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LEGACY refers to the existing, outdated process of selling.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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This may be obvious to all you seasoned veterans out there, so skip this one if you are an expert job seeker.

I’d like to give you some background/insight/ideas on how to get a job in technology technology-with technology. I’m often looking due to the nature of what I do, and I’ve been at it for just over 10 years (Sales Engineering).

There is a wealth of tools on the Internet that weren’t available just a few years ago for job seekers. These tools bring the opportunities to the seeker, where in days gone by the seeker had to, well, seek. True to the “80/20 Rule”, I used to spend 80% of my time looking for an opportunity, then 20% actually applying for that opportunity. Now that ratio is gratefully reversed.
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Things just don’t work. But what is worse is that they don’t work for the wrong reason. So rather than bitch about why things are all screwed up now, I’ll productively focus on what we really need.

• We need a system of systems that has a common interface, or standard, for each.
• We need to be able to unplug an email client and replace it with a better one without changing any other system
• We need to completely de-couple all data from the applications themselves
• We need a single interface with which to access all applications
• We need this interface to be viable in all current edge technologies, like PDAs, CarPCs, cell phones, PCs (all OSes, of course), etc.
• We need to be able to access our systems from anywhere-even someone else’s edge technology-securely
• We need to be able to break, have stolen, or lose our edge technology implementation and not lose any data; This includes access from airplanes, PDAs, airport touchscreens, etc.

We’re not seeing convergence. We’re seeing a rise in proprietariness of applications. Google is consolidating to dig into the desktop market where Microsoft rules, not to make our lives easier. So when you see a company saying it is making your life easier by combining applications, like the idiotic cell phone companies lately, ask it whether you can plug into it the best of breed out there that they compete with.

Take a wild guess what the answer will be.

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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