you from “hello”. You immediately respond by problem solving and offering up solutions. Even if the person on the other end of the phone or computer is shopping your solution – and your willingness to give it up. Even if this individual has bigger fish to fry than the project they are using to vet you, and your company.

So what if you solved their problem in 10 seconds flat? Sort of like engineering roping and hog tying.

Your customers and prospects want a dialogue. A conversation. It isn’t a contest to see how many solutions or suggestions you can come up with. Or how clever you can be responding to questions they throw at you.

Why are you wasting their hard-to-get time?

The best conversations you can have with customers are those conversations even they didn’t know they wanted to have with you. The relevant conversations that involve industry and marketplace dynamics, economies of scale and nations, the context in which they are (trying) to make a decision, and the chaos of their business model.

Bet they didn’t teach you how to have those discussions in business school, sales training or engineering school.

These are the relevant conversations that stick in customers’ minds long after they have them with you. Because they know you took the time to build up your knowledge base beyond the status-quo of selling your solution. Because they appreciate the breadth and depth of your vision. Because they understand how your perspective helps them run their businesses. Because they are grateful for you taking the time to speak with them.

Relevance could be the definition of “value” that everyone’s been throwing around lately. And value’s just a noun in need of a descriptor.

Relevant value.

I like the sound of that.

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Do You Develop Your Customers?

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Now that’s something to ponder. Since so many of us go forth each day to thrash about the bushes searching for prospects for our products and solutions.

What would happen if the target of our desires wasn’t product or solution placement as much as it was  developing prospects into becoming our customers. Our loyal and retained customers. How does that happen?

  1. It starts with customer conversations. About them, not you, your product, your service or your invention. About who they are and what goes on inside their heads. Not that deep-discovery stuff about why your solution is, well, the only solution they would ever need. Maybe you’re convinced. But your customers remain skeptical.
  2. Your customers don’t want your products, services or invention. At least not yet. Because they haven’t heard themselves articulate how your “stuff”  fills some void in their “intangibles”: behavior, lifestyle, job, you name it. Even if your customers and prospects are currently using your competitors’ products. It’s not a decision they can make. Yet. Because it’s not a discussion they’ve had, yet, even with themselves.
  3. Your market should be based on who your best customers are. Best customers may not be the folks who currently buy your product. Your best customers are the folks for whom your product or service is designed, based on your knowledge of (you guessed it) customer conversations, early adopters, validation and vetting, design and redesign. Even if you are a mature company.
  4. You business is about modeling what you do to align with the folks you do it for: again, your customers.

The best companies, entrepreneurial or not, start the customer conversation and never end it. Ever. Even if the conversation isn’t pretty. Those are the best kinds of discussions. They are honest. If a customer is telling you exactly what they think – because you’ve asked them to, in partnership and in dialogue rather than as a frustrated rant – you’ve earned that honesty. Congratulations. There’s an opportunity to make your product or service better.

The best customer conversations may talk about products and services outside of your industry segment, and how their attributes successfully fill the void in those customer “intangibles.” Listen, instead of jumping to problem solve. You may pivot towards an even better concept than you started out with. Yes, you’re the expert. But your customer is expert at being the customer. Listen to them. Be open to what they are telling you.

The best business model incorporates customer mindset throughout. All of the customers that are involved from winning the order to receiving payment.  The dialogue involves your internal customers as well as your external ones. Talk to them, constantly. Make them part of your journey. They are the target, as well as the vehicle, of achieving your objectives.

Think what a loyal and retained customer base means to your business model. It starts by working with your customers and teaching them what it means to be part of your business. And they, in turn, will teach you what it means to be their supplier.

It all starts with that first, not-to-be-avoided, customer conversation.

What are you waiting for?

Learn more about customer development. Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU is available on Amazon.com, April 2012. Click on the book title and enjoy!

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s time to clean out your client closet (again)

March 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Yup. Time marches on. The end of the 1st quarter, 2012 approaches! Is everyone getting jitters about meeting their quotas, numbers, bonuses, payroll, you name it?

About three (wow, three) years ago, I wrote a post titled “5 Steps for Spring Cleaning Your Client Closet.”  Remember what we were doing as Spring ’09 approached? Beginning to realize the full impact of the economic meltdown of the past two fiscal quarters.

Many of our “client closets” had been cleaned out for us, involuntarily.

Because we were doing business with customers who had no business being our customers.Because we were doing business with legacy customers who had been with us from the start, but whose business had dropped off due to various factors we – or our bosses – hadn’t (a) noticed, (b) taken the time to discuss with them, or (c) due to our company’s moving into new directions.                                                                                                                                                                     

Fact of the matter is, I live in a place where there are seasons. And when I “change out” my clothing from summer to winter and winter to summer, I also take a long look at the direction in which my business is going. At least twice a year (but more like, constantly).

Take a look at the people and customers and organizations who inspire you to do your best work.  Take a look at the people and customers and organizations who, quite frankly, drain you and your company’s energy, resources, creativity and insights. Because it’s more important to them to be negative rather than collaborative. Take a look at the bottom line value (yes, it always does seem to come down to “worth”) of your continuing working with these customers.

And trim your client closet.

Your “best” customers may neither be the ones who represent the largest revenue contributor nor the ones that represent the longest-term “sexy” projects to work on.  They may give you a ton of small projects which tie up your production lines – often at the spur of the moment – and derail operations. They may want you to drop everything and manage their latest crisis – causing you to jiggle every other appointment you had scheduled – simply because this is a “big name” customer and, therefore, in their mind, have the option to be divas. Ultimately, how does working with customers like these impact your overall productivity and profitability?

Does every project need to be a crisis?  Because if it does, perhaps you thrive on excitement and firefighting – which may not be in the best interests of  long-term business building.

Perhaps the first thing to clean out in your client closet is your “mental” and “emotional” script of what it looks like, sounds like and feels like to head up your own business. Then you’ll establish that 10,000 foot eagle’s eye view of your client closet – and understand why you attract the types of customers that you do.

Do your “best” customers share the same value systems as one another? While they may come from diverse industrial or entrepreneurial segments, they need to be willing to collaborate across silos within their organizations and with each other in a forum setting. We all do our best work like this, together. We all learn from each other.

And, together, we inspire each other.

You don’t need more customers. You need more customers like the ones you do your best work for. The ones who bring out your best.

Head to your client closet.

Learn more about becoming the go-to company for your best customers. Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU is set for release on Amazon.com in April, 2012. Sign up to receive updates, newsletters and a complementary chapter by clicking on the image of the book, upper right on the DYMB site.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

The Fable of the Funnel of Doom

March 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Once upon a time, some very nice engineers working for a custom manufacturer were told by their Boss that they had to SELL. Or else they might lose their jobs.

The engineers tried to sell. They thought of the word “sell” as the equivalent of a four-letter s-word! They were cursed! They huffed and puffed and asked their current customers for RFPs, lots of them.  Pretty soon, they had more RFPs than they could handle, and no time to do their engineering. They were trapped in the Funnel of Doom.

The Boss looked in the mirror, who told him: “Bring in that consultant.” And he did. The consultant (who did not fly in on a broom) met with everyone many times. She gave them homework to do. She taught them some business-building aerobics. And then “poof” she was gone. Until her next visit….

Two weeks later, things were a lot different at that company…..

  • Things were cleaned up. The company was no longer an RFP mill. The engineers-turrned-sales-reps jettisoned the backlog of RFPs they solicited from current customers (who had no interest in awarding them business). They concentrated on doing work for paying customers. (Whew!)
  • Upper level management conceded that telling engineers to “sell” by asking for RFPs was busy work with a dead-end probability of landing a deal. (A major epiphany for upper level management. Their sales paradigm was changed. No more business as usual.)
  • Two of the four “sales” engineers contacted companies they identified as potential targets for their own company’s core capabilities.
  • Since the engineers were jazzed about contributing their skill sets to the target companies, they had decent conversations with peers, did some internet research on trigger events about the target company, and discussed their findings with the CEO and the VP of Sales.
  • The leads provided by the sales engineers were intriguing to the CEO and the VP of Sales, who decided to make follow-up phone calls to these target companies and have true C-level peer conversations.
  • The CEO and VP of Sales had the “sales” engineers sit in on their conversations. What an epiphany for the engineers to hear what a C-level discussion sounds like (e.g., not exactly design issues).
  • The CEO and VP of Sales broke down the status-quo corporate silos and freed their engineers from their towers and cubicles! They shared information with the “doer” engineers. And they did something significant: they debriefed with them  after each phone conversation, comparing what each of them heard.
  • The recently-anointed sales engineers became enthusiastic about identifying and qualifying more leads opportunities, especially since the CEO and VP followed up on most of these leads, or told them why the lead wasn’t viable for their business and strategy.
  • The curse was lifted! Everyone started contributing to the bottom line. And they could complete the requirements of the original position they were hired – and paid – to do.
  • One of the “sales” engineers was so good at identifying leads opportunities that he began making appointments with prospects and went on initial sales calls.
  • The newbie sales engineer started reading more about sales, took a few courses, and transformed into part of the sales arm of the company.
  • Upper level management was thrilled to have some of the weight of business development taken off their shoulders by staff engaged in leads identification.
  • And they closed more business with new customers.
  • Did they live happily ever-after? The anemic division covered their operating expenses. No one was fired. No downsizing. The company is still in business.
  • Everyone realized there are “personalities” involved in what makes them viable, and not. They are still dealing with those “personalities.”
  • This company did break down the tower of status quo silos. They did learn to sell, together. They liberated themselves from the Funnel of Doom.
  • They understand that selling is an opportunity to showcase their core capabilities, not an excuse to turn their company into an RFP mill.

Have you found yourself in the same place? Then you know it’s no fairy tale.

Let’s talk about it.

My book, Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU, shows you how your functional role, not your job description, allows you to positively impact business development. Click on the link for more information. Available in April, 2012, on Amazon.com.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

I’d leave my cubicle but….

March 19, 2012 By 4 Comments
  1. You want to talk about yourself, not a solution. (You sound like a reality show.)
  2. You talk like a brochure on legs. I can read about that stuff on your website. (A one-size fits all approach doesn’t work for me. Tells me a lot about your organization.)
  3. You’re using buzz words instead of real words. (Aren’t you cool! I think I’ll tune you out.)
  4. You act pretty familiar with our team, which you’ve never met before, like you know an inside joke which we don’t. (We take ourselves seriously. It’s not a joke. Don’t waste our time with your performance art.)
  5. You don’t look at me when I’m at the conference table. (OK, so I’m smarter than you. Do I make you uncomfortable? Hmmm, I’ll have some fun, here.)
  6. I don’t make you uncomfortable, I intimidate you! (That’s your problem, not mine. I’ll have some more fun.)
  7. You don’t know what you’re talking about. (Doesn’t your company onboard correctly – or at all? I’m embarrassed for you. And you’re wasting my time.)
  8. You left your sales engineer back at the ranch. How much time do you think we have for all the meetings you want to schedule? (You’re an amateur and unrealistic about the importance of your products and solutions. Wake up.)
  9. You keep pushing specific solutions. We’ve got a bunch of stuff going on here. (You think too small, don’t ask questions, and haven’t done your homework. We need bigger solutions.)
  10. I make an appointment with you. You arrive and make it a point to tell me you don’t have a lot of time to meet, you’re so busy. (Hey, don’t let me get in your way. The door’s that way.)
  11. You talk at me, not with me. (What, this is the script they gave you in sales training? Give me a break. You’re a commodity. Don’t bother me.)
  12. You call me once a week to prospect and leave the same message on voicemail… (I delete each message.)
  13. You email me once a week and send the same message… (I’m tired of deleting your messages. I think I’ll block your email address.)
  14. You tell me you have the solution to my pain, but I’m not in pain. Really. How did you arrive at that conclusion? (You haven’t done your homework, sound like your sales training program and you expect me to take you seriously? C’mon man.)
  15. You don’t pronounce my name correctly. Were you even listening to my voicemail greeting? (Delete message)
  16. I’m not the correct person to contact. You don’t think I’m going to tell you the correct contact person, do you? (Delete message)
  17. You keep selling based on low price and discounts. Do you think that’s a value proposition? (We don’t take you seriously.)
  18. Our team uses you as an example of what not to do or sound like, when we debrief after you leave. (Ouch)

Have some examples you can add to this list?

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Does Your Job Make You Bullet Proof?

March 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

The financial meltdown of 2008 demonstrated, among other things, that no one is essential to their company unless they are meaningfully and legitimately aligned with revenue generation and the business development process.

No one has job security, even if they feel their technical expertise and/or seniority are insurance against unemployment.

The individual who is ill at ease communicating across disciplines within their organization, or with C-level (corporate) decision-makers at customers’ companies, does not bring real value to their company’s table. The marketing and sales professional who views their job as an eighteen-month tour of duty until their next promotion provides only short-term, tactical return on investment for their company; they are disposable once company goals are met. The engineer who is not able to make their technical information accessible and understandable to non-technical professionals becomes a liability rather than an asset to their organization.

It’s scary out there in the career world. All you have to do is listen to the news to get a sense of the precariousness of the economic outlook for the job market. Companies are working leaner and meaner as they struggle to contain the costs of doing business. They are focused on achieving more with less. Organizations are looking for individuals who have the mindset and capabilities that allow them to be trained to function across disciplines. It’s your responsibility to utilize the opportunities at your company to prepare yourself for (a) your next manager, (b) providing enhanced value to retain your current position, or (c) your next job.

There’s no room for finger-pointing or excuses. You have to mean business – and revenue generation – for your company.

The common denominator across everyone’s job descriptions, whether stated explicitly or not, is revenue generation. Revenue generation drives your company, whether you are in the business-to-business sector (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector. Without a revenue stream, you don’t have the luxury of perpetuating the us-versus-them and status-quo mentalities. More important, aligning  your perspective and output with your company’s business development process at least grows the skill set you offer to your current employer.

By enhancing your capabilities to include this broader perspective of revenue generation, you become more valuable to future employers. 

Do you mean business for your company? Companies need to do a better job of generating revenue by focusing on a fluid and ongoing process that brings in the appropriate people early on in the business development cycle. This process accomplishes the tasks of market identification, product development, and maximizing revenue generation and profitability through optimizing company-wide resources. Conducting business by bringing together technical, marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing, operations, and logistics resources to work together in providing solutions for your customers moves everyone one millimeter outside their comfort level.

In the long run, you really have no other option.

Identifying common themes running across all disciplines, and making sure everyone seated around the table understands the terminology and principles of the team, provides opportunities for collaboration and innovation. Deconstructing corporate silos can become a powerful business development tool. Think about how utilizing common-denominator teamwork looks to the customers contributing to your revenue stream. This process allows potential and even current clients to view the breadth and depth of your organization while you solidly demonstrate a collaborative, synergistic corporate culture.

Talk about a differentiator from your competition!

This left brain / right brain, technical/non-technical business development process may feel extremely awkward to you and your colleagues. If departments learn to communicate across disciplines, you will collectively realize that siloed infrastructures and status-quo mindsets are unprofitable. Fiefdom-building will be less easily achieved and turf wars less readily tolerated.

 This type of business development-focused model self-selects for non-technical and technical professionals who are receptive to and excel at interacting productively with each other and with clients. You and your internal team members will mean business.

Have I just described YOU?

[This post appears courtesy of a post for www.doyoumeanbusiness.com and is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU, available on Amazon.com April 2012. For more information and a complementary download, click on the picture of the book at the link provided.]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling Tagged With: , , ,

Building Business or a Funnel of Doom?

March 13, 2012 By 2 Comments

My customer leaned back in his chair and sighed: “Look at this drawing the engineering department at Company X created.”  He opened a folder, took out a drawing of a funnel-shaped spiral, and pushed it across the table.  The top of the funnel was labeled “RFPs.” The bottom of the funnel, the narrowest part, was labeled “Doom.”

Here was the Owner of a small, family-owned business – a manufacturing company -  with multiple divisions and gross annual revenue we had grown into hundreds of millions USD.  Yet the only people generating business were his two sons, a few sales reps at one of the companies, and a “well-connected individual” who went to a lot of local and regional meetings and “made connections”. The Owner had no sales force or manufacturers reps. He wasn’t actively involved in the sales process, either, since he felt “everyone knows who we are.”

Hmmm…. There was more than just a Funnel of Doom going on here.

The Owner asked the engineers at Company X  to help generate business. The way he saw it, they needed to start earning their keep more effectively.  He also knew if Company X didn’t start generating more revenue, he’d have to sell that division. The Owner didn’t want to create hardship for these employees, but they were an underperforming division. And he suspected there was more than one reason for why customers and prospects didn’t want to do business with them.

The employees figured they had the boss over a barrel. So they dug in their heels, made a few feeble attempts to generate sales, drew their Funnel of Doom to document their failure…. and wagged the dog. The Owner was not pleased.

“Can you teach these guys to sell?” he asked me. “Root causes can have really big contexts,” was my reply. “There’s some psychology going on here and not just a failure to sell.” We decided to tackle the problem incrementally and sat down with the engineers. Here’s what we found out:

  1. The engineers-turned-sales reps called their peers at legacy companies asking for RFPs to respond to. That was what these engineers thought was “sales” because an RFP was the only document which resulted from someone else’s “sales” efforts at their company. So this was their status quo perception of their company’s sales process.
  2. The amount of business legacy customers conducted with Company X had diminished over the years.  But there were always RFPs they threw at Company X.  So it “looked” like they were still interested. In reality, they weren’t. Company X lived – and was going to die – by RFPs/RFQs.
  3. The engineer-reps were so thrilled to have “won” the right to respond to these RFPs / RFQs – due to their own efforts – that they continued calling peers at their customers’ shops in order to generate more “sales.”  
  4. The engineer-reps were now spending 90% of their billable hours – yup, you guessed it – responding to requests for quotes. They hadn’t been awarded one contract yet, but were asked to refine drawings as the contract award date was pushed back. These guys were obsessed and consumed by the demands of their Funnel of Doom.

Does this sound like the churning and burning and dialing for dollars that goes on in sales organizations, where there’s no target, just a Ready-Fire-Aim numbers approach? (e.g., if you call enough prospects – or respond to enough RFPs – someone will buy from you).

For starters, I asked the engineer-reps to think about:

  1. How easy it is to get someone off the phone by telling them to complete an RFP , which would go nowhere.
  2. How it feels to be the “third bid company.” Because their company had become, over the years, an RFQ-mill, nothing more.
  3. Which legacy / current customers were the best targets for their efforts, when the goal was NOT to be invited to provide an RFQ, based on one phone call.
  4. Whether pulling financial data from the past three years would help the engineer-reps (and the Owner) identify existing customers generating the biggest positive impact on revenue stream – and the best initial targets.
  5. Collaborative business development was part of everyone’s job description, from top to bottom in the organization.

The engineers reached for their Funnel of Doom drawing, which they carried with them, and crumbled it up.  They looked at the Owner. Clearly, we had some homework to do. However, this time around, they were going to do it. Together.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales & Engineering Collaboration, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , ,

5 ways to mis-use Sales Engineers

March 10, 2012 By 4 Comments

Involved in technical sales, or sales to manufacturing and engineering firms? You have internal colleagues called Sales Engineers, called on to clinch things with the customer.

How are you working with, using, or abusing, these valuable technical resources (aka, “techies”) that your company employs? Recognize any of these personas?

  1. I’d like to involve the sales engineer from the beginning of the sale, after I qualify the lead and determine there is a justification for bringing them into the solution. But I’ve found that SE’s make me appear, to the customer, to be a talking head or brochure on legs who doesn’t know how to use the left side of their brain. My company treats me like a hunter whose role simply is to rustle the bushes, identify the target, land the target and dump the carcass at their front door and then go out hunting again. The SE’s are such brainiacs. They make me feel stupid. So  I use them as my ace up my sleeve. I don’t want to appear like a stupid sales dummy.
  2. I’ll bring in the sales engineer in, right before I’m about to clinch the sale. The SE is my “exclamation point” of value-add. They make me look good. I’ve brought in sales engineers early on in this process. We end up contradicting each other. The SE’s talk to the customer’s engineers because they aren’t comfortable talking to non-technical professionals. The SE’s end up telling folks “no, you can’t” after I’ve pre-negotiated “yes, we can” with my company. OK, so I didn’t let the SE in on this info because it’s not their problem Then again, they made it my problem due siloed lack of communication between sales and engineering.
  3. I have monthly quotas to fill and technical product sales to close. I book as many appointments as I can, even with prospects who seem to have too much time on their hands. I drag the SE’s to as many appointments as I can. I never consider that I am giving away free technical information.  I guess I’m tying up valuable company resources, chasing unqualified leads. It doesn’t matter. I have to justify my position to the company and it’s based on how many appointments I make each month and how many of their technical solutions I pitch.
  4. My company mandates that I always bring a sales engineer into each meeting involving a technical solution. My company makes technical solutions out to be cosmic mysteries. Seriously, I’m not that stupid. I can use the left side of my brain. Problem is, I’m a newbie or middle-of-the-road performer.  All of the SE’s get tied up either 1) working with the rock star sales folks or 2) getting sent out on dead-end sales calls with reps who are filling their monthly sales quotas. With no SE’s available when my customer’s decision making team is available, I was forced to suck it up and try to close my last sale myself. Which I did. Hey, it’s not such a cosmic mystery. Why does my company try to make technical stuff out to be so hard for us sales people to understand?
  5. I know enough not to call in the SE until I have a firm reason to believe that their presence is need to close the sale. However, I collaborate, on a regular basis, with several SE’s in my organization with whom I “click.” So I am talking to them from the first sales call, kicking the tires, and trading approaches and knowledge. I grow as a sales rep, and they grow as a technical professional, regardless of whether I am parading them in front of the customer or not. If they are available to close the sale, great. Our partnership is value-add for the customer. If the SE is not available, we’ve prepped each other so our tag-team is “there” even though I may be the only person at the final meeting. The point is, we are a team. And we are involved, as a team, from the first call to the prospect, whom the SE has helped me identify as a viable lead. My company compensates these SE’s for every sale I close. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.

Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU is available on Amazon.com in April 2012. For more information, click on the link.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

Jill Konrath’s Foreward – Do YOU Mean Business? by Babette N. Ten Haken

March 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The sales process is tough. If you’re in sales, you know how much time it takes to set up meetings with potential prospects. They’re not receptive to your advances. They’d rather stay with the status quo than change. The budgets are tight and all they’re concerned about is price.

If you’re a technical professional who’s involved in the sales process, you’re under pressure to make pitches that convince prospects to do business with your firm. But for some reason, what you’re told to do just doesn’t feel right.

Sound familiar? The truth is, in the past few years your prospects have changed – radically. Since virtually everything they need to know can be found online, they don’t need to meet with you. Nor do they have the time. Everyone is crazy-busy, trying to handle more work and impossible deadlines with fewer resources.

As a result, their expectations of us, as sellers and technical professionals, have changed, too. They’re tougher on us. More demanding. We have to prove we’re a valuable resource before they’ll even consider having a relationship with us. But saying good things about ourselves or our company falls on deaf ears.

Despite all this, fewer than 10 percent of sellers have altered how they approach prospective clients, create opportunities, or differentiate themselves from competitors.

To be successful today requires a major rethinking of “what works.” In my first book, Selling to BIG Companies, I introduced new strategies to help sellers get their foot in the door of targeted accounts. In my second book, SNAP Selling, I focused on new strategies for dealing with frazzled, harried decision-makers.

Babette Ten Haken challenges stereotypes as well. I first met her seven years ago, when she called me with a question. Having recently taken on a sales role, she was perplexed at the divisions between the sales and technical functions. And, she felt like she was being pushed to do things that not only didn’t work, but also compromised her belief system.

She was right. And since that initial conversation, she’s been a woman on a mission to help sales and technical professionals be more successful with business development. In Do YOU Mean Business?, she challenges traditional stereotypes and shows you what actually works in today’s business environment.

You’ll find answers to questions such as:

  • What should your sales process look and sound like when you’re interfacing with prospects and current customers?
  • What resources are available to you as technical and non-technical professionals working together?
  • How can you become valuable resources to your customer’s decision making?

If you knew more about Babette’s background, you’d realize just how much she knows where you’re coming from. Trained as a scientist, she spent years facilitating left brain-right brain meetings as a marketing research professional in the pharmaceutical industry. Following that, she transitioned into total quality management and Voice of the Customer research.

To her, the cross-over interface between sales, business development, and engineering is fluid. For over 25 years, she’s been doing this “simultaneous translation” between technical and non-technical colleagues that resulted in very productive and profitable outcomes.

When you read Do YOU Mean Business? you’ll see what I mean. She’ll shake up your perceptions and then deftly guide you through what it takes to be successful. It’s well worth your time to read it.

-          Jill Konrath, business strategist and author, author of Selling to BIG Companies and SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers

Receive a complementary audio download of an interview Babette Ten Haken gave about her book, as well as  a download of Chapter 1 of Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU by clicking on the image of the book in the upper right hand corner of the DYMB site. Available on Amazon.com in April, 2012.

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Book Reviews, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

Sales Engineers and the Apply-As-Needed Scenario

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The interface between sales and engineering is interesting. It’s where the folks who create, market, sell and maintain software solutions, ranging from programs for security, shuttle launches, your iPhone Apps – and just about anything else – reside.  It’s the domain of the folks making the “stuff” of our lives: clothing, shoes, durable goods like cars and washing machines, skins for aerospace applications, CARC coatings, gas turbine packaging applications … and lots of other cool stuff.

In order to manufacture and assemble these consumables, there needs to be the sale of raw materials, machinery, software interfaces, and other elements of the supply chain, to the companies responsible for getting a product to the end-user.

Where there’s a technical side of the sales equation, more often than not, there is an individual whose title usually is “sales engineer.”

A sales engineer could probably be one of the most important individuals in the competitive arsenal of manufacturing and service companies. Yet people (especially traditionally-trained sales folks hired by manufacturing and service companies) tend to regard sales engineers as the pre-sale customer service folks who are there to close the sale and re-assure the customer that the stuff the sales guys and gals proposed is actually going to work. Hmmm…

That is not what a sales engineer is all about. However, the sales engineer does tend to enter the sales cycle a bit early, or late.  What’s up with that?

It could be that your corporate culture permits salespeople to treat sales engineers and other technical professionals like tools in a toolbox. Once the technical professionals have fulfilled their functionality within the sales cycle, they are promptly returned to their cubicles.

I call this the “apply-as-needed” scenario.

There’s a history behind this behavior pattern. In most siloed, division-based infrastructures, technical professionals don’t have the opportunity to become familiar and comfortable with the dynamics of the sales process. Because they traditionally are perceived as a liability rather than an asset.  

Sales engineers and other technical professionals may have gained reputations for talking way too much and too long about all the cool technical features of the product or service being sold. What’s of interest to them may not be a priority to corporate decision-makers. Since engineers are more comfortable seeking peer conversations in meetings, they may direct the majority of their conversation to the customer’s engineers, and exclude the other decision-makers seated at the table.

Then again, the salesperson may or may not have prepped the sales engineer in anticipation of this important meeting. As a result, if questions are asked of the sales engineer, they bring up issues that the salesperson has already painstakingly addressed and pre-negotiated with internal management. The sales engineer may end up telling the customer “No, we can’t do that,” when, in fact, your company has told your salesperson “Yes, we can.”

And if the sales person hasn’t done their homework identifying the context into which your product or your proposed solution is being placed, they may not understand that the customer is somewhat risk-averse.  Your solution is perceived as controversial or disruptive. The customer is looking for an “out.”  

Are the dynamics of your company’s typical sales and engineering interface providing your customers with the opportunity for an easy “out?”

Lack of communication between your sales and engineering functions can cause your customers to second-guess the value of your solutions. How many closes of sales have slipped away because salespeople apply technical / sales engineering colleagues “as needed” during the sales cycle, rather than throughout the business development process?

What does preserving your company’s status quo, in terms of lack of communication between sales and engineering, end up costing your company in lost sales opportunities?

I’d say it’s time to shake things up a bit.

This blog post features an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book, Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU, due for release on Amazon.com in April 2012. You can find out more about the book, and sign up for downloads and a newsletter, at www.doyoumeanbusiness.com.

 

 

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Copyright © 2009 - 2013 Sales Aerobics for Engineers ®, LLC. All Rights Reserved.