Thoughtful Presales

Thinking about… Presales as Apologists

We all wish we had a product that sold itself, one that met all the customer’s requirements, had no quality issues or design quirks, and provided a great, intuitive user experience. However, if that was the case, there would be no need for a team of Presales professionals!

Unfortunately, the products we sell are generally not perfect. There may be many reasons for this, including design decisions, technology restrictions, limited resources, budget or time to invest in R&D, changing customer needs and expectations, and technical debt.

As a result, we can find ourselves playing the role of an apologist, required to positively and persuasively represent our product and company, despite the gaps, flaws or any other baggage.

The term “apologist” may not be used that much, but it has a recognized place in the analysis of religion and politics, among other things. Maybe “spin doctor” is another relevant term here. It’s also a skill that middle management needs to employ, to represent company messages and decisions to their team, regardless of their personal opinion.

A skilled apologist can take something that seems strange or illogical and make it sound reasonable and rational. They provide context, make logical connections and present a compelling story.

In our role as Presales, even if you privately acknowledge that your product is lacking in some areas, your job is to sell the product as it is, warts and all. Being an apologist is not about conceding defeat or saying “sorry, our product is not that great”. It is a role we take on to defend against the competition, evangelize the value and confidently persuade the audience that we are the best partner to help them achieve their goals.

Here are some techniques you could use to be an effective Presales apologist:

Avoid the gap

When there is a perceived gap between your product and the competition, the first tactic you might employ is to avoid mentioning it. Unless the customer brings it up, we don’t want to highlight something that might be missing or more difficult to use.

Instead, focus on the strengths and differentiators of your solution, with the goal of shining a light on the competitor’s gaps. If you are lucky, that particular issue may be overlooked.

Act surprised

This can be a useful technique if you are challenged by the customer, for example, “I heard your solution is difficult (or expensive) to use”. A good response is “Oh really? That’s surprising as it hasn’t been the experience of my customers. Where did you hear that?”.

I’m not quite proposing that you go the full political path of “deny everything”, but an aspect here that is important is the personal interaction and how you come across. The face you show to the customer needs to be full of confidence and belief.

Understand and Bridge

What is the business outcome that your customer is trying to achieve? How does your solution deliver that outcome? Your customer may have a fixed idea of how things should be done, or maybe a competitor has shown it in a different way that is seen as more sexy or easier to use.

It’s important to ask questions that help you understand the customer’s business goals, so that you can bridge to explaining how your solution achieves that same goal.

Bridging is a technique I was taught when doing media spokesperson training: acknowledge the question and then move smoothly into your talking points. You may not be directly answering what was asked, but it helps you refocus the conversation.

If your solution can still deliver the customer’s desired outcomes, and if you have strengths and value in other capabilities, then you can minimize the risk of a perceived issue or gap.

Provide context

A final technique you may need to employ is to explain why it is completely reasonable that your product works in the way it does. People will often be more accepting of things if they understand the reasons why and if they make some sort of sense.

Note that the correct answer here is not, “they didn’t invest enough in R&D”; nor “the product manager is an idiot”.

Maybe there was a valid design or technology decision that caused subsequent limitations. Or it could have been developed in a certain way based on the needs of a key customer. With a more mature product there may be technical and functional debt, which make it harder to dramatically change the interface or the flow of work.

The key point with any of these techniques is to be well prepared in understanding your product, it’s history, success stories and capabilities. You need to anticipate the objections and traps and to have your talking points clear in your mind prior to meeting the customer.

A brief reflection to conclude: I’ve found this an interesting topic to think about, as there is a feeling of tension sometimes between my sales role and my core values of integrity and accuracy. My thoughts above could easily be taken to an extreme of lying and deception, which is not what I am advocating.

I rationalize to myself that I am being paid to do a job, that avoiding topics or redirecting the conversation is different to outright lying, that all the vendors are putting their own spin on things, and that it’s all part of the game of business.

I do believe that value can be delivered in different ways and part of my role is to focus on our strengths and minimize the weaknesses. While there can be a tension, I love working in the domains of Presales, Sales and Marketing and have continued to do it for a long time.

What are the potential gaps in your solution that you may need to explain or defend?

Thinking about… Engaging Webinars

Most of Australia is currently in lockdown and we don’t even have the option of face-to-face events, so we are heavily reliant on webinars to get our message out there to current and prospective customers. Even if you are not locked down, it’s likely that the nature of your marketing acitvities are still much more online than they were previously.

With digital fatigue setting in, however, it feels like it has got harder to acquire and retain audiences for webinars.

I know that for myself, if my day job is largely spent on virtual calls, the idea of attending another online event is not appealing. As a vendor, if we are to get value out of these online events, they need to be highly engaging and deliver value to the target audience.

While planning and organizing webinars may be owned by Marketing, as Presales professionals we will have input into the planning and are likely to be responsible for the delivery of content. In the paragraphs below, I’ve briefly explored some ideas and tips around the following Webinar themes:

Audience Acquisition – Content, Incentives and Brand
Engaging Delivery – Variety, Interaction and Energy

Attractive Content

It’s important to advertise a speaker or a topic that is relevant, interesting, and is perceived as valuable by your target audience. My experience is that we’ve had the best attendance when we have advertised an external speaker, such as an industry analyst or a customer. As the vendor we can still do a pitch, but it should be the minor part of the presentation.

Another approach is to focus on a specific problem or use case, as people are more likely to attend if they believe they will learn something about a challenge they are facing, rather than a general overview or update session.

Incentives for Attending

As with any marketing event, you can provide incentives to attract people, such as providing meal delivery or an Uber Eats voucher, branded giveaways or even an attractive prize draw. These can all help with getting the initial attention and attendance of your audience.

One of the training vendors I have worked with has taken the approach of “paid” webinars where your token payment (eg. $50) goes to a charity. They use the session to preview and promote their content and it provides a nice approach to social action. I have been very willing to pay and because I’ve spent the money, I prioritise attending the session.

Brand Recognition

Developing a brand for your webinars will take time and persistence. Your company brand will help here, but I am also talking about the association people make to your online marketing events. Branding is about consitency in the naming, format and artwork/design of your sessions, as well as building a reputation for delivering useful content. It’s good to think about how you can develop a webinar brand that has audience pull, rather than approaching each session as a one-off.

At my company, we have built an effective brand of internal webinars for sales by structuring different “series” of 2-3 webinars that align to a theme, such as industry use cases, but also have consistency in the program name (Reasons To Call) and regular speakers.

Speaker Variety

A new face and voice coming on catches people’s attention, so have multiple speakers and switch between them regularly.

The simplest version of this is to have two speakers: a host who can introduce the agenda, moderate the Q&A and connect with the audience, and the main presenter.

A more sophisticated approach is to run sessions with four or five speakers, each one only speaking for 2, 5 or 10 minutes. This can take more effort to manage and ensure consistency of the content, but pays off in more effectively keeping the audience interested.

Audience Interaction

There are a few simple ways to interact with your audience, including Chat, Questions and Polls and these are available in most of the webinar platforms.

Live chat can be good because questions and chat coming in contributes to the feeling of activity. Even for people not participating, they can read the comments and questions of others. However, as a host, it can be hard to keep track of the questions coming in on a chat stream. For a customer webinar I prefer a platform that provides moderated questions as it’s easier to monitor and manage.

Another best practice here is to have a colleague on the call whose job is to monitor and write answers to the questions as they are coming in. That reduces the presenter’s workload and also helps contribute to the “live and interactive” atmosphere.

The other main tool I like to use is audience polls. It breaks up the flow of slides, gets people to think and take an action, and then you can talk about the results of the poll. A simple “what’s your biggest challenge with X?” poll can provide insight for you and additional value to attendees.

Voice and Energy

When you are presenting online, you still need to project and put energy into your voice. A dull monotone is a sure way to put your audience to sleep. If you can, try not to read a script, as this is harder to energise and may sound less natural.

Don’t speak too fast, and while it’s important to pause, those pauses should be shorter online compared to when you are in the same room. Use of polls and changing speakers is a good way to build in pauses where a question could be asked.

How do you make your webinars engaging?

Thinking about… Building a Business Case

Do you need to build a value story, business case, or ROI model with quantifiable benefits? Here are five guidelines I use to do this effectively:

Listen early for evidence of impact
Express value in the customer’s language
Challenge the customer to think broader
Keep your business case simple
Be transparent and collaborative

1. Listen early for evidence of impact

From your very first customer meeting, you need to be discovering and documenting evidence of impact. What is the pain, or cost to the customer of the current situation? What KPIs are not being met? How often does an issue occur? What personal goals does your stakeholder have?

Ultimately, we are trying to identify a key KPI, forecast an improvement to that KPI as a result of adopting your solution, and quantify that improvement as a financial benefit.

As you continue to conduct discovery and qualification, ask more direct questions to uncover measurements and impact. Even if you don’t get a specific answer, such questions are good to get the customer thinking about the cost of their pain and the potential benefits. For example:

How often does the system go down?
How many team members or IT staff do you have?
What is the cost to the business of a 1 hour outage?
How much time does your team spend on reporting each week?

It’s really important to make notes and capture every data point you can, because they will become useful when you want to credibly present a draft business case.

2. Express value in the customer’s language

While you might have templates that you can start from to build a business case, if they use terms that are unfamiliar or do not resonate with the customer, then you are reducing the effectiveness of your value story.

Also, the different individuals you are engaging with may put different levels of importance on the same benefit. So we need to discover what is important to each of our key stakeholders, align our value story with those priorities, and use language that the audience will understand.

An easy action to take is to look up the customer’s annual report and review their corporate goals and KPIs. Look at the words they use and reflect this language in your value story. Think about how you can convey the message that adopting your solution will positively influence those corporate goals.

3. Challenge the customer to think broader

Often we are talking to technical or lower-level people who may only have a narrow understanding of the costs or benefits. They might see a benefit in your solution making it easier for their team to complete their own tasks, but need help associating that value with financial benefits and company goals.

For example, a solution that automates testing can help teams be more efficient and deliver application updates faster. One level of benefit is that this can save costs by making the team more efficient. Another level of benefit is that delivering app updates faster can provide a competitive advantage and increase revenue for the business. A QA manager may only care about the savings against her budget, whereas the business case is much stronger when we can also tie it to revenue growth.

There might also be costs borne by other teams (eg. infrastructure management costs), which your solution will help reduce, but may not be a direct benefit to your buyer. We may need to make sure this is called out and push for it to be included in the business case.

So, while we do want to express value in the customer’s language (see #2), there are times when we also need to challenge them to recognise the broader business benefits.

4. Keep your business case simple

There is a tension here between precision and simplicity but I strongly advise people to keep a business case as simple as possible.

All business cases rely on assumptions, so a single benefit calculation with some broad assumptions is much easier to create, explain and understand than a list of 20 detailed value drivers. A more detailed and sophisticated business case model is arguably more precise, and therefore more credible, but on the whole your customer is not going to have time to get into too much detail. If they get lost and confused by the business case then they may lose confidence in you and your solution.

One of my rules of thumb is to remove any value drivers or benefit statements where the calculated benefit is low and focus on the key items and KPIs that show the most benefit. If it is not material to the value calculation then I prefer to not talk about it at all. The only exception to this might be when there is a particular value or intangible benefit that I want to highlight (see #3).

5. Be transparent and collaborative

Best practice is to build a business case together with a customer stakeholder. Fantastic practice is to have your customer’s staff present the ROI model and conclusions to management, instead of you as the vendor.

Even if you’ve built the business case independently, be prepared to walk through all the detail, and to clarify and validate the assumptions made. If a customer challenges me on a draft business case, my response is, “This is based on a lot of assumptions and we’d love to work with someone from your team to make this more accurate”.

Customers are always going to be a little sceptical of vendor claims about value, so open and collaborative agreement on the assumptions is the way to go. It’s also helpful to make sure your draft business case looks “reasonable” and “conservative” before you present it to the customer for the first time.

Does your value story reflect business benefits of increasing revenue, reducing cost and/or mitigating risk?

Thinking about… 10 Demo Commandments

I was thinking about tips for delivering outstanding demos, along with reflecting on some of my pet hates when it comes to watching other people. As a result, here is my take on boiling something complex and nuanced down to 10 simple rules:

Provide a roadmap
Ask questions
Start at the end
Link to business value
Do not configure a dashboard
Do not talk softer when looking down
Do not use nonsense data
Do not distract with the mouse
Pause
Answer questions

1. Provide a roadmap

It’s important to give people a sense of where you are taking them. It helps your audience understand what they are going to see and not get lost, and it helps confirm you are on the right track before you start.

In its simplest form, a demo roadmap is an agenda slide with a list of use cases or scenarios that you will cover. A more sophisticated roadmap could be a diagram showing workflow steps, different applications or representing the different personas that you will adopt during the demo.

One idea with a more extensive or complicated demo is to print the roadmap on A3 and put it on the wall, so you can easily refer to it as you progress. You can touch the page and say, “we are here, and now we are going there, which will help us understand the value of…”

2. Ask questions

Start your questioning early: “Here is the agenda (roadmap) I had planned, is this in line with what you want to see?”

Pausing your demo to ask a question takes discipline but there are two main reasons for doing so: i) you increase engagement with the audience, and ii) you can learn helpful information.

Try to avoid “Do you have any questions?”. This is too open and will either get no response, or you will get taken off on a tangent. Think about more targeted questions that will get the customer thinking about impact and value, or questions that will help you uncover insight or data points. For example: “Will what you’ve seen address your current challenges?” or “How many projects are you currently managing?” or “How much time do your staff spend each week on reporting?“

3. Start at the end

If the most senior person in the room leaves after 10 minutes, what will they take away?

This is a good question to consider when structuring your demo. Starting at the end means showing the key dashboard, report or screen that summarises and clearly conveys the business value of your solution.

Unlike a maths exam at school where you need to show your working and logic, go straight to the answer. Showing the detailed steps of how you got there may still be required, but it is of secondary importance and will be more effective when done in the context of your audience understanding the destination.

4. Link to business value

Whatever you are showing, explain how it will help your prospect (using their own business language and terms), or tell a story about the outcomes other customers have achieved.

To link your demo to business value, your words need to describe how the solution helps reduce cost, increase revenue or mitigate risk.

5. Do not configure a dashboard

That fact that your tool has a configurable dashboard is not unique, it is a given.

If you are demonstrating filters or how to select widgets on a dashboard, then you are wasting time that should be spent differentiating your solution against the competition. Even if you are asked about dashboards, a “Yes” answer is often sufficient, without needing to show the steps involved.

It’s true that an evaluator may want to dive in to how dashboards are configured at some point, but never start your demo with this.

6. Do not talk softer when looking down

This is something to be alert for: the Presales consultant projects their voice well when looking out at the audience, but as soon as they look down at the laptop their volume drops. This reduces your ability to keep the audience’s attention and deliver a compelling, confidence-building demo.

One tip is to pause talking while you look down and type. It’s ok to have silence and gives your audience a chance to think or to ask a question. Otherwise, make a conscious effort to project your voice at all times.

7. Do not use nonsense data

It may be fast to mash keys or funny to use movie character names when entering demo data, but it undermines our goal of linking the demo to business value. It is much more persuasive to use “real” business data and to maintain the polite fiction that you are showing a live production system (even when the audience knows that they are watching a demo).

One thing that can be powerful is to use the customer’s own data such as key stakeholder, application or project names. Showing customer-specific data makes it a lot easier for your audience to imagine and visualize how your tool would relate to their business environment. Even better if you can load-in some of their actual data for use in the demo.

8. Do not distract with the mouse

Move the mouse with purpose, then take your hand off it. A mouse that is circling rapidly around the screen or clicking constantly into different fields is distracting. If your audience is distracted, then they are not putting their full attention into what you are saying.

9. Pause

It’s so easy to get into demo mode and just keep talking, especially when you have a lot to get through and a script to follow. This might enable you to cover all your planned content, but it means you will miss out on engaging the customer, uncovering their important questions, or even just giving them time to digest what they have seen.

One extra tip is to have a word to your sales colleagues in advance and let them know you will be pausing deliberately, and it is not a signal for them to start talking. You want to give the customer space to think and to ask their own questions.

10. Answer questions

If the customer is asking questions, that is a great sign of engagement and that they are actively considering and trying to understand. If you can answer the question quickly, then do so.

If you are going to answer the question later in the demo, a good practice is to write the question in a parking lot – either a whiteboard or a text file. That way you can acknowledge the question and ensure it is not forgotten, and reviewing the parking lot is a good way to summarise and recap at the end of the demo.

What are your golden rules for demos?

Thinking about… Presales as an Olympic Sport

The Olympics are on at the moment and medals are being won, with dreams realized and hopes shattered. It got me thinking about which Olympic sport provides the best analogy for Presales: is it the high expectations of the High Jump? The endurance of the Marathon? The flexibility of Gymnastics? The teamwork of Hockey? Or maybe it’s the struggle of Greco-Roman Wrestling?

Perhaps a more useful approach is to draw parallels to the Presales experience from multiple sports and consider what we can learn. Here are a few that came to mind:

Pentathlon – Athletes in the Modern Pentathlon (or Decathlon, Heptathlon, or Triathlon) must be competent across multiple disciplines. They might have a strength as a runner, but also need to perform at a high level as a fencer, shooter, swimmer and horse rider – all in a single day. In the same way, good Presales are masters of multiple events: in a single day they may be giving a presentation, preparing a demo, installing a POC, and responding to an RFP. Presales might have a specialty, but they also need to pay attention to developing their other skills in order to become a strong all-rounder.

Canoeing – Competitors complete the course one at a time and the first person down sets the time you need to beat, while last person down the course knows exactly what is required to win. As Presales in a competitive tender situation, you want to be either the first or the last vendor to present. Go first and you set the bar high, making it hard for the competitors who follow. Go last and you can clear the bar, leaving the customer impressed and your competitors seething. (I realise I’ve mixed my metaphors there by bringing in references to Pole Vault!) In the Olympics, your performance in the heat determines the order in the final. In Presales we can think about the early meetings, presentations and how we respond to the tender as our heats. If we have built good relationships with the customer, that increases our chances of being able to pick out presentation position.

Water Polo – This looks like a rough sport, where the athletes are constantly swimming and physically getting up in each other’s faces. Fitness and endurance is important, and like all team sports the players need to be thinking ahead about their moves and passes. Selling is also a team sport and it’s important to have the right people engaged on a deal. We also need to expect it to get a little tough mentally, if not on the body. Great sales teams plan their moves, keep on swimming and during a meeting they can pass the ball (of talking) smoothly back and forth, to keep the deal moving forward towards the goal.

Swimming Medley Relay – Continuing with teams, medley relays are another example where success relies on every member doing well in their specialist role. There is often the champion swimmer who gets a lot of media coverage, but the best squads have strength in each member of the team. Another thing I have noted about the relays is that some individuals who get the team through the heats do not swim in the final. For the final the coach aims to form the best team possible from the available swimmers. In a Presales world, this might mean some people contributing to an RFP response or an initial demo, while bringing in a more experienced person to take the lead for the final presentation. If you win the deal, one person might get more of the glory, but the whole team wins and gets paid (which sadly makes Presales better off than many Olympians).

One final analogy to touch on is that all Olympic athletes know how to play their game or perform in their event, but regardless of the sport they all have coaches, they all have support teams and they all practice constantly. In Presales our manager is hopefully our coach, providing guidance, helping us fine-tune our skills and cheering us on. Unless you are new, your manager is probably not mandating that you practice regularly, so this is a discipline that needs to be self-motivated.

And in the end, none of us can succeed in Presales without our support teams: our colleagues in Sales, Enablement, Marketing and Professional Services; as well as our family and friends.

Which Olympic Sport do you think provides the best analogy for Presales?

Thinking about… Thought Leadership

Regardless of your role, level or years of experience, I encourage all Presales professionals to invest time in building your own personal brand: the combination of things related to how other people (colleagues, managers, customers) recognise and value you. For example:

what are you known for?
what are you the go-to person for?
why should people listen to you?

Investing time in becoming a Thought Leader and raising your profile not only helps your own career, it helps your company engage with customers, grow pipeline, produce content and generate buzz in the market.

There are multiple ways that you can start to work on making Thought Leadership contributions, which I have grouped into five domains:

Field of Knowledge
Social Marketing
Customer Community
Public Speaking
Publication

The expectation here is not that an individual “super-person” does every possible activity in every domain. You can start small in just one area and then build on and expand from those activities over time.

1. Field of Knowledge

The first step in becoming a Thought Leader is getting known as a subject matter expert within your company.

When I meet with different Sales and Presales teams, I am often asked for more knowledge and best practices to be shared by other groups across the region, but far fewer people seem willing or able to spend the time creating or sharing that knowledge. If you want to become a Thought Leader, start by contributing to your company’s internal Field of Knowledge. Examples of how you can do this include:

Actively participate in Discussion Forums or Chat Groups
Deliver Internal Presales, Sales or Partner Training
Write a Case Study or Whitepaper
Volunteer to be a buddy for a new hire

What I look for in senior promotion candidates are people who have been contributing and sharing their knowledge internally over time. Even if you are not a candidate for promotion, delivering content and sharing your expertise is a great way to stand out relative to your peers and exceed expectations.

2. Social Marketing

Developing an online profile and presence helps build recognition both internally and externally, although to do it effectively requires regular attention and frequent updates.

If you want to build your personal brand in the social media domain, there are a number of activities you can do, including:

Regular updates and Article/Link sharing: eg. Weibo/Linked In/Twitter
Write a relevant Blog Post to express a point of view
Record a YouTube video that demonstrates a Use Case

An easy way to get started online that will help your company is to share news updates via Linked In. It only takes a couple of clicks and helps with building awareness and buzz in the market.

A more advanced entry point to social marketing is to start writing a blog or to contribute articles to your company’s blogs or newsletters. My colleague Yash, for example, has written short articles directly on LinkedIn and has also contributed blog posts that the marketing team have published on our community pages.

3. Customer Community

A Forbes article by John Hall highlighted the link between helping others and building your brand: Be a leader in your industry: Help Others

The “Customer Community” domain of Thought Leadership is about stepping outside of your company, finding the local user- or industry- or interest- groups in your city and joining one. It’s a fantastic way to build your network, increase your own knowledge and represent yourself to a broader community.

Your first goal should be to simply build your professional network, and over time you can become a more active participant and influencer. Ways of building your personal brand in this domain could include helping someone out, sharing knowledge, doing presentations to the community on behalf of your company or even becoming a member of the organizing committee.

4. Public Speaking

The domain of Public Speaking is a high visibility way of getting in front of people and building your personal profile as a Thought Leader. It’s about developing your presentation skills and becoming confident to stand in front of larger and larger audiences, being recognized as a subject matter expert who speaks with authority.

If you want to develop your Public Speaking experience, the easiest starting point is to become a speaker at your company’s marketing events such as local seminars, webinars or customer forums. Getting confident presenting in small-scale events can then extend to speaking at industry events and conferences.

If you are active in a customer community or industry group, that can also be a good forum in which to develop your public speaking skills – either as a representative of your employer, or by speaking on a particular business or technical topic in which you are knowledgeable.

5. Publication

It is relatively easy to write something and self-publish, whether by writing a white paper and sharing it internally (Field of Knowledge) or writing an online blog (Social Marketing). What I want to focus on here are more substantial deliverables that could include:

Writing an article that is carried by an external magazine (print or digital)
Writing or contributing to a research paper (eg. through a University or an industry-group)
Writing or contributing to a book

The topics you choose to write on can vary. Doing this in a way that demonstrates Thought Leadership involves spending time researching your topic, extracting insights, forming your own opinions and then being able to clearly communicate your point of view in writing.

If you are working on a career plan to establish yourself as a Thought Leader, then getting published is a fantastic way to build your profile and personal brand.

Conclusion

My colleague Aella observed that “Personal Brand is who you are without a Presales title”. Each of us has different strengths and skills and becoming a Thought Leader takes time, thinking, communicating and persistence. My goal with this article has been to explore some ideas and share practical examples of actions that you can take to get started.

I recommend picking one or two domains where you will take initial action and then adding more actions and contributions as you build confidence and expertise. Investing your time in becoming a Thought Leader will help you increase your knowledge, build your network and open up new career opportunities. The return on this investment is a Win-Win-Win situation for you, your company and your customers!

What actions are you taking to become a Thought Leader?

Thinking about… Presales as Therapy

A term that I am not a big fan of is “Trusted Adviser”, mainly because I hear it too often in a sales context. Optimistic sales people, sales managers, trainers and even Presales proclaim, “Our goal is to become a trusted adviser to the CIO”. If only it were that simple.

Building a trusted relationship is an excellent goal and there are people who clearly do become “Trusted Advisers”, but think about any given customer stakeholder, whether they are a CIO, a VP or a Manager. They deal with vendors, consultants and thought leaders (often self-proclaimed) from many different companies and not all of them can become trusted advisers. In fact, you might be lucky to get one such person who becomes substantially trusted and listened to by the CIO, moving beyond the basic buyer-seller relationship.

I want to propose that “Trusted Adviser” has the wrong emphasis and instead, the goal of Presales should be to become a “Trusted Therapist”.

To give advice involves the act of telling and it also subtly signals a sense of superiority – that you have the answers and know more than the person you are advising. A therapist, on the other hand, spends a lot more time listening and asking questions. Therapists encourage clients to reflect on their situation, to open up about their challenges and to reach their own conclusions about the solution and actions they need to take. They might challenge assumptions with their questions and may offer some advice, but any telling comes later in the process.

So consider the concept of Presales as Therapy and how that might change your interactions with customers (and even Sales People). Getting customers to open up about their current situation, pain points and dreams (or goals) is exactly what we want. To do that, we can employ our therapist skills to ask open-ended questions, practice active listening, listen more than we speak, explore how the person feels about a topic, and discover what they place value on. If we understand these points about our customer and what the core problem is, we are in a much stronger position from which to propose a solution and to be persuasive. And instead of making a statement to offer advice, try using questions to challenge someone’s thinking and lead them to a conclusion.

It’s still critical to build rapport that develops into trust over time and whether you prefer “Trusted Adviser” or “Trusted Therapist”, the important word is “Trusted”. One key element that builds trust with people is listening and making an effort to understand them. A person who feels listened to feels valued, which builds trust. The more comfortable someone is with you, the more likely they are to open up further about their challenges, which can be insightful for you and therapeutic for them. In turn, a stronger relationship with someone means they will be open to listening when you do want to give them advice. And from what I’ve heard, people who like their therapist tend to keep going back to them for conversation and guidance.

In your next customer interactions, try to approach it as a therapy session, where your job is to ask, listen and learn, rather than tell. See if this small change in your internal language alters the experience and level of engagement with the customer.

(I’ll add a quick disclaimer here to acknowledge that my thought experiment is an oversimplification of the therapist role and practice. I’m not intending any disrespect, nor to undermine the role of either a trained therapist or a professional adviser.)

Fill in the blank: I want to be a Trusted _________ to my customer.

Thinking about… Presales as Performance

“Keep playing with confidence”, my teacher had said. The occasion was an Eighth Grade Clarinet exam and I had a very tricky technical piece to play, which I had not practiced enough. As I performed the song, I appeared calm and sure, moving quickly and confidently from one note to the next until I was done. Honestly, I had probably only played 20% of the right notes at the right time. But I didn’t stop, I didn’t wince, and I didn’t apologise; I continued on, bluffing my way through. Afterwards, the examiner’s notes read: “well played.”

As Presales professionals, we are performers: every time we give a presentation, deliver a demo, or even engage in a conversation we are under the spotlight, and aiming to capture the attention of (and influence) an audience. Whether it is an audience of 1, 5 or 500, I believe the skills that musicians and actors use are extremely relevant to our role. And if you are keen on developing your public speaking skills, then you will be cast into that role of performer even more directly and frequently.

Here are three tips for turning your next presentation into a performance:

Project
Practice, Practice, Practice
Keep Playing

Project

Always stand up to present, even if everyone is seated around a table. Project confidence with your stance and act and speak with energy and enthusiasm. Project your voice so it can be heard clearly from the back of the theatre (or conference room; or headphones).

In person, it is completely valid to move to the front of the room where you can command your audience. It also makes it easier for you to point to the screen and to monitor reactions as you present. This is admittedly harder to do when you must drive a demo or if you are in a virtual meeting. However, even if you are seated or in a conference call, voice projection is still important and in fact it’s good to overdo it slightly when on the phone, to get the right level of energy coming across over the wires and speakers. Some people will stand at their desk even when presenting on a virtual call as it helps them speak with more energy and assurance.

One mistake I have seen people do is they project their voice when looking at the audience, but their volume drops as soon as they look down at their laptop. Keep an eye out for this and make a concsious effort to keep speaking loudly and clearly, or pause talking in those moments while you are interacting with the demo.

To learn how to project your voice, there are plenty of videos and websites available with instructions and tips (those are just two I found from a quick search). For me, I try to make sure I am breathing from my belly (diaphram) and mentally pitching my voice to be clearly heard by those people at the back.

One other preparation tip is to watch Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk video on power poses. I now make a conscious effort to stand, pose with hands on hips, and breathe deeply before starting an important presentation, and I find it calming and helpful.

Practice, Practice, Practice

I was once told by a professional stage actor: “Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.” For Presales, you need to know your content, know your product and know your demo script, and you need to know it backwards. For a major presentation I not only read and review the slides, I stand and practice my delivery out loud in a room, and I do it five or six times. I still do this level of rehearsal for key events, even after many years of presenting.

Personally, I don’t write a script or notes for a presentation. I rely on the slides themselves, my knowledge of the content and my repeated practice to get me through. Each time I do an out-loud run-through I say slightly different things, but what I find is that it helps solidify in my mind the flow and the core messages I want to get across, and it comes across more naturally than memorising or reading from a script. For a demo, I might write down notes to remind me of the planned flow, but I rely on practicing in advance to refresh my deep knowledge and to guide what I say on the day.

Keep Playing

“The audience doesn’t know what the audience doesn’t know.” If something goes wrong, or you miss a step, there is a high chance that no-one else has noticed. So don’t call attention to minor issues or mistakes. Even if something more obvious happens, don’t worry and don’t stop. Stay confident, keep projecting your voice and simply move on to the next step or the next section of your presentation. You can laugh about it with your colleagues later, but the audience doesn’t need to know.

Conclusion

You may not see yourself as an actor or a musician and the idea of performing on a stage may terrify you. But the reality is that Presales professionals are all actors, and we are called on to perform in a multitude of venues, to a variety of audiences (and often at short notice). Developing performance skills can improve your confidence and your effectiveness as a presenter. If you have the opportunity, I recommend getting involved in Community Theatre, Theatre Sports or Improv, or a group such as Toastmasters, as this is a great way to fine tune your skills of projection, thinking quickly and adjusting to a changing situation.

How do you deliver an award-winning performance?

Thinking about… Make it look easy

XYZ Inc were evaluating IT Process Automation solutions and had asked three vendors to conduct a Proof of Concept (POC), all at the same time. Our Presales specialist Kris went onsite, by himself, to install and configure the software. The other two vendors each had small teams of 2 or 3 people working on their POCs.

Over the course of the week, Kris took the time to visit the competitor teams in their rooms. He had short chats with them, exuded confidence and made sure to tell them how smoothly he was progressing. When the customer stakeholder visited for a status update, Kris leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “All done”, he said.

You may be thinking that Kris was acting a little too cocky. While that is true, I love this story as an example of one of my maxims for Presales: Make it look easy.

In Presales, our core role is to sell a technical solution, with emphasis on the word “sell”. Technical solutions can be complex and that’s why companies have people like us on the team. Presales bring technical depth and credibility to the company through our expertise and our customer interactions.

However, where we can sometimes trip ourselves up (from a sales perspective) is when we go into too much detail, confuse the customer with complexity, or show something that makes our solution look difficult to use. As Presales professionals, we need to consciously consider how we communicate, both verbally and non-verbally, and what we can do to make our solution look simple to deploy and use. We need to make it look easy.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that our job is to be deceptive. Integrity and credibility are important and once the customer does buy, I want Presales to maintain a connection with them (my second maxim for Presales: “Build a relationship”) and make them successful users of our product. For the customer to choose our solution over the competitor, I need to build their confidence in our capabilities and ease of use. If I make it look hard, then I haven’t done my job properly.

Here are 5 practical ways to make it look easy:

Minimise clicks. Less is more. You might be intimately familiar with navigating around your tool’s interface, but the customer is not. In a demo, show only those screens, capabilities or features that support the use case and your value story. There is no need to show every possible thing that your product can do.
Fewer faces. Lots of people in the room for the presentation or POC? “Gee, it must be complex”, thinks the customer. If you need to hire a bus to take the team onsite, that’s too many people. If you do need support from specialists, try to get remote assistance or only have one extra person onsite with you at a time.
Tell stories about outcomes. Stories help you connect with people and case studies provide great examples of your solution in action. When asked a question, answer with a simple story about what another customer achieved. Focus on the results, rather than the detailed steps of how they got there.
Rough and Ready POCs. Our job in a POC is not to deliver a production-ready system, so it’s ok to resort to a bit of “smoke-and-mirrors”. We need to showcase our solution in a way that persuades the customer that we are the best choice, and we need to do it fast. So don’t spend unneccesary time on things like robust exception handling or integrations. Use scripts, flat files or manual actions to simulate external systems.
Simplify Installation. This will not be an issue in the world of SaaS, but one thing that can make a solution appear complex in a POC is the installation process. Use a pre-installed virtual machine, a “POC-in-a-box” Docker image or a cloud-based service. Worst case, try and encourage the customer to go and enjoy a coffee while you run the install script.

What techniques do you use to make it look easy?

Thinking about… Moving from Presales to Sales

Takeaway: the very first sale you need to close is selling yourself to the Sales Manager

I was filled with joy and the thrill of a race won. The purchase order (P.O.) from ABCD Corp had finally appeared in my inbox. I had been shepherding it through the process and chasing it down for over three weeks. This included emailing and calling the customer’s procurement team in India, and following up with local stakeholders to get it approved and progressed to the next step in the process. When the P.O. finally arrived, I felt fantastic. I walked around the office with a smile on my face, telling anyone who would listen about this significant milestone of my first ever P.O.

Rewind two weeks. The final day of our financial year. The pressure was on to meet our numbers and pull in all the business we could. I had been working closely with Joan, a new Sales Rep who had joined a few months prior. ABCD Corp wanted to buy an additional quantity of licenses and I helped Joan go through the process. This included determining our pricing strategy, meeting with a procurement manager from ABCD Corp, and getting a quote created in our systems. Due to the unfortunate timing of an already booked overseas vacation, it turned out that Joan flew out of town on the morning of this final day, leaving me as the backup. Things were looking promising. ABCD Corp had agreed to the purchase, I had answered questions from their procurement team and provided additional paperwork the day before, and we believed the P.O. just needed to get approved and issued. Simple.

As the day went on, there was no sign of a P.O. and the pressure increased. The Sales Manager, Stan, wanted regular updates. He wanted to know where the P.O. was and who needed to sign it. The Country Manager came and spoke to me. What was the hold up? Who had I spoken to? Stan called again at 6pm. Had I called the ABCD Corp back office team in India (5.5 hours behind us so still working)? At 7pm I received an email from a procurement contact with a brief update. I sent a screen shot to Stan and was careful to edit the picture. I cropped out the contact’s phone number, because I knew that if Stan saw it, he would push me to call them directly. I already felt stressed and didn’t want to do that. About half an hour later I plucked up the courage and made the call. It didn’t get answered so I left a message. About 9pm I received another email informing me the P.O. was now pending approval from a manager in Australia – a person I didn’t know and couldn’t contact. And given the time of day, this person was unlikely to action it tonight. I spoke to Stan for the final time that evening. He was disappointed but philosophical. We hadn’t brought the deal in, but it would surely arrive the next day, giving us a good start to the year.

The P.O. took another ten days of chasing before it finally arrived. I was excited and proud. Joan returned to work the next day. Refreshed, relaxed and with a deal already booked.

The story above is the closest experience I have had to those aspects of the Sales role that we Presales often do not see. It can be easy for Presales to believe that we are doing all the work, and easy to become frustrated that the Sales Person is making more money. We think: “I could do their job. And do it a lot better”. What was eye-opening for me in this experience was the scrutiny and pressure, and the complexity of the customer’s purchasing process.

So I am writing this article from the perspective of an observer and mentor. My “sales” type activities have increased over the years but I have never made that full step from Solution/Presales to direct Sales. I have advised Presales staff and watched numerous colleagues make the transition. Some were immediately successful, some took a few years to find their feet and others moved back into the comfort zone of less-stressful Presales roles after a year or two.

In the IT industry, having a technical background can have a huge advantage as a sales person. You know what you are talking about, find it easier to learn about new products and can quickly build credibility with buyers. Some of the most successful sales people I know started their career in Presales. But it is not an easy path and not suited for everyone.

For me personally, there are two main mental obstacles when I consider taking on a sales role. I am naturally an introvert and not a fan of networking and socialising. I like to build strong relationships with people over time and I don’t want to be in a position where I burn those relationships in order to get a deal in on the last day of the quarter. The idea of a role where I need to talk to strangers scares me. Rationally, I think I would be fine and in fact I network and connect with people all the time. But it is a still a mental block.

The second barrier is that I am scared about the pressure. Pressure to meet quarterly targets, to build pipeline, to close the deal, to get paid enough to pay the bills, to keep my job. Presales can sometimes be on the receiving end of the pressure a sales rep is under, but often it is unseen and our jobs are generally more secure. We are not in the 1-on-1s with the Sales Manager, not getting rejected or simply ignored by customers, not getting calls from Execs on the last day of the quarter. I have experienced Reps in tears, lashing out in anger and giving up when the pressure gets too much. Sales people can reap rewards and make a lot of money, but they can also have very lean years.

My intent here is not to discourage you from considering such a move. Sales Roles are important and potentially lucrative. A Presales background can increase your chances of success. I’m reflecting on my own experience and hesitation with the goal that any Presales individual contemplating this career move will have their eyes open about the challenges and differences.

If you do want to move from Presales into Sales, where should you start? My advice is that you need to realize it will take time and therefore must start talking to people early. While not a hard and fast rule, I have observed that once you start socialising the idea, it might be two years before you can actually join the sales team. You need to lay the groundwork, change perceptions and build relevant experience.

Lay The Groundwork

Step one is to have a career discussion with your manager. Regardless of your career path, a key requirement is to let the right people know of your interest. Your manager will be able to give you good advice, coach you on the steps to take and help you put together a plan. You also want your manager to become your personal champion, sponsoring you to the Sales Manager as a valuable candidate for such a role.

You also want to start observing the sales people you work with more closely. Ask about their own stories. How did they get started in sales? What do they like and hate about the role? What skills do you need to develop to be successful? Ask if there are simple activities that you can help them with, so you can start building the required skills.

Very importantly: You must pitch yourself to the Sales Manager and change perceptions.

Change Perceptions

If you want to move from Presales into Sales, the very first sale you need to close is selling yourself to the Sales Manager. Unfortunately, this can be a challenge when the Sales Manager knows you but perceives you as the “technical” person. They may respect your knowledge and skills, but not have confidence that you can transition into a “sales” person who will agressively drive and win deals. This is a key reason why it can take several years from expressing your interest to making the move. Even if they see your potential, hiring an experienced Sales Person is often seen as a safer bet when the Sales Manager themselves are under huge pressure to deliver.

To change perceptions, you need to give people time to get used to the idea (laying the groundwork) and you also need to build (and demonstrate) relevant experience.

Build Relevant Experience

Once people are aware of your desire to move into a sales role, do as much as you can to build your skills and experience. This could be by helping the Rep with “paperwork” activities such as creating an Opportunity in the system, putting together a Bill of Materials or pricing a Quote. You could also start sitting in on the more commercial customer meetings, and join internal sales meetings such as forecast calls.

One Presales colleague, having indicated his desire to move into sales, took on end-to-end ownership of some small transactional deals at a key account, under the guidance and mentoring of the Sales Rep. This was a great way for him to get hands-on sales experience in a low-risk and well-supported way. It also helped demonstrate his abilities and commitment to the Sales Manager. The next year, he moved fully out of Presales and has since built a successful career in Sales.

You also need to get more comfortable with (and make a habit of) networking, cold calling people and building relationships. Keeping in touch with customer contacts is something I encourage Presales to do more of, regardless of your career plans, and its easiest to start by cultivating ongoing connections with your technical contacts.

A final comment regarding timing: one of the things to realise is that the Sales Manager will only take you on when they have a position to fill. This will typically be when a Sales Rep resigns, or when they are given headcount and budget to grow the team, which may only occur at the start of a new financial year. When a Sales Rep does leave, that is your moment. If you have successfully laid the groundwork and changed perceptions by building and demonstrating your sales skills, you will have created the perfect opportunity and compelling reason to move into the role.

Good luck and good selling.

What are the most important skills that can equip a Presales professional to move into a Sales role?