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!

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!

Organization for Sales Engineers

So you are a Sales Engineer, and 40 hours a week doesn't give you nearly enough time between detailed discovery calls, demo prep, demos, whiteboarding, RFPs, SOW, updating notes etc.... But wait, if you remove the time spent on entering notes into your CRM system, then SE life would be perfect....well maybe not perfect, BUT you would regain a couple hours a week.

So if this sounds interesting to you as a Sales Engineer interested in improving your organizational skills and time management skills, then you too should look into Jott. Yes, Jott.com allows you to call a number and summarize your demo notes, follow-ups and or key informational just by talking out loud. Jott does the rest and transposes your message into an text and send an email... Voila...You're done and no forgeting or rekeying in your notes into your CRM system. Jott away!!!

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...

Organizing Data for Sales Engineers 101

As all good Sales Engineers know, we all receive and collect tonnes of useful data....I am talking about prospect requirement docs, screenshots, reports, product management roadmaps, product feature lists, competitive landscapes docs, etc...etc...etc.... The list may actually go on forever ;) The key is to figure out what is the best way to organize all of this data to allow it to be extremely useful when it is needed most. So one of the best tools that is mandatory for all SEs is Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com). This tool allows you to perform full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed.

It is a great tool that indexes you content accurately. Give it try!!!

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!