ATCP, LLC

It used to be, years back, that a certification meant that you were knowledgeable. Problem was, it really only meant that you were able to pass the kind of test given, and that you had enough short term memory to cram for the test’s material. Certifications do not now, nor have they ever, indicated wisdom or knowledge in the application of one technology into the infinite variety of prospect environments.

If anything, these days too many certifications mean that the person has no time for a real job in the real world, and is virtually useless in a Sales Engineering situation. With thousands of certifications for thousands of applications, which ones do you pick? Oh yeah, and there are more every day! Would you bring a perpetual student on the most important sales call of your career? Of course not. More »

If you wanted folder functionality in your web based client, you were usually out of luck with Gmail. In fact, here they say so:

Folders

Actually, Gmail doesn’t use folders. To help you organize your mail more effectively, Gmail uses labels instead.

Here’s why we think labels are better than folders:

Labels	Folders
A conversation can have more than one label	You can only put a message in one folder
A conversation can be in several locations (Inbox, All Mail, Sent Mail, etc.) at once, making it easier to find later	You have to remember where you filed a message to retrieve it
You can search conversations by label	You can’t always do folder-specific searches

But this isn’t actually true-on either account.

You can actually have both folders and labels in Gmail-effectively having cake and eating it, too. All you need to do is install GTDInbox for Gmail so that your browser version of Gmail will act more like the IMAP service it actually is-showing you folders and such like it does in Thunderbird. This does not change anything about Gmail-instead it makes the Gmail interface look the way the actual Gmail servers see the email you have there. This step is also reversible, so any time you want to go back, just uninstall/disable the add-on. Simple.

So lets make a folder in Gmail called TEST:

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One example illustrates how my methodologies help secure business. On my blog I focus on Sales Engineering, and bettering the profession. In this article I discuss the importance of methodologies in the sales process, and one of my high level methodologies. This methodology alone secured the largest proserv engagement in Sprint’s history ($4.5M), and was directly attributable, per the prospect, to my methodologies. You know when you’ve done this properly when at the the start of the signing the prospect leans over and asks me which page he/she needs to sign. :)

Prospects don’t want the lowest price. They want the best value-just like you and I do when shopping. Sales Engineers are in the justification game. Anything, regardless of the price, that can be justified will be purchased. It is our job to do just that.

As for presentations, I routinely create custom flash animations in place of static PowerPoint decks (why are we still putting prospects through PowerPoint?). These serve many purposes that have secured business for our account team in the past:
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Over the years I’ve heard a lot of sales professionals use these three terms incorrectly, so lets fix that now.

Demo
This is our software, with our data, and our use case(s).

Demos are used only after the opportunity is properly qualified. Showing a demo before the prospect is qualified leads to confusion. No demo will sell software. Seriously.
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