ATCP, LLC

Part 3 (of 3) of a white paper I wrote 10 years ago for a customer that had just recently started selling professional services, but had sold product for over 20 years. This deliverable was one of several I created over the years to train sales and delivery staff in the ways of professional services and intangibles in general. Part 2 is here, and Part 1 is here.

Notes:

LEGACY refers to the existing, outdated process of selling.
Confidential refers to the company itself.

What Decides Whether a Project Should Be Approved?

You may well be pushing your project through channels that are not as familiar with the solution from a technical perspective as they are from a business perspective. While LEGACY as a whole is geared toward technical management, you need to be familiar with, and conversant in, the business categories your client is used to.

Your goal is not to educate the client in LEGACY and change the way they perceive their business. You goal is to show that you think like your client does, and understand the way their business works. In most cases you are not being asked to redesign everything, just address a specific issue. If your approach is too far from the mark, and you lose effective commonality with your client, you will lose the contract. At that point it doesn’t matter how wrong they were, what matters is that you failed to close a deal because you were too busy telling the client how wrong they were.

It cannot be stressed enough that templates and guidelines available to you through the intranet should be treated as exactly that-starting points. You must use these tools to make sure that whatever your end result for a proposal or presentation, it suits the customer’s communication style and information exchange pace. The farther you stray from reading and reacting correctly to the customer’s language, pace and views, the less their heads will shake up/down and the more they will shake left/right.

Be prepared to discuss the solutions proposed with regard to how it will affect the following factors:
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Part 2 (of 3) of a white paper I wrote 10 years ago for a customer that had just recently started selling professional services, but had sold product for over 20 years. This deliverable was one of several I created over the years to train sales and delivery staff in the ways of professional services and intangibles in general. Part 1 is here.

Pre-Sales Project Considerations

Confidential is now maturing its sales approach to include other IBUs into a more complete and comprehensive offering. This unified approach makes for a much more exciting pre-sales phase, and allows us to meet and impress our Strategic Partners and sister IBUs.

A very important function of the new SDM (Service Delivery Manager) position is the close integration with the SAE (Sales Account Executive) and the sales phases of an engagement (Sales Cycles). In many cases, this new area of responsibility is very new to an SDM who may have risen through the technical/engineering ranks. In Confidential, the sales efforts were not a part of the technician’s concerns until after the sale was complete.

A purely technical approach in pre-sales can be disastrous. Equally bad is the pure sales meeting where the SAE can’t answer a question. The time to answer every question is every single meeting. There should be no take-ways to get back to the client on our capabilities. Understand that in almost every case each client meeting will have representation from their managerial and technical staff. You must have a team here to field questions and inquiries from both areas of the client’s business.
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Part of being a Sales Engineer is knowing how to display a product/service in any setting-even trade shows. The best Sales Engineers have no boundaries on their imagination, and use all their tools in ways that were not thought of previously. This is why it is important to own all your own software. If you are waiting for your next appointment (or worse yet consulting), you will get rusty fast.

In this article I discussed easy glass with V-Ray. In the article above, only one image from this project was included. Since I get so many hits to that article (where the tutorial is), I thought it might be nice to include all the renders I did for that client.

I’ll just post all the pictures here, with links to the larger versions by just clicking the thumbnails below. But first I should set this up.

The client asked for a modern trade show component (not the whole booth) that would allow prospects to play with the futuristic controls. These controls and displays are for super-yachts, so it had to look good. You’ll see the PC driving everything underneath, as these exhibits need to be designed completely, with all aspects of their operation taken into consideration.

As an aside, this type of glass (with the reflective falloff) is my absolute favorite! It effectively conveys not just futurism, but realism.

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I am on the road. A LOT.

The hotels I usually stay at have no variety in television, even though they almost all have the same sattelite provider I do at home (Dish Network). This means I can’t watch things like the Red Sox on NESN. Not any more!

I bought a Slingbox Pro at Best Buy and am still stunned at how good a device this is. It communicates with a private tracker at Sling Media so that any client on the Internet can access it. My networks sit behind 2 firewalls, so pin-holing took me a little time, but there are no changes needed to external machines-even those with personal firewalls on them.

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