Month: October 2008

Brace yourself.

Prospects are going to cut way back on spending money, but they won’t stop entirely — they never do.  Traditional sales approaches as we know them will falter.  Making a sale will be as difficult as it has ever been in the past 30 years.

In the stiff competition for funding, what can you do as a sales organization to persuade the customer to give top priority for the expenditure for your solution?

Leverage your SEs.

Use your SEs to work with the customer’s technical constituents to dig deep for business pain.  Find lots of pain.  The more pain the better.  As an SE, when the customer explains their business problem to you, don’t take their word on face value.  Dig for more pain.  Good questions are, “What is the impact of this problem on the business / your group / your job?”, “Who else is affected?”, “To what extent?”, “How much?”,  “Why is that?”, “What would be the quantified impact if this problem could be resolved?”

Get numbers from them.  Numbers help the customer visualize the problem and solution.  Numbers help you, as the SE, establish compelling value, which helps you hold price.  The vendor who helps their customer visualize problems and solutions better, will get precedence over those who don’t.  Those vendors who help technical decision makers build a clear quantified business case for funding will more likely get priority for that funding.

Sales and SE Executives:  In this time of stress, rather that trying to squeeze more out of sales reps, consider leveraging the SE’s technical credibility to grow deals, shrink sales cycles, and cleanse funnels.  Leverage their technical credibility to help the customer give top priority to the expenditure for your solution.

Don’t think SEs can impact revenue?  Consider this:  A $2.5 billion dollar hi-tech company has a 2:1 ratio between SEs and sales reps.  That’s right.  Two to one SEs to sales reps.  Years ago the VP told us that they discovered that SEs could generate substantially more revenue than sales reps, so they switched the traditional ratio, and the strategy paid off handsomely.

A Fortune 500 company has a large pre-sales force.  Their normal sales cycle uses SE to drive the entire deal to the extent that sales reps only process orders.  Why?  Because customers prefer working with the “Technical Side of the Sale”.

Leverage your SEs, and brace yourSElf.

Sales Engineers often need to enforce a little order into the chaotic and disorderly world of the sales rep. If we do it without impeding the sales rep’s progress, we are successful. I have worked with many talented sales reps ni my time-some of them truly inspirational and visionary. Others had no idea why they were there, or what they were doing.

I started compiling many of my methodologies (one of which is described in this article) after working with one such visionary sales rep, Godfrey Unaka. I worked as a consultant in Boston in the late 90s, and back then a consultant had to act as Sales Engineer. He inspired me to look at sales as just another process, like a technical process. He gave me the idea for the 5 (6, really) Ds in the first place, and I owe him for that. I haven’t been able to locate him since, but I hope he is successful-wherever he is. Thanks, Godfrey!

Why have methodologies?

They work. Countless times I have gotten the sale with methodologies and a clear-cut plan when a cheaper bid was present. It is true-no matter what your prospect tells you-that quality can win over price. Price is the worst differentiator. If you are in a price battle, then you have failed to illuminate a differentiator that will put you in a different, better class than your competition. This is the stuff of solution, or relationship selling. Some call it enterprise, or strategic sales, but to a Sales Engineer it is all the same.

So lets take a look at my million dollar methodology for getting the big money.
Continue reading “Pat’s 5 Ds (well, 6, really…) of Engagements”