ATCP, LLC

If you understand what Sales Engineers are, then you realize that they should be isolated from the general population in the same way that field reps are-and for the same reasons. The same traits that make a Sales Engineer effective are the same that alienate them from the common cubers, and I’ve recently proved this is true.

For one thing, successful Sales Engineers are able to convey confidence above all else. That confidence, in a sales situation, translates into credibility for the Sales/Account Rep. That confidence is completely 180 degrees against the flow of a successful cuber, in that they learn to survive by being passive in all matters, avoiding making decisions. A no-decision is a decision that can never be wrong, right?

But in the Sales Engineer’s world, there is no room for indecision-we may only get this one chance in front of a prospect! We need to be able to say what is needed, and say it confidently. There are many funny names/phrases for what we do in a tight spot, such as “being frugal with the truth”, but one of my primary axioms for Sales Engineering is:

Never leave the call with questions about your stuff.

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A colleague turned me on to an article here that talks about 5 stunningly awful mistakes for demos. I don’t think these are all that bad, and certainly not stunning, but I’ll include the 5 here, as we have a few more practical ones to add after:

1. Misunderstand the customer’s needs: “Harbor Cruise.” Don’t make a demo in the hope that your customer will eventually see something of interest. Inexperienced salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for doing their homework. Jaded sales engineers offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from their sales colleagues. Do the research to figure out what your customers need in advance. More »

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 »

[AS2, Flash CS4 Professional]

This might sound silly, but it is extremely useful. I just did a job for a client that needed to rotate their banners on a site that they had done for them 4 years ago. The site was hard coded to:

MovieA_______________________________________________

loadMovie(”flash/MovieB.swf”, intro_mc);

intro_mc is a simple, 1 frame movie in MovieA’s library that holds a Rectangle shape the size of the banner area. You use this rectangle to precisely position the asset in Movie A. intro_mc is placed as soon as it is needed, sometimes before the frame here that loads it.

MovieB_______________________________________________

This movie has the job of loading banners and displaying them. This is a great approach for lots of reasons, but for us the most important is that we don’t have to hard-code our banner rotation worker, MovieB, into MovieA or any other caller.

MovieB loads it’s movies from an XML file called banners.xml, which looks like this:

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In this article I talked about my 6 D’s of projects, objectives, goals, sales, designs, etc. For this short article I’ll do a little follow-up to explain another aspect of the same methodology.

There are only 2 buckets that any sale or project ever falls into:

Business Need – They want something they don’t have.

Business Solution – They have something they don’t want.

Based on whichever you are presented with, my 6 D’s will produce something different. Let’s look at each:

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