But, to the original question “How best to sell a solution in the technology market?” I respond “by not selling a solution”.

Instead, sell a proposition which (once you all agree on that definition) is typically a compound of solutions.

To paraphrase myself from a post in a different LinkedIn forum:

In the world of organisations selling tech and tech-based solutions to business and government, a salesman requires the ability to clearly, precisely, quickly and concisely state:
- exactly what it is that he is selling
- exactly why his customer would buy it
- and why buy it from him rather than the competitor
- what his customer sees as the value what he is buying
- what his customer sees as value in terms of who he is buying from

I don’t mean as an elevator pitch or as sales material… these are the components of your account development plan or customer intelligence and without them I would suggest that you are only selling technology solutions and are not likely to succeed (or, if you have been successful are unlikley to remain so).

To get to this requires your clearly understanding which of your competencies, capabilities, credentials, etc. combine to form the correct proposition (solution, product, service delivery set – – take your choice of handles).

The proposition needs appropriate staging and presentation based on the needs and perceptions at a customer-specific level: what value will it provide and how will the ROI manifest, not what tech it uses or the world-class offshore development facility…

In my opinion, everything is secondary to what your customer sees as the value in buying it, and in buying it from you.

—
and a quick response to John: while I agree that change can be troublesome, it all depends on the objectives. To use random examples:

- if you are replacing the telephone system across a vast business organisation – or upgrading versions of Microsoft Exchange or other back office software – or even moving users from XP to Windows 7 then mimimised impact is required… and there are likely countless other, better examples but yes, sometimes change is bad
but
- if you are introducing a tech-based solution to transform a business unit, whether doubling output, halving resources or generally miminising costs, change is necessary and desirable: if the work packages being delivered by 10 people today will be delivered by 4 people, SAP and a dog next week then change is inevitable and is in fact a primary target of the exercise

True concern for the end user is laudable but only if that is what the man with the spreadsheet is paying for – which is of course the final part of the equation: once you know what it is that you are selling & why your customer would want to buy it, and from you then the next step is to ensure that you are selling it to the right person (another example: the IT department of your Local Government customer might not have VoIP on the roadmap until next year BUT VoIP in the contact centre would increase the base of people who can be employed in the contact centre – demand for contact centre resources as one of their current business issues base – by enabling simplified and connected home-working – - and in doing so offer employment to home-bound people which in turn provides extra “ticks in the boxes” around accessible employment targets.

and yes, it should be a great year!

Do feel free to contact me directly if you want to discuss further propositions as the basis for results in selling tech and tech solutions
]]> http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/in-response-to-the-question-how-best-to-sell-a-solution-in-the-technology-market/feed/ 2 danielsteeves http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/in-response-to-a-linked-in-question-what-is-the-most-important-problem-your-salespeople-need-to-overcome/ http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/in-response-to-a-linked-in-question-what-is-the-most-important-problem-your-salespeople-need-to-overcome/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:51:11 +0000 Daniel Steeves http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/?p=55 ]]> Brief Intro: I am a cross-over from the highly technical / creative / architecture space in the IT world to the sales / commercial side of the house – a process which commenced 10-15 years ago – not into targeted sales roles but supporting sales and marketing in getting the right message across as to how and what this tech stuff does for the business… in other words, the impact to the bottom line of the business.

That said, from my point of view, the single most significant problem of a salesman (and I limit this to my primary space, selling tech and tech-based solutions to business and government though I suspect it has wider application) is when he has the inability to clearly, precisely, quickly and concisely state:
- exactly what it is that he is selling
- exactly why his customer would buy it
- and why buy it from him rather than the competitor
- what his customer sees as the value what he is buying
- what his customer sees as value in terms of who he is buying from

To be clear, the same thing goes for those trying to market whatever it is that the sales bloke (blokess) above is trying to sell – to the same people, and hopefully beyond.

To get around this requires that you clearly understand which of your competencies, capabilities and credibilities combine to form the correct proposition (solution, product, service delivery set – - take your choice of handles). This proposition needs appropriate staging and presentation based on the needs and perceptions at a customer-specific level: what value will it provide and how will the ROI manifest, not what tech it uses or the world-class offshore development facility…

These things are all good, and not all fall into my ‘so what’ category but, in my opinion, everything is secondary to what your customer sees as the value in buying it, and in buying it from you.

all the best, thoughts of all flavours welcome
Daniel

__________________________________

Incidentally, Beyond Solutions – my company – has a new and unique methodology, currently rolling out to our first customers

DEAL is a proposition modelling methodology – a little more detail can be seen at my website

I agree with all everyone says about circulating agendas, themes, guests, schedules, outcomes, the responsibility of all to participate in the success of the meeting, minutes and all the rest – but publishing your agenda and encouraging participation and openness is standard for successful team meetings in most aspects of a business.

While I won’t tell you how to motivate your teams since I don’t know them or what they need, I do want to mention a few things that are sure to convert all of the aforementioned good work into an ineffective meeting:

- Facilitation: whoever manages the session should manage the session; the group needs to act like a team with a single conversation only

- Bad slides: I won’t bore you with detail – though I do hope that you know the difference (if not, let me know… we’ll talk)
o One way to fix it: pay attention, care, produce better slides (audience members: criticise poor slides when you see them… better to point out areas for improvement internally with peers than to deliver a bad presentation to your customer… then again, do you always needs to use a slide deck?

- Focus of agenda on interests of all: we don’t care how much Robert, Mark, Susan and Bill sold last year, this year or hope to sell next year… okay, we do care a little but do not require extensive reporting: the boss needs the deep detail, for the most part the rest of the team needs only an overview.
o Ways to fix it: mix it up, but things that might be valuable, depending on the needs of the owner of the meeting, include: did they do anything different on that recent closure; have they come up with an approach to have that ‘different kind of conversation’; tell us why they went after the CFO for that last deal and why it did or didn’t work;… in other words educate and inform the team with things that their peers are doing that could apply to their own space. One approach that I have used in the past is to ask each member of the team to provide one roadblock encountered and one roadblock cleared since the last meeting, the former to seek ideas and assistance, the latter to inform and pass on skills and knowledge

- Repetitiveness is boring
o Ways to fix it: rotating different team members as facilitators each meeting, charged with changing something from the last time and ensuring interaction during the session
o Boss’s choice: deliver something needed topically = it may be education one session, a customer / expert / exec speaking the next

- Show that you are listening and interested: capture and document ideas, plan how to take the good ones forward

If you manage some or all of the above, you will have people leaving the meeting not only feeling that it had not been a waste of their time – and maybe even motivated by someone else’s idea, solution or comments or, just as often, by the thoughts tweaked and synapses fired in his own head, generating the right answer for his issue based on the knowledge and interaction of the session.

All of the above is opinion, take it as you may… but one thing I can guarantee you is that playing ‘that’ scene from Glengarry Glen Ross is not the motivator that you might think it is.
]]> http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/in-response-to-a-question-on-linkedin-as-to-what-constitutes-an-effective-sales-meeting/feed/ 0 danielsteeves http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/london-town/ http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/london-town/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:15:14 +0000 Daniel Steeves http://danielsteeves.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/london-town/ ]]> Sitting at Pret pre-contract meeting – clearly the painful bit of self employment!

Meanwhile, last chance to grab Win7 for free – well, free until next August – it remains highly recommended.

First, today I removed from my BlackBerry a little app called CellSpin – it was at first glance great, letting me send tweets or create blog entries direct here to WordPress, including pics, videos and sound. Then I wrote a lovely blog entry which CellSpin promptly ate! Funny enough, the quick entry that followed, stating that fact, was sent from CellSpin and it did work… but once burned is enough for me so off with its head!

So, now for Outlook and the bold statement in the title of this  blog around improvement.

Installed, in this order (after some experimentation) I am now using Xobni, the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar and Outlook Business Contact Manager.

Xobni indexes mail, conversations, exchanged documents, etc., by contact, in a sidebar which can also connect to the contact’s LinkedIn, Facebook or other profile.

The LinkedIn toolbar for Outlook, among abilities to import your LinkedIn connections and invite your Outlook contacts, also provides a very functional ‘grab’ capability to generate Outlook contacts from selected text.

and finally Business Contact Manager which is shaping up nicely enough in terms of providing the (limited) CRM capability I require as an independent consultant!

So, check them out – the first two can be downloaded via the links provided, but BCM only seems to comes with office Pro or Ultimate (if they are not new to you, apologies, but even so, together they provide some serious functionality (which of course MS could have delivered…)

avoid this phone app!!

Meanwhile, thanks to a loose interpretation of the details on this page my BIS-enabled BlackBerry Bold is running as it should be once again! Actually rather simple once you understand how to trick the BIS interface

Last note today is that I’ve added a focus on mobile and flexible working – specifically enabling businesses to leverage technology in that space to save on money, resources. etc – to my portfoliio… the experience has been there, it just wasn’t mentioned.

On that, it is my opinion that mobile tech is the way it is all going… wireless, etc is not the important bit, though: what is truly important is applying and adapting the use of those technologies to derive value, increase sales, reduce costs, increase customer base, extend brand and all that other good stuff. But is it a transformation that businesses will realise that they need assistance to get it right… I think so but would love to hear some one else’s thoughts on the topic (even if only to force the first ever comment on my blog! :-)

Windows 7 up close (from ZDNet) - from my p.o.v., having been forced to use Vista on a new laptop, Windows 7 was more than rational. If, however, I were asked to advise IT Departments as to whether or not they should move to 7, my response would be multi-part:

1. if current XP implementations are working, it might be a plan to leave them as-is

1a. current XP platforms experiencing intermittent but consistent connectivity or bsod issues, go for the upgrade (remembering of course upgrade from XP means clean install)

2. for new or existing Vista implementations, upgrade

3. for all cases where the answer is Windows 7, get the support teams tooled up, check out the upgrade faq and get started, now, using the RC download (should still be there for a couple of weeks yet)

finally, my daily digest from CIO.com irritated me today when stating that “true convergence requires a customer-centric approach”… this illustrates 99% of the problem with telcos: they haven’t yet caught on that ALL services require a customer-centric approach if ever to be delivered successfully!

And, for an interesting take on using your webcam / primitive 3d processing, take a peek at:

GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid | Augmented Reality.

Still trying to sort out some real uses for this near-ubiquitous device… this p.o.v. from an MS-centric side of the fence is a start – - thoughts, anyone?