Stand-Up Sales

At some point during a sales cycle, your prospect will actually want to dig into the details of your technology!  This can be a mixed blessing -- although hopefully not because your technology won't stand up to scrutiny! 

Rather, customer desire to know about what your technology can do is an opportunity for the sales rep or especially the sales engineer, to forget everything they ever knew about sales!  Why?  Because the temptation is strong to unload a truckload of facts and figures about your technology.

Stop!  And remember two things:

1. You should be presenting technology that is relevant to your prospect, based on your discovery with that customer.

2. And you must not forget basic rules of teaching:  you know your products and technology intimately.  But your product is a terra incognito, i.e. an unknown land, to your prospect.

The attached example is a good way of dealing with the second problem.  You need to simplify and interpret your product for your prospect in a way that makes sense.  This is one reason why product marketing is so important.  The role of the product marketing manager is to package up and present information about a whole lot of functionality, in a way that can be more easily grasped by prospects.

The example here concerns the Magic software development and integration environment.  As a rules-based development platform, Magic is exceedingly powerful and can do almost anything.  But this is a problem for sales!  Magic's power is a problem because the prospect doesn't want to buy a Swiss Army Knife that "does almost anything"! Your prospect wants a cost effective and flexible solution to a particular problem.

See how in the attached workshop flyer, various alternative Magic application deployment patterns are systematically highlighted.  In a given workshop, it's easy to say: "This morning, we will focus on Scenario No. 4" -- but of course at the same time, the customer notices the other Scenarios. 

Takeaway:  Try and break up your product functions into "bite-sized" chunks that are relevant to your prospect's objectives.  It will be easier for them to remember and to imagine how they can be successful using your solution.

Click here for the Workshop Scenario outline.