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.