Salestechie’s Hypothesis on Responding to Customers

Yet another quick post, and this time it’s about responding to customer enquiries. Sometimes things can go wrong and your customers can send you an angry mail asking for a quick resolution. This is where my hypothesis steps in which I explained below:

1. A quick and good response is the best
2. A good but late response is not good
3. A quick and bad response is worse
4. A late response is even worse
5. A quick and bad response is not better than a late response
6. You should not even think of a bad and late response

Ultimate outcome of my hypothesis is “Better learn how to give quick and neutral responses when you cannot give a quick and good response”. E.g. We are now investigating the situation and expect to resolve this issue in 3 hours.

Bulletproof Salesman

Bulletproof Salesman is a documentary film about Fidelis Cloer, a German guy selling armored vehicles to people at war zones. He travels to places like Baghdad and Kabul in the search of new sales opportunities.

You can say that being a war profiteer is unacceptable and this movie is bad, but you cannot say that it is not interesting. Personally I didn’t see anything in the movie that can improve or influence my sales abilities. All I saw was the passion of selling in a very unusual way.

You can find more on the movie’s official web site: http://www.bulletproof-salesman.com

Get Your Own CRM

If you have many accounts, it eventually becomes a burden to manage customer information, track customer events and remember contact details. And It’s also very common that you start to mix which customer is interested in which product or which contact belongs to which account and so on.

If your sales organization is lucky enough to have a customer relationships management [CRM] platform or a service such as SalesForce you can obviously take advantage of it to organize your customer relations. If not, you can do as I did. Continue reading…

The Edge of Technical Sales

If sales team were rock bands, only the good sales teams could be the U2. And only the bright sales people could be the Bono and only the talented and cool salestechies could be The Edge. It takes successful teaming, years of experience, innovative thinking, and lots of practice to be The Edge of Technical Sales.

A tree is a “tree”

Suppose that you need to prepare a slide to tell about some facts about trees. You are given the title “A tree is a tree” and you started working on your slide by googling for some nice tree pictures. Don’t forget that you will also be presenting those facts by using the slide you prepared.

How would you end with your slide? What is the best practice to use texts and pictures? Is it good to add every detail to your slide; every benefits, every constraints? Or is it better to tell your story instead of writing it down on a slide?

Below are three slide versions I’ve prepared for the topic. Obviously there can be more variations, but lets just start with three.

First one uses no text, no content but just a picture of a tree. Everything depends on how well the presenter can handle the topic.

Slide Variation - 1

Continue reading…

In The Middle

In a meeting or in a casual chatting, I usually find myself in a strange situation if there are sales people and customers around. Sales people strongly believe just what they want to believe and customers always look reluctant and distant to believe whatever sales people believe and as sales techies we are in the middle, trying to convince customers what sales people believe is true meanwhile bringing sales people’s belief back to earth.

Ready To Go?

If you are planning a trip to another country where you haven’t been before, it is wise to be prepared before heading for the airport. Below, I made a quick list of things that I check before I pack my suitcase.

The Art of Suitcase Packing

Use your iPhone as a Presenter

Laptop, mouse, usb disks, cables, phone, pen, chargers and more and more cables. I hate to carry all of these stuff with me whenever I travel or go for a visit to a customer. I take every chance to carry less stuff and get my bag lighter. One of the things I could get out of my bag is the presenter, thanks to Mobile Air Mouse.

Mobile Air Mouse

Mobile Air Mouse is an iPhone application that turns your phone into a remote mouse. Continue reading…

Selling the Experience

As sales engineers, we are obsessed with the products and technologies we are offering. We are so focused on how our technology solves customers’ existing problems, and so eager to show every smart functionality in our products. For that we don’t find it burdensome to give a long introduction on the technologies and common issues with the existing situation. For IT audience it may be somewhat reasonable but only to the extent that we don’t lose their interest. For sales and marketing audience, it is just torture. I had the best feedback ever recently, from a marketing guy about the slides about some functionality of the product. He said : Don’t ever show me these slides again

iPad With Wings

He was absolutely right. I did the mistake of not being ready for the marketing audience, I showed him the technical slide with some blocks and architecture. It was what the product is, and it was how the product does what it’s doing. It wasn’t why we did that product, it wasn’t our plans for that product. It wasn’t the experience. Continue reading…

W3LC0M3 T0 MNHSK

Best part of being in sales business is traveling. In my case I mostly travel abroad. This time I’m in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The pictures below are taken with the lousy camera of my iPhone. I’m sorry for the low quality and sorry for not having a nice Canon camera.

A cold Minsk night

This is my first visit to Minsk, however I can tell with confidence that Minsk is a city with its own characteristics. OK, let’s start from the beginning.

Minsk Airport is a small one with so many Tupolevs and Antonovs on the ground. If you are a visitor you have to buy the Obligatory Medical Insurance at the airport before going for the passport check. You need to pay roughly $1 for each day of your visit. Continue reading…