Memorizing or Knowing

I was driving to work the other morning and heard a replay of the Opie and Anthony Show on SiriusXM. In the segment I heard, they were talking to Donald Sutherland, who was promoting the movie “The Hunger Games”. During the talk, Jimmy Norton asked Sutherland an acting question about how he learned his lines.

Donald Sutherland

The response was pure sales gold, and something every salesperson show hear. He said, I don’t memorize my lines, I know them word for word. I know them. If you memorize, your words come out by rote. If you know them, then they sound natural. When you study the words, understand them and the meaning behind them, you can carry on a conversation, not just talk at someone.

Think about your sales presentation. Do you really know it or can you only deliver it well? Maybe not even that. Know and understand what your solution does. Know and understand how your solution does what it does. Know and understand why your solution does what it does. Now reread the previous sentences, but replace the words Know and Understand with the word memorize. You are basically left with a marketing blurb.

Know your stuff

If you want to have more engaging conversations with your prospects and move the process forward faster, learn the meaning of the words you are saying.

My 2013 New Year’s Resolution

My New Year’s Resolution, start writing my blog again.

Happy New Year 2013

I have been on hiatus while I moved across country and started my new job. While on my break, I discovered a couple of things. First, I missed writing. Second, I need to write. When I write I am able to empty some of the thoughts that bounce around my head before they cause serious damage.

We have all read time management books, listened to experts, even tried different “things”. The one thing I have learned, is some things are more important than others, and what makes them important is they keep me sane. Well more sane anyway. So no matter how full my plate is, I have to make room for the sanity savers.

Manage Time

I have settled into my new position and have a whole bunch of new fodder for my technical sales blogs. I look forward to getting them on pixels soon.

I hope you all have a great New Year and are able to fit the important things into it. 2013 is shaping up to be an exciting, productive and profitable year. 

Big Mini Data

We hear about big data all the time. How big data is changing everything. If you don’t know what big data is, follow this link and get up to speed. When we read reports on Big data, they are generally Really Big Data, like Facebook adding 500 Terabytes a day. Well even your SMB clients with far less data, growing at a far smaller rate, feel like they have big data, and they are right.

Big Data

So how are you helping your mini big data users? Have you upgraded their backup and recovery options? Have you looked at their storage requirements and is it sufficient? Have you looked at the software they use to report on their data? The database they use to store their data? This is your job you know… Knowing what they need so you can sell it to them.

You may have clients who started populating an MS Access database several years ago and they have never done any real maintenance on that database. Maybe you should migrate them to MS SQL or MySQL, something with a little better performance. Are they using built in reporting tools? Maybe you need to get them using a more powerful tool set for reporting.

To quote Wikipedia Big Data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. I think that is what I just pointed out above. So if your clients are using under powered tools to deal with larger databases, they have big data…for them.

Weak tools can break the system

Big data needs better tools and better planning. Planning for growth and performance. Better tools for working with and displaying the data. Don’t miss the big data boat with your clients, evaluate your clients data needs today.

New Position Process

Wow, where have I been? Well starting a new position is time consuming. Maybe I should say it SHOULD be time consuming. If you expect to get up to speed in any new position by just putting in the “normal” amount of work hours, you are sadly mistaken. In the software sales industry, you have to expect to put in a lot of hours in a regular work week. When starting a new position in that industry, expect to add at least 25% more than the producers are putting in.

How Much Time?

I don’t know how this sounds to you, too much or too less, but it seems to be what works for me. Too many more hours than that and I start to lose my sharpness. Any fewer and I can’t do the daily load and learn the amount of information I need to to keep ramping up.

Again, I’m a technical sales resource, so I need to know all the nut’s and bolts. So how do I do it? Read, read a lot. It is amazing what you will learn if you read everything your company produces about your product. Marketing slicks, sales brochures, Web pages, technical manuals and release notes. Not just the most recent release notes, read them for at least a year back. This will help you find information that your competition uses against you based on old information, as well as helping existing customers know what they can gain if they upgrade.

You have to know what you need to know

While I’m reading, I’m watching. Watching others work. What do they say? What do they show? What do they make sure to point out? What are they sure to avoid? All of this is invaluable. Next, I talk to others about what I have read and seen. Coworkers, customers, prospects, anyone. Again, this will help refine what I know and how it is received and perceived.

The original "Like"

I have done technical demos for my Wife and Mom before. Why? If I can’t make them understand complex technical software, I need to simplify my presentation. I always start with simple demos when showing a new product. Tell a story, paint a picture where people can see themselves using the solution, get them to want more, and be ready to do that.

Good Decision or Good Reaction

I have always wanted the people around me to be the type of people I can trust to make good decisions. I’m changing my mind. I now want to put my trust in people who can best deal with the aftermath of bad situations. Why the change? Well, let me explain.

Decisions Decisions...

First, everyone likes a winner. Everyone likes supporting winners. People, who make good decisions all the time, will be winners. So we like to support people who make good decisions. However, no one makes good decisions all the time. So if you are supporting someone who makes a bad decision, how do they react? How do you react?

Don't Freak out, Figure it out

It is possible to overreact, or become paralyzed, when someone who normally makes good decisions, makes a bad one. When things aren’t going your team’s way after a bad decision, it is possible to start playing the blame game. If members of your team do this, why, and what does it mean? To me, it shows that you are not a team, you are a group following a strong leader. When the leader stumbles, the group falls apart.

Stick together, but don't Sink together...

A team sticks together. But to be fair, so did the crew of the Titanic. So you have to do more than not blame each other when a bad decision puts you in a bad spot. You have to have someone in charge that can make the most happen out of that situation.

It isn’t if a bad decision is made, it is when. It isn’t if you have to scramble to make the most of a situation, it is when. So while I want to support someone who makes great decisions, I really want to support someone who doesn’t fall apart when it hits the fan.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Unified Communication

There were a couple of communication related stories today. Hotmail got a reboot, and looks very clean. It is now called Outlook.com and I logged in for the first time in 7+years. Yahoo email and messenger had some outages today, welcome Marissa Mayer. Twitter reinstated Guy Adams Twitter account. What do these three stories have in common? They show us what is good, bad, and ugly in communications.

Hotmail is now Outlook.com

First Outlook.com. Hotmail may have been my 2^nd or third email service and if I recall correctly I created it to log into Microsoft support sites… It was a mess. Typical email client where no thought was given to how the interface would be used by people. I remember how excited I was to get my early invite to Gmail and how clean the page looked. How…usable it was. Now, so is Hotmail umm, ah, Outlook.com. This is the good. Taking something less usable and making it better.

Yahoo Email and Messenger

The bad. Yahoo. One of my friends posted today he didn’t know which was worse, not getting email from Yahoo, or admitting you still use Yahoo for email. It is showing the problem of the company as a whole. Something that doesn’t work that well, even if you wanted to you it. They have a lot of work to do to raise themselves to the level of a bad provider.

Twitter Killing themselves

The ugly. Twitter has again shown ways it can’t be trusted. Due to its business relationship with NBC, tweets were being monitored and when a Twitter user included an email of an NBC executive, the Twitter staff alerted NBC and suggested they file a complaint, which they did, causing the Twitter users account to be suspended. The problem? The email address is on NBC’s website, it is public. Another problem? Monitoring tweets for content. Enough of an issue was raised that Twitter reinstated the account and apologized, but not for why or how they disabled the account. They continue to state the post was a violation. This will be great the next time people start tweeting about the next uprising in the Middle East and Twitter shuts them down for the content of their tweets. Ugly.

We all learn every day and especially in the always on global social media pool. But whatever your platform, it has to be on, it has to be usable, and it has to be open or you might as well open a telegraph office.

Samuel Morse Telegraph

Living Large, Lying, or Laughing

As many of you know I have taken a new position recently. Now I’m not going to use my blog here to tell you how amazing Axcient is from the top down, but I have never been so impressed with any group of people. Instead I’m going to share my thoughts and feelings of jumping into the shark tank.

Axcient has a fairly new partner that has just taken off doing a huge number of placements. They want to bring the entire sales and executive team up to speed to really drive these numbers. Guess who gets to present to them? That is right, yours truly.

Now this doesn’t present much of a problem for me for several different reasons.

1. 1.       I love to present, I can’t wait to get started.
2. 2.       I’m a geek, I have learned a lot about the product technically already.
3. 3.       I came from the VAR space, I know the needs for Backup, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery.

So to sum it up, if you have knowledge, know how to apply it, and like doing it, you can’t miss. Do you take this approach when you sell? I say sell, because even though I’m talking to a partner, I’m selling them on selling us. Everything is sales. Now I didn’t feel this when I was a wet behind the ears technician trying to get all my errands run between service calls…but I learned…I learned.

As I have said before, sales is about confidence. If you have confidence in whatever you are selling, you have just made your sales process much easier. Hardware, software, or yourself.  If you don’t have confidence, why? Which of the elements are you missing?

Repeat after me, I have the knowledge about my solution, I know how my prospect will use it to solve their issues, I believe I will do my best for the client and my employer. If you can say that line without either laughing or lying, you’re living large.

If you aren’t running to get in front of the next new group to talk to, maybe you need to think about a career change…