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LEGACY refers to the existing, outdated process of selling.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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I answered a query for article content regarding how to get through your day when you don’t feel like it. Below was my submission.

This content applies to Sales Engineering as well as all my other interests in this blog.

It is harder and harder to impress people-especially those concerned with, or responsible for, your advancement and promotion. A fantastic way to do this is to like, or even love, the unlovable. You can do this in two stages:

1. You don’t believe it, but you’re selling it, and
2. You believe it, and live it.
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Since the job title Sales Engineer (Wikipedia entry I created) is new, I see employers confusing the hell out of this role. I just had to post about it in the hopes that at least one employer or head hunter will realize how they are making things for real Sales Engineers worse by doing so.

When an HR professional, recruiter, or head hunter puts the title “Sales Engineer” on a job description that isn’t, it makes my job (and those of other real Sales Engineers) much, much harder. PLEASE stop doing this.
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I searched for awhile to find the “perfect” bag to house my gear when I’m out shooting photos. There are so many good brands out there, but you can’t really tell how well they’ll hold up when all you see are photos of the bags on the web: ThinkTank, Northface, LowePro, Tamrac, Domke, Naneu and so many others.

There are backpacks, rollers, slings and duffels in every style, color and shape imaginable. Some are made for students, some are made for parents and others are designed to be used by photographers to hold camera equipment.

After searching, I settled on the “Naneu Pro K3L” backpack. Boy, was I disappointed to find out that a bag that cost me $146.64 USD could be built so very poorly.

Sure, there are plenty of high-end, $400 bags out there, but come on, Naneu… you can do better than this. A bag shouldn’t fall apart in the first month of light use.

Well, this one did and I recommend you stay far away from Naneu bags until they can demonstrate that their build quality has improved. Naneu Pro NSBLBL K3L Adventure Backpack – D-SLR Camera Kit and Laptop PC (Blue) $135.99 Sub Total: $135.99 Shipping: $10.65 Sales Tax: $0.00 Total: $146.64

After having this bag unused in my basement, I decided to take it out for a test-drive to NYC for a 2-day photo shoot. After lugging this bag around packed with a medium load, the bag began to break down.

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