ATCP, LLC

[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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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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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.
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I’ve written so many emails about this that I think I should put the info down in a blog article and simply refer models to it! The following is first person:

Clothing
I will tell you not to plan on anything ‘busy’ to wear. You need solids, and preferably nothing the same color as any desired background. Black and white are winners, as is a variety of jewelry. This holds true for both kinds of shoots.
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