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hello i'm john care from mastering technical sales and you are watching the cloud therapist hello and welcome to the clathrap for shorts i'm richard simon today's talk is a top five tips for sales engineers i have the pleasure of welcoming back john care from mastering technical sales mts provide professional skills training for sales engineers globally hello john how you doing i'm doing wonderfully well richard as you can see it's a casual friday here in sunny florida so every time i have you on you're always tempting me about the temperature and things like that so it's great it's great to have you back on then john really appreciate you coming uh coming on to do this talk so yeah let's just dive straight into your um top five tips for sales engineers please sure um so quick overview before we start um so there's five tips one of them is going to be behavioral one of them is going to deal with business value discovery one is a tactical tip around demos uh want about slides and why you shouldn't use them and the last one uh will apple call becoming the fabulous sales engineer so that's what we're going to cover fantastic so you're probably already impatient right now so let's go into the first topic which is patience right so patience is a behavioral thing and not often something that is displayed in great quantity by sales teams around the world right yet there's a lot to be said for patients in the sales engineer and i'll give you three specific examples why that's important the first one is the use of pauses and silence when you're dealing with customers and so there's a ton of research out there from companies like gong io that show that poor performing sales teams pause 0.6 seconds between sentences and questions whereas good performing sales teams pause two to three seconds between questions and that shows the customer that a you're listening and b gives the customer time to give you some additional information so that's patience as in don't jump in and fill the silence right so that's part one part two revolves around have the patience to always ask one more question and so you never ever want to leave a call with a piece of informational data that you don't know so have patience find the right time and ask that additional question before dashing into the demo or diving into the presentation and then part three of patients is don't start talking about your technology about your product until you know why the customer cares about it right so example i might say to you richard why do you tell them about your reverse network trans war osmotic protection processes and you have no idea why you might be talking about that right and it's in the next release by the way all right so instead you know you might say you know john i was thinking the same thing and then you pivot back to the client yeah and say so if you could just tell me a little bit more about how you utilize that technology now i'd give you a far more focused answer so what you're doing is a barter and say give me more information and i can give you a more focused answer rather than just diving in and guessing right so that's the art of patience cool excellent what's the next one for us so the next one is around business value discovery and i call this time money in people there's a lot of effort that goes into business value discovery and even technical discovery around formulating the right questions and a process to go through it and framework and the art of the possible and everything and there's very little time that's spent on the answers as in what do you as the sales engineer want to hear from the customer so we say what you want to listen for is time money or people so if you can get the customer to say we'd like to do this three days faster or i only want one person to work on this for half a day instead of five people for a week or we have an upcoming maintenance payment of 250 000 pounds that we want to avoid in april that's an example of time people or money so as a sales engineer salesperson team if you can get the customer to give you a business driver that relates to time people or money that's a job well done because they are fungible right you give me one of them i can convert it into one of the other two so that's tip number two is tmp time people money that's what you listen for excellent and i'm really curious about your third one so i can't wait for you to dive into that so the third one visual aid here is called fix the damn mouse that's a very tactical tip so richard um what is the background color of most pieces of software that you use on a day-to-day basis the background color of the screen white it's white right what is what is the color of the mouse pointer by default well it's it's white as well it's white the black outline yeah yeah so it's the proverbial white cat and a snowstorm right it's really hard to see the mouse when you're doing the demo so fix the mouse means go into your settings whether whatever device you're on um and invert it so you then have a black mouse pointer and double its size right and then you can also use mouse enhancement software that makes it flash and beep and put boxes around it the reason you do this is so the customer can see your mouse and what you're pointing at and that way they're not expanding brain cycles trying to figure out where the heck you are on the screen and what you're doing um and your navigation instead they're focusing on the outcome so let's fix the damn mouse simple tactical one-time thing two-thirds of ses do not do it excellent and and for those just a quick tip for those using command line uh for for their demonstrations again there's obviously different ways of you know changing colors for the outputs and things like that as well on that one excellent yes yeah so again just make it visually appealing exactly the customers absolutely yeah okay number four okay so number four is a larger one and it's dump your slides wow so think about it i mean if i go back to when i was a senior i.t exec or a cio i mean you know i mean richard how many slides do you think i saw in an average month i wouldn't i wouldn't even dare to guess that one john yeah so a lot right sure um a lot like hundreds if not thousands the majority of them were internal slides right and you can just imagine what kind of slides you know a network engineer or security analyst would show a cio right that's scary um so the slides that vendors come in with and present you know usually far better quality than internal slides how do you differentiate make you know your slide different from all the other slides that your customers see it's really hard so the answer is dump your slides and go visual so there's the proverbial right a picture is worth a thousand words right so whether it's electronic stylus or an old-fashioned pen yeah sketch it out right and if you truly believe a picture is worth a thousand words it takes the average sales engineer six and a half minutes to go through a thousand words so if you can sketch something out from the customer and get them to collaborate with you you know electronically or physically what you then have is a joint solution it also greatly enhances the credibility of the se or even the cell drop because it's something that you've created right i call it seat to keyboard you know it comes out of your brain on the screen and it's something that belongs to you it's not something that some product no marketing fellow backing corporate has designed and built it is yours so it's far more personable and it's a great way to drive these sales motion forward so don't always resort to powerpoint or google slides um even you know in a virtual world if you have an opportunity to sketch something out and draw something from the customer then take that opportunity and do it it will differentiate you from your competition yeah absolutely and and to be honest with you i think i mean the a lot of the engagements i've had over the years um and more recently um you know the whiteboarding something with the customer is i think is infinitely more interactive and it just gets them thinking and pointing and asking questions and things like that so i do wholeheartedly agree with that yeah it's an amazing technique um and even if you're delivering virtually i mean here we are we're using zoom yeah right i mean i could put a slide up and then i could annotate on top of the slide so you can throw a complicated architecture diagram out and then annotate it over the top you don't have to start from a blank page so there's so many ways to go with it absolutely okay and your fifth one all right so the fifth one is also a little intriguing i hope so we want you to be an absolutely fabulous sales engineer and fab uh stands for features advantages and benefits right so it's a very old concept in the world of sales created by a guy called neil rackham um gosh like 35 years ago when he worked at ibm right and if you think about it we as sales engineers are great at features we love features we love the f's right we live and dive by them um we're okay at advantages and sometimes we talk about those and mostly we are horrific terrible at expressing the benefits right so as a very quick everyday example an illustration here we have a coffee mug right actually that's a bit of silicon valley history that's a oracle coffee mug for the year oh okay because they're from 1988 how scary is that um so here's an illustration um so this coffee cup has a handle yeah so that's a feature it's something the coffee cup has an advantage is what it does so what does this handle what does this handle do for me richard yeah so you you're well you you you're able to hold the cup i guess yeah so i'm able to hold the cup and i don't burn my fingers like compared to another yeah so most of us as engineers we stop right there because right blatantly obvious it's a great idea to be able to get a good grip on the cup and not burn your fingers right but the benefit is what does it mean to the customer right so what does it mean to me well if i don't burn my fingers it means i don't have to go to the emergency room of the hospital yeah i can continue to code you know play tennis whatever it is right so reps are much better at benefits than we as sales engineers are sure so every time you have a slide even though i just told you in the last tip not to use slides we still have to right every time you see the word feature or advantage or benefit on a slide make sure it truly is one of those because marketing people are mainly clueless about it um no offense to my marketing friends um and then if you have one of those classic slides where you've got you know a screenshot on the left hand side or a piece of hardware and nine bullet points down the right that list features in the speaker notes you should put the corresponding advantages and benefits right somebody in the room is going to care about the benefits and usually right you see how this all works now back to one of the earlier tips usually the benefits come in form of either time money or people right so that is the absolutely fabulous sales engineer don't just stop at the features go to the advantages and then finish off with benefits excellent well john that's fantastic that's your top five tips i really appreciate that i think that's um i'm i'm always sort of um you know fascinated by that sort of whole space and you know having been a sort of sales engineer and done that multiple times and been a favorite role that i've done in the past i always kind of find it you know fascinating kind of how how that sort of space progresses and you know sort of uh all the different tips of how you can kind of engage with customers and i think that's really brilliant so um i will certainly provide more information um on you guys on mts and on your website and all the other stuff in the description of the video you also have though a fourth edition of your mastering technical sales the sales engineers handbook book coming out in april is that correct yeah that is correct it actually just went to the publisher today oh fantastic um release soon it's a totally rewritten um edition so the third edition came out in 2014. so there's been a lot of advantages in technology as well as just you know sales techniques since then you know everything's become virtualized and cloudified and we have the consumption model of value engineering and so there's a lot of incredible amount of new content in there so it was time to update it and come out with the the new book so that will hit the streets shortly you know i'm thrilled fantastic well um john yeah thank you again um for for coming on and uh yeah i hope we can do another talk soon i look forward to it richard thank you so much for having me on thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed the content please subscribe to the channel and we'll see you next time [Music] you