Sample Test Data for Sales Engineers

Gathering sample test data for SEs has been difficult as there is not much sample test data available out on the internet for your specific prospect within a certain industry without significant costs or timely manual data manipulation involved. In performing some research, I have come across a great product (SAAS based also) that may help Sales Engineers build out a more realistic dataset for a demonstration by extracting selective prospect information that can be used in building out a realistic dataset for a delivering a prospect's solution demo. So, you are probably wondering, what type of tool is this, since it will significantly cut down my demo prep time and improve the quality of my demo solution, and thus increase my conversion ratio...which means more $$$ in your pocket...

SO, here it is...Check out a product called Mozenda (http://www.mozenda.com/), it allows you to call a website and then run an agent against a category page parsing out relavant details as well as drilling into individual item pages to parse out key attributes such as title, description, price etc...

It is a great tool for building out item/SKU lists that can be easily exported out into standard formats, such as .csv. Great tool! Give it a shot as they have a free 14 day trial.

* Remember, always check with the prospect first to confirm it is ok to use extract sample data from their website for your demonstration and respect appropriate copyright laws..Good Luck!

Web Based Diagramming Tool

For most Sales Engineers (both Software and Hardware based), currently mapping out current architectures/infrastructures can be a challenging task...Now add on top of that not having the ability to easily map out these environments while you are on the phone with the prospect makes it that much more difficult..For those of you with HUGE budgets to buy the latest and greatests to assist in your SEs sales cycles, this post may not be so useful for you.

But for the rest of us, if you want an easy to use, web based (I love the SAAS model) tool, that allows you to map out environments, do straight forward Flow Chart, E/R, Network, UML, BPM flows, and sequence diagrams to name a few, then it is worth a shot to testdrive Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com/). This drag and drop tool allows you to version your diagrams, snap to grid, full formatting, image upload, web image searching and a bunch of other great features. Setup a free test account and play around with it...If you like it, the price is very affordable for what you get and it will enable your Sales Engineer to better capture their prospect's requirements...Give it a try!