sales-engineering interface | Sales Aerobics for Engineers ® Blog

Do You Play Well with the Kids in your Business Sandbox?

May 10, 2013 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

You know as well as I do that there are people in your organization you enjoy working with, and those whom you don’t. If you work for a large corporation, your feelings may become lost in the crowd. If you are in a startup or small company with less than 20 employees, it’s hard to hide your feelings. If you are working closely with technical, engineering and sales professionals, the situation can seem like mixing oil with water.

One of the first signs that the wheels are coming off a startup is when everyone is at odds with one another. If you are in a small, family-owned business, however, this type of dysfunction may be the status quo and, unfortunately sanctioned, norm. Along the sales-engineering interface®, tension between disciplines can become so palpable that you can cut it with a knife.

You are all playing in the same sandbox, every day. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration Tagged With: engineering professionals, sales professionals, sales-engineering interface, samll company, startup, technical professionals

Are You A Horse With Stripes or A Zebra?

September 13, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

How do you introduce yourself at meetings? Do you state your job title and professional certifications? Do you showcase the number of professional publications you have or whether or not you are the winner of the quarterly sales contests or the annual top sales leader award?

What do you really bring to the table, day in and day out? You are more than your job title or latest accolades. Those are nouns. What adjectives would you use to describe your professional core competencies – those deliverables that your colleagues and customers can expect to receive from you consistently, professionally, and with unending excellence? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration Tagged With: common denominators, cross-functional meetings, entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs, professional core competencies, sales, sales-engineering interface

Wearing Multiple Hats, the Startup Fashion Statement

September 7, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

If you are entrepreneurial and are engaged in a startup business, you are more than well aware that you aren’t exactly working a 9 – 5 job. It never ends. And that’s not all bad.

If you are entrepreneurial and at the helm of your startup business, you know there’s more to your CEO job title than that acronym. In fact, to be accurate, you are the CEO-CSO-CMO-CTO-COO-CFO.

You wear a lot of hats.

You really are all things to all people. You are interoperable. You have to be. Who else but you to make the key decisions. All of the key decisions involved in running your company and implementing your vision.

Which means it’s extremely important to surround yourself with collaborative team members, willing to share your vision, and willing to wear some of your multiple hats from time to time.

The Curious Case of the Sales Engineer

May 7, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Casting calls require you to specify whether you are auditioning for a role which calls for singers who can dance or dancers who can sing. While being a sales engineer is hardly a song-and-dance routine, many SEs wonder just what role they are supposed to play in the business development process.

If you are a sales person with a strong technical side you may have identified, prospected, qualified and negotiated the sale. Or not.
If you are an engineer with some strong and not-so-soft sales skills you may be taking over the sales process after a lead has been identified and qualified. Or not.
You may find yourself inserted into the sales equation somewhere in-between, applied-as-needed, with or without having been provided context. You play a brief but critical role in the drama of the sale and are returned to your department after your role is completed. Or not.

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

March 8, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 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: babette ten haken, cross-functional mindset, Do You Mean Business, Jill Konrath, sales-engineering interface, technical/non-technical collaboration

Sales Engineers and the Apply-As-Needed Scenario

March 5, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 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: business development, sales engineers, sales-engineering interface

Stuck in the Middle With You

March 2, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

I’ve always been rather gregarious. That’s probably the reason why, as a corporate newbie, I was “involuntarily” volunteered into the role of simultaneous translator between “Us” (the techies) and “Them” (the biz folks) for “those” meetings. After all, I was the young woman who would talk to, well, even a table top.

Of course, after some round-table chatter, then I’d ask The Question. And with That Question, the tone changed. Here I was, a reasonably good-looking woman, fashionably dressed, chatting away as if I were at some corporate event. And then I laser-focused in and asked a technical question, just like the techies were asking! Yet I looked like – and certainly sounded like – a business person. Where was this coming from?

The business folks felt betrayed: hadn’t I been on their side? The technical folks were (mentally) fist pumping in the air: finally, their side had scored points. And there I was, in the middle, like I’ve always been. Asking an honest, but piercing, question that got everyone around the table focused.

I’m comfortable in the middle, facilitating. Not everyone is. My questions are honest, open and inquisitive. They always have been. I’m not into making round-table discussions an extension of the corporate team sport. After all, we only get one chance to do this right, so why not revel in the opportunity to brainstorm and collaborate?

How many of you are comfortable taking the first step towards this direction? Assuming perhaps a bit more responsibility, asking questions that either a) aren’t supposed to be asked or b) have never been asked but c) should be asked. It involves risk, exposure of your Professional Self and, well, perhaps failure. People might just look at you like you have two heads. People might wonder what you had for breakfast.

People might just see you in a different manner and realize you had their back all along, even while participating in an Us-versus-Them mindset that normally puts everyone at each others’ throats.

OK, so this position isn’t for the weak of heart. However, if you are passionate, committed and really good at what you do, what’s the upside for taking a chance to cross over the conversation?

It reminds me of that scene from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. You know, the one where Indie has to get over the abyss so he can find the Holy Grail….except there is no footpath that he can readily perceive? And using a bit of hypothetico-deductive logic, he throws dirt into the abyss and voila! That path is revealed. And with a bit of faith, he crosses it. Not exactly knowing what he’s going to find on the other side.

Take that leap of faith. You’ll never look back.

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: collaboration, cross-functional mindset, sales-engineering interface, technical/non-technical collaboration

Your Best Sales Partner May Be an Engineer

November 29, 2011 By Babette Ten Haken 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: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: business development, collaboration, engineering, Josh Hinds, sales, sales-engineering interface, SalesTraining Advice website, status-quo mindset, technical/non-technical collaboration

Lessons Learned from Spinner Dolphins

October 17, 2011 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

I was in Maui last week. Look, someone had to go and I had my hand up first. Anyway, long story and I just completed the manuscript for my book and off to the publishers. I had to regenerate grey cells. And when one blogs, you obtain your inspiration from, well, anything. Basically your surroundings, dinner conversations, even going up and down grocery store aisles. (We won’t discuss the type of inspiration one obtains when driving in heavy traffic).

I snorkel and swim. Good thing to like to do when in Maui, let alone anywhere. I had the opportunity of snorkeling with the Pacific Whale Foundation eco-tour for smaller groups (which I highly recommend). We went to Molokini Crater, which is one of the best places in Hawaii (let alone anywhere) to go and offers incredibly diverse underwater ecology.

On the way to La Perouse Bay, we encountered about 200 spinner dolphins. Which is unusual. First of all, these wonderful creatures are nocturnal. So seeing a large and energetic group during the day was unexpected. And yes, they spin. They leap out of the water and can rotate as many as 6-8 times before hitting the surface again. Quite a show put on by the adolescents and teenaged spinner dolphins, who were not content to remain with the rest of the group. Show-offs!

What was really unusual, as our on-board ecologists told us, was that about 5 distinct groups of the spinners had come together and were now traveling as one. These amazing creatures realized that occasional collaboration was a great evolutionary strategy. By forming larger groups, the spinner dolphins created a degree of protection from outside predators, like sharks and whales. There were more eyes and echo location to signal danger. Larger groups also offered the opportunity for hybridization of the gene pool. In other words, by breeding with individuals outside of their normal group, the dolphins potentially were introducing new genes into the group which might infer greater resistance and resilience to parasites, barnacles and remoras as well as the microscopic poachers found within these parasites and symbiots.

And there was something else going on. There was at least one other species of dolphin, the spotted dolphin, observed traveling with this large group of spinner dolphins. What was up with that? Inter-species collaboration for starters. Collaboration of a far greater kind, most certainly.

Which got me to thinking about how this rather large group of spinner dolphins had arrived at the concept of collaboration for survival, perhaps in response to changing ecological conditions. I doubt that they reached consensus or hashed it out at Monday morning meetings (you, know, a dolphin version of “OK, who wants to stick out their neck first? I’m into my job security.”).

I wonder who the first dolphin was who made the overture to the second group of spinners to come together. Frankly, I think a whole bunch of groups spontaneously arrived at the same conclusion. Just because it felt, biologically and ecologically, like the right thing to do.

I think it just happened because it had to happen. Talk about sink or swim.

So how many groups of individuals do you have swimming around your company who might benefit from coming together to collaborate for competitive advantage?

There is something to be said, after all, for the value of bringing together diverse perspectives for the benefit of hybridized product development which might allow your company to develop new markets and audiences. And you can’t obtain this perspective if everyone has a siloed mindset and a my-department vs. your-department competitive attitude. You know, that technical professionals vs. non-technical professionals thing. Then there is the competitive advantage created by collaboration with those companies and individuals whom you consider to be your competitors. Sort of like that spotted dolphin. Talk about broader competitive advantage.

Are you one of those individuals who would like to leap out of the water and spin around a few times to shake things up a bit? What is holding you back? Are there departments in your organization with whom you could collaborate, to positively influence competitive outcomes? Perhaps you can see them swimming just beyond the horizon of the walls of your cubicle. I bet they look just like you, not too intimidating. Are they looking back at you when you take a peek over that wall to get a glimpse of them jumping out of the waters in which they are swimming?

So what are you waiting for? Don’t even start to second-guess yourself about the drawbacks of collaborating. I don’t think the spinner dolphins gave it a another thought.

And they looked like they were not only surviving, but thriving.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: business development, collaboration, cross-functional mindset, hybridization, sales-engineering interface, technical/non-technical collaboration

Are you making others feel like they are on the outside, looking in?

May 31, 2011 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Reposted, with modifications, based on my guest post for the May Civil Engineering Central blog.

There’s an art to building and maintaining client relationships. It’s more important than ever before. Clients are becoming more difficult to “win” and their loyalty is more elusive. And the definition of “client” encompasses those individuals within the workplace, your subcontractors and the companies who have contracted your products, services and capabilities.

There’s no room for elitism in client relationships. Your clients, subcontractors, co-workers and boss may admire your skill set and communication acumen. However, they do not hire you so they can worship you. They hire you for What’s In It For Me (WIFM): what you bring to their table and how you build their revenue stream.

Your “wow” solution or creative design allows people to appreciate you for understanding their needs. They assess your ability at communicating and asking good questions. They are delighted in your facility in translating these needs to the various technical disciplines involved in the project. And they will laud you and your company for producing output that not only solves their initial problem, but perhaps moves their company further along competitively as well.

So don’t ruin the momentum you and your company have created by an attitude that communicates you are “too cool” for your clients. Or worse, that your clients are “too ignorant” for you to truly impart the sum total of your skill set. Or that the language and principles of your technical expertise are too far beyond the capacity of your clients to understand. Oh, please. These are not the differentiators you want to establish no matter how good you are, how educated you are or how wonderful your solutions are. There’s someone to replace you right around the corner.

That’s not to say you should be your clients’ best friend, either. There is a fine line to maintaining professionalism while being accessible to the full range of your clients’ needs. Developing the extra set (or two) of professional “antenna” which allow you to assess the context of business decision making is crucial to building and maintaining client relationships. And while professionalism may extend into playing golf, providing tickets to events, and invitations to company social events, you still need to remember that you are hired by your clients (and your company, for that matter) to provide solutions, not companionship.

When it comes down to it, your client base doesn’t owe you anything after they pay their last invoice to your company. No matter how much they fawn over you during the course of the project. Regardless of whether or not they made you feel invincible and infallible during the course of the project. Repeat business isn’t guaranteed. And the context of the next project with this same client may not afford you anywhere near the same degree of familiarity as you encountered during the previous project. In fact, you may not be working with the same set of internal contacts either. All the variables may have changed.

So what legacy do you leave your clients, upon completion of each project? How do you make them feel?

Think about it. I know they will.

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: Civil Engineering Central blog, professional development, sales-engineering interface, technical / non-technical collaboration