Improve Your Sales Demos

Looking to Improve Your Sales Demos?? Effective sales demonstrations are one of the most important pieces to progressing your opportunity forward in the sales cycle.  Software vendors who already have an in-house demo environment for their Sales Engineers may feel that they have all of the bases covered.... Wait, you may also want to consider that you software solution may be a point solution in the grande scale of all of the business applications required by an organization.  In economic times that are much more difficult to sell in,  it is even that much more important to show off much more compelling demos.   SO..... a great hosted service for companies looking to demonstrate their software solution integrating to other systems is Skytap.

Skytap offers web based access to vmware images and data centers so that your Sales Engineers can book configure a custom environment for their demonstrations.  Take a look at your Sales Engineering organization and spend some time looking at Skytap to help improve your sales demos!

Managing Remote Employees For SE Managers

Are you managing remote Sales Engineers?  Do you know if your Sales Engineers are as productive as they can be since they are thousands of miles away, and many timezones apart...Many Sales Engineer managers struggle with this.  There are many tips and tricks that allow you as a manager to bridge the gap, and below are a couple to get you started.

First consider communication frequency and communication methods...The default reaction of a rookie manager is to call and ping their remote employees simply to check in on them...The typically 'yt?' (you there?) message over instant message software provokes feelings of distrust.  Instead schedule regular meeting, probably more frequently than if they were sitting in the same location, but try to leverage webcams to maintain the personal aspect itself.  Secondly, many of the IM solution have webcam functions built in over IM for quicker response for urgent issues/questions and this quickly validates if your SEs are as productive as they can be.  Give it a shot.

Mastering Technical Sales - Sales Engineer Guidebook

Learning about Mastering Technical Sales? If yes, then this book is a must read!!! Mastering Technical Sales by John Care and Aron Bohlig covers the full spectrum of what Sales Engineers need to know in order to be successful in their technical deals. It starts by covering fundamental concepts around:

-Qualifying Leads
-Determining Go/No Go strategies for RFPs
-Needs Analysis Tactics
-Delivering the Perfect Pitch
-How to Avoid 'Dash to Demo'
-Remote Demonstration Tips
-Objection Handling
-Branding
-Channel Selling with Partners
-Hiring SE Talent
-Time Management & Metrics

This book is a must-have in any Sales Engineer or SE Managers collection!!!

Inside Based Software Sales Engineers

If you are an inside software Sales Engineer, and are looking to get an edge over your competition, below are 2 quick tips to outsmart your competition's SEs.

Firstly, since inside Sales Engineers lose the benefit of seeing their prospects reactions, it is EXTREMELY important, to make use of frequent Named Open Probes...What do I mean?? Hopefully this sounds familar, "John, tell me more if you feel that Feature X that I have just demonstrated does not address your business requirement Y..." This keeps your prospect engaged, attentive, and does not allow them to mentally go to 'another place' during your demo.

Secondly, you must be able to effectively utilize a variety of Web Based Tools for capturing screenshots, mapping out process flows/systems architecture, communicating with your sales team real time, whiteboarding etc...Check out my Tools Category on this blog for more info... Without the use of these tools, your competition will already be a step ahead of you...