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Customers

Guest Post: The Cranky Sales Engineer Shares Sales Secrets

by The Cranky Sales Engineer on March 17, 2009

in Customers, Guest Posts, Sales

Annual planning is nearly over and the Cranky Sales Engineer almost has his quota for the year.  In a tequila inspired fit of account-planning ecstasy, he has decided to share how he and his brethren actually sell products and what product managers can actually do to help.

The Cranky Sales Engineer and the rest of the sales force look for a mystical confluence of three features to make any deal happen:

  • A Technical Problem—Nobody buys anything because its “cool” or “neat” unless they are penniless early adopters.  The rest of the market needs a problem to solve or they aren’t interested.  We need to find a real problem.  Not a “my back bothers me sometimes” problem but a “I’m going to knock my own septic molar out with an ice skate” kind of problem.
  • A Relationship—The Cranky Sales Engineers spends an inordinate amount of time at sporting events, dinners, lunches, and, yes, pub crawls, with customers.  Why?  Because customers will only buy if there is a relationship. Without it, they don’t trust us to actually solve the problem.
  • A Business Proposition—There needs to be a business deal on the table that makes economic sense.  Without it, the problem remains unsolved, and the relationship is just another excuse to go to the ball game.  The business numbers must add up.

The Cranky Sales Engineer is constantly astounded by product managers who manage to be completely irrelvent to this process.  These managers talk about features with no problems.  In fact, that’s all they talk about.  Features they have, features they will have, features they don’t have, and the Cranky SE’s favorite: features that don’t work.

What can you do to help your SE’s sell your product?

  • Tie features to technical problems—You should know what gawd-awful problem you’re solving before you invest in new features.  It’s true, that sometimes the problem being solved is that the customer is tired of five mouse-clicks when there could be three. But that’s a problem if you have to do it 100 times a day.  Show us a technical problem to solve.
  • Make sure the features work—Trust is one of the keys to a sale, and the Cranky Sales Engineer loses trust and credibility every time a feature isn’t fully tested.  Here is a clue to when your sales engineers have lost the customer’s trust: the customer asks, “Don’t you guys test your programs?  Why do I have to do it?”
  • Ask the sales team about pricing—You can screw up pricing two ways.  If you make it too high, we can’t sell the product.  But worse, if you make it too low, we can’t make any money selling the product.  Here’s a thought.  Ask us.  Ask the good account managers and good sales engineers.  The good ones don’t want to sell cheap products, and they especially don’t sell on price.  Make it worth our while.

It’s hard to make all three parts of a deal line up.  Customers have no money.  They are retrenching.  Help us find toothaches and give your sales team the tools to pull the the deals together.

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View all the Divine Rules of Product Management here.

Law #2: On dealing with customers who can’t understand you don’t develop custom software just for them.

If a customer presents a detailed list of features, demands they be developed immediately, and then tries to extract firm commitments with specific dates for each feature, the Product Manager shall adroitly step around the trap as follows.

The Product Manager shall assure the customer s/he understands the  issues by paraphrasing them back and sympathizing with the customer’s frustrations. 

The Product Manager shall, in front of the customer, write the details of each issue, for posterity, inside a high-class notebook with gold gilded page edges.

The Product Manager shall frequently say phrases like:

  • I can see why that’s important to you
  • We’ll see what we can do
  • I wish we had the resources to work on all these great ideas… which two are most important to you?

The Product Manager shall not definitively promise a feature will be developed nor its delivery date, unless the feature is already done, tested, and due for release within the next 2 weeks.

The Product Manager shall also take copious notes of the entire conversation and circulate these notes to the Product Manager’s boss and the customer’s account team, highlighting that NO PROMISES were made.

If thou does this according to THE SOFTWARE LORD’s wishes, the customer will calm down and perhaps take a less adversarial approach in the future. Even better, the Product Manager won’t get fired in 6 months for allegedly promising the customer something that can’t be delivered.

—————-

Have the Software Gods been speaking to you as well?  Have any additional Divine Rules for Product Managers you wish to share?  Share them in this post comments.  The Cranky Product Manager will feature the best Divine Rules as posts on this blog, with appropriate link-backs to the destination of your choosing….

Also in Divine Rules of Product Management

  1. Divine Rules for Product Managers #1: Prepping for Engineering Meetings
  2. Divine Rules for Product Managers #2: On Dealing With Unreasonable Customer Demands
  3. Divine Rules for Product Managers #3: On Helping the Press with Product Reviews
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Customer Self Sabotage

October 23, 2008

The Cranky Product Manager flew many miles, suffering through innumerable connections, delays, malnourishing food, and indignities heaped upon her by TSA officials. All to interview this fantastic new customer that just spent a huge wad of cash to buy DysfunctoCrank. Even better, this new customer represented a new and potentially very lucrative market segment. With [...]

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Following Up: Customer Advisory Groups

October 2, 2008

Following up on yesterday’s post on Customer Advisory Groups/Boards/Councils, you should realize that the Cranky Product Manager is hardly the definitive authority on the subject. So she thought she’d ask you all to contribute your wisdom.

What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of Customer Advisory Groups?
Any tips/tricks on how to get the most bang [...]

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On Customer Advisory Groups

September 30, 2008

Two questions from readers triggered this miraculous post:
“What is your opinion of the effectiveness of Client Advisory Groups, and do you think that PMs (cranky or not) should organize and facilitate them?”
“Follow up to the Client Advisory Groups, assuming you have an existing CAG how do extract useful feedback and integrate it with the development [...]

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Stage 4 Product Proliferation

April 14, 2008

Once upon a time, long, long ago, DysfunctoSoft had a simple little price list. It could be described in a paragraph. Buy our server and pay $XX,XXX per machine. Buy our companion client-side tool and pay $YYY per instance. Simple.
And then came the inevitable. Customer A started whining: DysfunctoSoft, we like your product. But it [...]

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Thanks for Sharing Your Secret Moves

April 18, 2007

Ooooh, our readers have all shared some pretty excellent Secret PM Ninja Moves for dealing with feature demands from customers and from sales.  Check out the comments. Great stuff in there.
The one Secret Move that the Cranky PM does not see listed is the Jedi Mind Trick (“This isn’t the feature you’re looking for…”)  [...]

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Share Your Secret Moves

March 31, 2007
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QlikTech, Go Learn Rule #1

June 16, 2006

Hey, QlikTech! The Cranky Product Manager has a bone to pick with you! Instead of delivering a “keynote” presentation at this week’s Software Marketing Perspectives conference, you instead subjected the Cranky PM and her peers to a full-on, in-yer-face pitch for your “business intelligence” software.
While the Cranky PM fully expects any presentation given by [...]

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