collaboration | Sales Aerobics for Engineers ® Blog

Give Your Customers Academy Awards

February 26, 2013 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

OK, I have to admit. I was watching the Academy Awards this past Sunday evening. Yup, I was checking out the red carpet action as well. Upon receiving their awards, every one of the winners attributed their success to their team: those folks who bring out their best and get their stories out of their heads and onto the screen.

Which got me to thinking.

How do you reward your clients?

Many of us would say that the reward our customers receive from working with us is the value we bring to them with our strategies and solutions, products, platforms and services.

Have you ever thought of creating an Award for your customers? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: A-List Customers, cleaning out your client closet, collaboration, customer awards program, customer loyalty program

Rocking Boats, Disruption, and Entrepreneurs

February 1, 2013 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Who’s the person always rocking the boat in your organization? You know who they are. They ask questions which make you feel uncomfortable. They do their homework. They combine ideas from various disciplines and come up with solutions that don’t even make sense. They think out of the proverbial box. Way, way out of that status quo oasis you call your corporate culture.

They disrupt the norm.

They upset folks.

They are unconventional.

They are comfortable assuming risk.

They play 52-pickup with your ideas, and come up with something that, well, isn’t the way it’s always been done. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales & Engineering Collaboration Tagged With: collaboration, corporate culture, entrepreneurial types, ideation, rocking the boat, status quo

Give Yourself a Good Swift Kick

November 30, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

As we close in on year end, this is not going to be one of those go-get-’em, onward-and-upward, next-year-will-be-better posts. You probably are already where you were going, anyway. You are probably already in top form as well.

You probably know it.

So what’s the deal? Are you finding it a tall order to live up to having met your own expectations?

I thought so.

You are not alone. What you do so effortlessly, in fact, does take quite a bit of effort, process, and discipline, doesn’t it? And practice.

Continuously.

It’s All Sales Blah-Blah-Blah to Engineers

October 12, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 4 Comments

If you feel speaking with engineers is like having a root canal without anesthetic, don’t flatter yourself: engineers feel the same way about talking to sales people. Either way, this conversation isn’t really much of a dialogue at all, in the majority of status quo conversations. Is it?

Engineers tend to be specific and direct in the type of knowledge they are asking about and in the nature of answers they expect to receive. Words are very important to technical professionals: a word translates into a design specification or outcome. If you, as a salesperson, don’t know your stuff and are throwing around technical buzz terms like they are confetti, I don’t have to tell you that technical professionals will have no mercy in making you feel like an inferior life form. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: collaboration, engineer, engineers, sales people, sales spiel, technical professionals

8 Tips for Deploying Your Tech Team To Sell

October 2, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

Ever think about letting techies loose with your customers? Learning how collaboration with your technical colleagues can positively impact your sales process and close ratio.

After you overcome your reluctance to collaborate with “them,” that is.

I’m not advocating grabbing the nearest available engineer and running out ready-fire-aim to talk to a customer. Do some planning. How will this strategy complement your sales process, skill set and, ultimately, career path and revenue stream?

Here are eight strategies to kick-start deploying your tech team to sell – either with you or on their own. Your tech team remains at the cross-roads of customer conversations and revenue growth, once the business is won and brought in house.

Everyone is a Customer of Everyone Else – on the Selling Fearlessly blog

August 2, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

My post today is featured on Robert Terson’s Selling Fearlessly blog. It’s title: Everyone is a Customer of Everyone Else, an excerpt from my book, Do YOU Mean Business.

Enjoy your read.

Tell me how the concept of customer plays out in your workplace and in how you serve your customers.

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: collaboration, customer focus, technical professionals

Avoiding working with engineers?

July 11, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Your engineering staff is your lifeblood. Are you in sales, marketing or finance? Do you work for or sell to manufacturers, distributors, or service companies? How’s it going?

Time to take your own pulse on how you, as a salesperson, get along with your engineers. Do you view them as allies or adversaries? Do you even understand how they think? Are you, yourself, an engineer who has been forced to cross the proverbial chasm into a sales engineering function?

As a salesperson, you may either be calling on engineers as a prospect or working directly with them within your organization. The sales function is contrary to the way engineers are trained. Technical professionals are objective rather than subjective. Deductive rather than inductive. Left brain vs. right brain. Problem solvers rather than big picture thinkers. Pragmatic vs. The Next Great Thing.

Word choices have tremendous significance and specificity to engineers. Choose your words wisely. You may learn something from your engineering colleagues.

Your sales life and pipeline can be enriched by learning from your engineering staff – and vice versa. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Sales & Engineering Collaboration, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: collaboration, engineers, sales pipeline, salesperson, technical professionals

5 Reasons Why Project Managers need to be more than Project Managers

June 7, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Recently, I was asked about why I make all this fuss about teaching technical professionals to sell. Don’t you have enough to do being engineers, project managers and technical experts?

The answer is two-fold: YES! You do have enough to do. And NO! You aren’t doing enough with what you are tasked to do.

Samir Penkar interviewed me for his Future of Project Management blog post. I encourage you to read the full transcript of the interview which also includes the audio download of our discussion, as well.

For those of you reading my blog post while you drink your first cup of coffee this morning, settle in and enjoy the condensed version.

And let me know your thoughts.

Here are 5 key take-aways about why Project Managers have to be more than project managers in today’s globally competitive economy. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: business development, collaboration, professional development, project management, sales

Business and Tapas

May 16, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

I just returned from Barcelona. It’s one of my favorite cities. There was a scientific meeting. I spent time talking business with researchers turned entrepreneurs. I also spent a lot of time touring the city and eating tapas, one of my favorite food groups.

I always head to Ciudad Condal Cerveceria in the Eixample district. It’s like heaven, with tapas.

The bar has wood-paneled, vaulted ceilings and a bar area full of marble and brass. It’s like entering a church for tapas. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: business, collaboration, customer experience, entrepreneurs, teamwork

Got Collaboration?

May 11, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

On May 5, 2012, I had the honor and privilege of sitting around the table with some of the best sales minds in the business. We came together in Chicago to collaborate.

And collaborate we did.

Leaving agendas and egos at the door, this incredible group of people had been working together online. Not all of us had ever met the rest of us. And so we did. Because we knew we had work to do.

For your benefit.

We are known for the quality of the content we generate. On our blogs, through our workshops, coaching and speaking. Through mentoring, encouraging. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Sales, Pitching & Business Development, Webinars and Special Events Tagged With: collaboration, networking, sales insight, synergy