A Sales Engineer's Pre-Game Warm Up

It is amazing how often you can increase your demo close ratio, by increasing your prep. Often veteran Sales Engineers have the mindset that they are being able to jump into a deal on a moments notice, and then expect to knock it out of the park without much prep each and every time…Although this is often a gut reaction of senior SEs, it is important to always revert back to the number one principle of doing as much up-front prep as possible. Every Sales Engineer has there own pre-game checklist - or at least the good ones do ;) So, here is my abbreviated checklist:

-Collect all the Key Business Requirements/Key Business Drivers
-Understand business/technical pains and the results/consequences of these pains
-Visually map out your prospects current environment and to-be environments
-Confirm the audience for the demo, their roles, pains, level of influence etc…
-Personalize the dataset that you are going to use against your competition...Get test data, get verticalized sample data, edit your SQL statements, grab some test data off your prospects website directly...

I know…create test data?!?...I don’t have time for that! I hear you, but sometimes that will be the difference of the unique wow factor for your prospects. Remember, the SE at your competition might be creating test data for their solution, and that might be the difference whether or not you get the business…A great saying we had at a previous SE shop was, “See your business in our software…”, not sure who to quote for coming up with that one, but it was great nonetheless.

Ok…Back to the list...

-Confirm your plan of attack and demo flows with your Sales Rep/AM/AE
-Confirm your agenda and timeframes with your prospect/coach/partner/consultant
-Setup effective traps with your rep ahead of time (Avoid the 'off-the-cuff stuff'...)
-Dry-run your presentation/demo internally and/or with your coach at the prospect

Remember, just like a champion fighter, the battle/demo is almost always won or lost based on the training/demo prep one does ahead of time... So don't forget to 'hit the gym' before your next demo!