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Tipping Dominoes

April 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Remember what you were doing in September 2008? That’s when the sales paradigm, and the global economy, broke into a million little pieces. And all the kings horses and all the kings men are still re-assembling the component parts. But not the same way, ever again.

For those of you still waiting for things to go back to the post-industrial mindset economic halcyon days… they are over. Your expertise is needed. More than ever. To be part of the new business development paradigm. And that paradigm favors individuals who are comfortable working cross-functionally. Who are comfortable on both sides of the technical/non-technical table.

There’s more to “you” than whatever you were “before” 2008. In fact, the global economy requires everyone to expand the “who you are” beyond corporate mindset and status quo thinking. Beyond postgraduate degrees and professional certifications. Think horizontal, as well as vertical. Think 360 degrees, taking 10,000 foot eagle’s eye view of the business terrain. It’s time to start tipping the dominoes.

Starting in 2008, I saw many technical professionals, colleagues of mine, displaced when their companies downsized. This was unheard of. So many engineers were schooled to feel that their technical acumen was an insurance policy for career longevity. Yet they found themselves on the outside, looking in. And not knowing why they were in this predicament. It’s time to start challenging siloed mindset and start tipping the dominoes.

Starting in 2008, I was spending more time untangling the disconnects and dysfunction of my clients’ out-of-touch business models, than I was selling marketing solutions. Before we could even get to the solution, we needed to determine the root cause of why these manufacturers and service companies were stuck with a client base that didn’t grow and with projects that utilized only part of their capabilities and capacity. The last thing they needed was a marketing solution. The first thing they needed to do was take a good look at what they had become over the years. Even the status quo is no longer comfortable. The dominoes have started tipping.

Starting in 2008, I was coaching entrepreneurs and MBAs. These very bright, very smart young people told me of conversations they were having with their technical or non-technical counterparts. These conversations sounded amazingly like the same ones I had 25 years ago as a corporate newbie. These conversations sounded amazingly like the ones I was having with current customers, you know, the ones with the disconnects and dysfunction.

The digital millennium allows our customers and prospects to access all the information they need to acquire about our business – without our having to “sell” them anything. Even if they require a custom solution which your out-of-date website inadequately explains while it fails to engage the reader. It strikes me as absurd that social media and web companies are all the rage with B2B companies. How can your company effectively utilize social media when your business model and certainly your sales methodologies are outdated?  It’s time to start tipping the dominoes.

We all have to mean business, regardless of our respective job descriptions. We have to work horizontally as well as vertically with our colleagues and customers. That’s the dialogue I began with you on April 18, 2009. That’s the dialogue I continue today, starting my fourth year, in this blog, and in Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU, now available on Amazon.com.

You continue to inspire our collective conversations. It is my sincere desire to inspire you to move 1 millimeter outside your comfort level, so that you will, indeed, mean business and revenue generation for your customers.

               Babette N. Ten Haken

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books, Business Development, Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, Engineering, Sales, sales engineering 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: Business Development, Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, Sales 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: Books, Business Development, Do YOU Mean Business, Engineering, Sales 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: Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, Engineering, Sales, sales engineering, Sales-Engineering Interface™ Tagged With: , ,

Working 4 Engineers or Selling 2 Engineers?

February 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Regardless of where we sit at the table, we see the same things differently. Do you appreciate those different perspectives? These differences fuel collaboration, not disagreement!

For those of us who generate business, selling solutions provided by engineering-intensive companies, how can you create more value for your organization that also results in a decrease in your marginalization within that organization? The cultures in technically-intensive companies perceive business development specialists to be like hunters; they are sent out identify prey and possibly kill those saber tooth tigers and bring them in-house (identify opportunities and win contracts). The gatherers (technical folks) take it from there.

The problem is, the market may be hungry for some other type of offering which your company is perfectly capable of providing. But you haven’t let your hunters/business development experts in on this revelation, so they continue to track the same prey rather than expanding your (and your clients’) pallet.

Business development professionals are well-positioned to tune into industry trends. After all, they are out there talking with potential customers who may not be aware of the breadth and depth of your company’s capabilities. How is your organization incorporating business intelligence into new customer acquisition? If you don’t feel the business development folks are smart enough to extrapolate this information into current and new markets, do you end up short-changing everyone?

Let’s flip the table around and consider how difficult it is to sell solutions to engineering-intensive companies.  Your company may have trained you to sell solutions, but the engineering mindset will spin your solutions out into an endless algorithm of “what if” to see how robust your solution actually is. And the engineering mindset really is smart enough to figure out how to create the solution you are selling, as well. As a seller, you hardly ever feel you “have the engineering company at ‘Hello’”. In fact, the company may enjoy making you feel downright uncomfortable.

Treating the business development folks like a team sport – no matter whether these folks work for you or are selling to you – serves no productive function other than reinforcing how smart everyone is in their respective professional silos. And, let’s face it, the engineers win that contest hands down. Problem is, the engineers suffer from a lack of soft skills related to communication of value, relevance and business-building to and for their clients. And the business development folks are the ones who perhaps are less impeded in their ability to take risks and walk your engineering talk.

It doesn’t make sense to perpetuate the Us-versus-Them status quo mentality that our academic training, institutions and companies tend to develop and perpetuate. You can’t have each others’ backs if you are, theoretically and behaviorally, at each other’s throats.

It’s up to you to catch yourself falling into these status quo habits. Yes, we all lose patience trying to communicate with our technical or non-technical counterparts. Dial yourself down a notch or two and teach as you communicate. Engineers are usually great communicators when it comes to explaining the details and extrapolating into a broader context. Business development folks are usually great communicators when it comes to relating the solution to the big picture. What happens when you arrive at that same endpoint, pulling together?

I’m seeing complement here. It’s just a matter of taking the time to test it out. Do you have a professional colleague from the “other / Them” discipline with whom you are comfortable working? Make an appointment to figure out “what they say” and “what they mean” and how it relates to what you are saying and what you mean. You just might find yourselves on the same page.

I’m guaranteeing it will change your perspective. It will move you 1 millimeter outside your comfort level and you won’t want to go back to the way things were.

Well, there’s a lot to be said about being comfortable. But comfort is not a guarantee for being secure. In today’s global economy, it makes sense to be poised for your next manager, promotion, or job with another company.

Make yourself as robust as possible. Think about working with the guys and gals sitting across the table from you.

 

Go to www.doyoumeanbusiness.com to learn more about technical/non-technical collaboration and receive a complementary download of Chapter 1 of Do YOU Mean Business?, coming out in April 2012.

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Core Capabilities, Do YOU Mean Business, Engineering, Sales Tagged With: , , ,

Understand Your Clients’ Motivations – Part 2

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, I created the first part of this two-part series called Understand Your Clients' Motivations - Part 1, on this blog site, Sales Aerobics for Engineers Blog. Part 1 focused on how we all make assumptions about the business development and sales process that we shouldn't be making.

Today, the second part of this two-part series is published as a guest post on the award-winning CivilEngineeringCentral.com Blog. Part 2 focuses on how we never really understand our customers' decision-making process. And it certainly isn't ever made in a straight line.

I invite you to read the second part (and first if you missed it).

Let me know what you think.

Want to know more about how to develop business and have those sales conversations with potential clients - even if you are an engineer / technical professional? My book, Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU is coming out Q1. Learn more about it by clicking on the book title, above!

Don't forget to connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook!

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Customer Focus, Do YOU Mean Business Tagged With: , , ,

Everyone is a Customer of Everyone Else

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Everyone has customers, both in the workplace and in the marketplace. The concept that everyone is a customer of everyone else, just like “do unto others,” should be a second skin we wear effortlessly, naturally. It’s not a shallow phrase we pay lip service to. Or a flavor-of-the-month concept that we apply-as-needed. 

Serving our customers, and treating everyone we come into contact with as a potential customer, should be second-nature to the way we are hard-wired. It should become part of our personal core values.

Why is this such a difficult concept for so many of us to wrap our minds around?

Your customer includes everyone you come in contact with during the course of your workday, including yourself. When you think about it, your interactions with your customers, both internal (coworkers and colleagues) and external (revenue-producing entities that purchase or rent your company’s products, goods, or services), represent a continuous business development process.

Perhaps some of your internal customers are the folks at your company with whom you do not want to be associated! (But you need to work with them in order to accomplish project objectives.)  Then there the internal customers, your colleagues, with whom you do your best work. The same holds true for your customer base: you enjoy creating deliverables for some of these folks while the relationship and process of working with other customers is right up there with root canal.

How can you create opportunities so your workday and responsibilities involve engaging more with those individuals and on those projects for which you produce your best output? And how can you gradually shift the balance of your workload away from the status quo order-taker colleagues and clients, so that you increase your level of innovation, collaboration and value?

How you define “customers” becomes your delivery of your vision and your professional expertise, and your ability to create value for your organization. It’s how you move from being perceived as an order-taker to serving your customers as an innovator and leader.

Think input, output and throughput. And for you sales professionals, think of a 4 x 100 meter relay race: from whom are you receiving the baton, what is the function of your particular leg of the race, and to whom are you handing off that baton?

Everyone is a customer of everyone else. It is just that simple.

Yet it is difficult to take this position with impending performance reviews, still more downsizing, and the tendency of some of our illustrious colleagues to treat the workplace with their own sense of entitlement (which translates into ‘do something unto someone else before they can do something unto you’). Not very professionally or ethically uplifting, I’d say.

If we perceive and treat our professional relationships as a matter of stewardship and paying forward to our colleagues and clients, our productivity and profitability might take a turn for the better.

We all are in this together. Think about how you can alter your role in the status quo so that your colleagues – even the ones you don’t care to work with – cannot help but have a positive outcome based on innovative collaboration.

Once you change your approach, the domino effect starts. It’s unavoidable. And you start to lead by example. The opportunities you start to create (or you perceive as “coming your way”) align more directly with your core values and capabilities.

You get on your customers’ A-list and they, in turn, are on yours.

It starts with moving yourself 1 millimeter outside of your comfort level and their status quo. It starts with your collaborating with your technical and non-technical colleagues, rather than competing with them (save that strategy for your marketplace competitors).

After all, the fulcrum for leveraging innovative business development is collaboration between technical and non-technical professionals.

What role will you choose to take?

Interested in reading more about technical/non-technical collaboration? Join the discussion at www.doyoumeanbusiness.com and receive updates and downloads about my book, set for publication in March, 2012!

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Customer Experience, Customer Focus, Do YOU Mean Business Tagged With: , , ,

Looking forward to Monday Morning Meetings?

January 8, 2012 By 2 Comments

Do you dread Monday Morning Meetings? Do you “turn off and tune out” until it’s your turn to speak?

By the time you read this blog post, you will be: 1) anticipating tomorrow’s meeting, 2) heading towards that meeting, 3) completing the meeting (or reading this blog post on your iPhone during the actual meeting because you have “tuned out”) or, 4) heading off to yet another one of those meetings.

Most of us perceive Monday Morning meetings as the Start of This Week’s Infighting. Someone rings the bell and we all start in again. Reinforcing the status-quo behaviors that keep our company, and us, spinning our collective wheels instead of moving ourselves forward.

Instead of battling our competitors, we are consumed by internal skirmishes.

It doesn’t have to be that way, you know. You can’t move forward, however, until you understand what is holding you back.

Think about having a Monday morning cross-functional team meeting that everyone looks forward to.  What would happen in order to achieve that endpoint?

Work to dislodge yourself from the “Us versus Them” status-quo mindset.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had each other’s backs? In the status-quo Monday Morning scenario, everyone ends up at each other’s throats! Not a pretty picture. But one that is played out in countless companies, every Monday morning and on, into the workweek. It’s the way it’s always been done.

Aren’t you supposed to be a well-oiled team working towards unseating your competitors, instead of each other? Yes, I thought so, too. So what happened?

Understand why your functional role is not the same as your job description

Your job title may sound impressive but may carry little weight in terms of your functional role regarding decision-making and impacting your company’s revenue stream. Who are the real decision makers in your organization? What are their criteria for decision making? How can you become a positive influence on revenue generation?

And here is a clue card: if you are not impacting business development and revenue generation for your company, your job may not be as secure as you think it is – even if you are a technical professional.

Techno-babble and business-speak create barriers to collaboration and revenue generation

You can’t 1) have anyone’s back and  2) impact revenue generation if 3) no one understands what you are saying. Including your peers. Everyone tends to sling around professional lingo to show others that they fit in and can run with the pack.

Yes, we all know you are very, very smart and have a tremendous educational pedigree. By being exclusive, however, you are boxing yourself out from being an impactful collaborator and communicator. Think about that one.

Take the perspective of a CEO, and lead rather than “do” as you learn about business planning.

You are the CEO of your career. If you want your colleagues to ask you what you think, rather than if you can perform project tasks, start leading yourself first and foremost. Instead of criticizing management direction,  learn to think like a CEO.

Understand the context of the decisions you always seem to be on the receiving end of. By learning about the business planning and modeling processes, you can start impacting those decisions.

Engage colleagues and customers in simultaneous translation: the ability to perceive, think and communicate to both technical as well as non-technical professionals.

Seeking engagement, rather than exclusivity within status-quo discipline driven corporate structures, means you’re collaborating. Becoming a productive and profitable member of your company’s business development process creates your value. And translates this value to your colleagues, company and customers as well.

It’s really a rather fluid set of business development dynamics in the long run.

Your thoughts?

Learn more about technical/non-technical collaboration, business development and your role. Opt-in to receive downloads from my book, Do YOU Mean Business? as we move towards the book launch date!

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, Job Functionality Tagged With: , , ,

The Road We Traveled in 2011

December 20, 2011 By 2 Comments

The two weeks of the Holiday Season leading up to the New Year are a time of reflection for many of us, although it sometimes doesn't seem like it. We are lining up our road maps for 2012: identifying  the referral network for our prospecting (because we've finally learned that cold calling and churning and burning through leads lists doesn't work). We are trying to get projects completed and invoiced by the end of the year to insure cash flow. We are deciding whether the roads we travel on are leading us somewhere productive and relevant, let alone profitable.

It can become chaotic and overwhelming. Unless you take a step back to gain a greater perspective of what's going on. And keep stepping back until you get a 10,000 foot eagle's eye view of the situation.

What roads will we travel on, together, in 2012? We've certainly traversed some interesting technical and non-technical geography in 2011.

As I tee up for 2012 blogging about some great topics, including customer experience, sales and the technical professional, liberating yourself from your professional status-quo, and some tools for smarter selling, I’ve revisited the roads we’ve traveled on, together, this year.

It’s because of our collaborative dialogues, your feedback, and the professional inspiration you’ve given me that I have a book coming out in February! I’ve made some major pivots in the direction of my business this year as well. I am a life-long learner. And I learn from the folks I work with as well as work for. I am always expanding my sandbox, and this year was no exception.

In mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs (both start-ups and and mid-level funding companies), I have the same dialogue I've always had when working with manufacturers and engineering-intensive service companies. The venture capital venue provides some very provocative discussions with companies who recognize it’s time to move beyond “the way we’ve always done things” towards “the way we need to do things.” And since they are already “there,” these businesses are open to dialogue and collaboration. Which are very gratifying discussions to have since so many companies are resistant to moving one millimeter outside of their status-quo comfort levels.

In reflecting the roads more, as well as less, traveled together this year, I'd like you to take a look at the page on my blog called Top Blog Posts . I keep it updated based on your comments, re-Tweets, Shares on LinkedIn and relevance to the professional communities and target markets in which I work.

When you get some down time this week or next, or even for a quick momentum-boost, take a look at these blogs which your colleagues found the most intriguing and provocative in 2011.

Your Best Sales Partner May Be An Engineer

Think You Have All The Answers? Did You Ask The Right Questions?

Being Relevant To Your Customers

Do YOU Mean Business?

Are You Chasing Around Customers and Prospects Who Are In Crisis Mode?

Lessons Learned from Spinner Dolphins

Did You Write Your Own Instruction Manual?

So Has It Turned Out The Way You Thought It Would?

Are You Drinking Your Own Kool-Aid?

The Power of Your Personal Brand in Space-Time

Understanding Why You Work for Other People

Your Financial Plan is Your Business Pulse

Take a read and let me know what you think, as you move forward into the new business year. These posts range from business planning to career development to website design to core personal values. There’s a lot of good food for thought.

Thank you for your readership this year.

Most importantly, thank you for your collective and collaborative inspiration.

Looking forward to continuing our dialogue!

BTH

 

Filed Under: Business Development, Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, sales engineering Tagged With: , , , ,

Your Best Sales Partner May Be an Engineer

November 29, 2011 By 6 Comments

Technical/non-technical collaboration for business development is considered the equivalent of being asked to cross over to the Dark Side from the Star Wars movies or walk across the abyss in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade . Many of you dismiss this concept as non-viable without letting the collaborative force be with you and crossing that conceptual chasm in a non-discipline-driven leap of faith.

In my recent blog post “Collaborate with Technical Colleagues and Close More Sales”, on Josh Hinds’ tremendous SalesTrainingAdvice.com site, I address the opportunities that many of you on the sales side may be ignoring in remaining true to a sales only perspective when trying to generate revenue for your company.  After the economic meltdown of 2008, the world has become a different environment for many aspects of life. Governments and economies are tottering and the status-quo of just about everything is being challenged. Which makes people more desperate to hang on to the status-quo than ever before. But there’s no security in that tack.

Sales people may avoid working with an engineering collaborator like the plague. There’s a lot to be learned from our colleagues from other disciplines who sit across the table from us during those dreaded Monday morning meetings. Taking the initiative to reach out to them expands your knowledge base, makes you more comfortable communicating outside of your discipline and allows you to be more productive in your business development efforts.

Whether a technical or non-technical professional, you cannot afford to ignore your role in your company’s revenue stream. And one of the first ways in which you can engage in this process is collaboration across disciplines.

Doesn’t it make business and career sense to move yourself one millimeter outside of your current comfort level and join forces with your technical/non-technical colleagues?

No one’s going to get you to take that first step but you. And there’s a tremendous return on your personal investment waiting for you on the other side.

 

Let's continue this discussion!  I have a book coming out in February 2012 on this topic. Click on Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU . Let’s talk.

Filed Under: Books, Business Development, Collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business, Sales-Engineering Interface™, Simultaneous Translation Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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