First, Demonstrate Value
Here’s a tip for presales engineers selling complex technology.
There we go, I’m already off on a tangent. My poor brain.
You see, I said “…engineers selling…” Yep, that’s the job of the sales engineer. Don’t fool yourselves. You get paid to sell. You’re the people with the credibility. Where the sales person manages the mechanics of the sales process, it’s the sales engineer that establishes credibility and demonstrates value.
I was once questioned by a customer about a higher price than a competitor (a distributor who took my design and priced it). My response… “you pay more because you get me.” It’s a funny story, but suffice it to say that I was lucky my sales guy was on vacation that day. He would have had heart failure at my response, and he would have just matched the distributor’s price. I sold the value (along with a little humor) and the customer agreed. They purchased at our higher price.
Anyways, back on track.
I’m often asked about support for a particular platform. “How can we sell Actional if there isn’t support for platform XYZ?!?!?!?” people scream/beg/plead.
Simple. Demonstrate value first. Worry the details second.
Sure, if we don’t support any of a prospect’s platforms, it’s not a good opportunity (duh). But, that’s not going to happen. We support all major protocols and platforms. Sometimes, there’s an obscure (or not so obscure) component of the overall solution that’s missing.
Well, get in there and work with what you’ve got. Get the prospect to agree that there’s value in our solution. Once value is established, the technical details are just that. Details. Important ones, but not difficult ones.
Let me share an example.
A large CORBA customer was struggling with sporadic failures. Unable to pin-point the root cause, they’ reboot “quadrants” of their data center and the problem would go away. During the 30-45 minute “reboot” they’d have major capacity problems, but… it was the fastest way to make sure their business kept up and running. (Of course, this really just fixed the symptoms, so they never actually solved the problem… which would just keep recurring.)
So, we demonstrated the value in their CORBA environment, and quickly had “men with suits and ties” in the room looking at the solution. They were so pleased, they brought a few new problems too. Of course, these problems involved a custom written high-speed messaging protocol.
Value was established and trust was there. The new protocol was just a bump in the road. A detail. In a couple of days, we instrumented their protocol, and the rest is history.
Anyways, if you want to read a great e-book on sales enablement for other ideas on how to improve your game, check out Jeff Ernst‘s e-book “The New Rules of Sales Enablement.” It’s a favorite.
