Posted by Daniel Sullivan on Tue, Nov 22, 2011 @ 02:13 PM
In another encouraging sign for hiring demand for Information Technology candidates, I have seen multiple examples of Sales Engineering managers loosening their requirements for new hires, and looking outside their traditional talent sources for exceptional candidates.
A number of recent searches have cropped up where companies hiring sales engineers have been asking for candidates outside of traditional pre-sales support roles, such as post-sales account manager, project managers, and product delivery/implementation types. Even technical trainers and some sales reps with the required technical depth. This openness means that hiring managers are exhausting the pool of available strong candidates, many of whom have simply withdrawn from interviewing for new jobs because they are making or exceeding their sales targets (and the accompanying commissions) and have a strong pipeline of sales prospects for quarter-end/year-end sales accelerators (where the scores can really change!) as well as for Q1 2012.
A window of opportunity has opened for external and internal candidates in highly-technical customer-facing roles to leverage the mix of technical depth and personal communication skills and land a lucrative Sales Engineering position, even from outside of a particular firm.
If you are looking to make a transition into Sales Engineering but don't know where to start, LOOK HERE. Our Telecommunications, Applications, Information Security and Systems Integrator customers are hiring aggressively, and I foresee this trend continuing.
Just make certain that you have a strong technical base in the product or services area that the hiring firm when you apply. Technical and market domain knowledge, as well as a strong personal presence, and communications skills (for product demos, webinar, presentations, RFPs, etc.) are the ingredients for successful Sales Engineer.
Good luck!
Dan Sullivan
Posted by Elissa Jane Mastel on Fri, Apr 15, 2011 @ 10:27 AM
By Mark F. Matejik, Guest Blogger
“People who don’t sell don’t sell for me.” I got this great concept from my friend Dan Sullivan one day as we talked on the phone. Dan is one of the best recruiters I know and got me into TANDBERG in 2007 which was one of my best trainer jobs for which I am eternally grateful.
So I am giving him and you a gift today my sales executive and sales management friends, to boost your insight and awareness about how we as top people go about finding and hiring top sales talent who will sell!
There are four keys of selling excellence that you’ll find in those who sell. And oh by the way, they form the acronym SELL. Find them to please your executives, board, and wallet. You may find your next #1 salesperson too!
The Four Keys of Selling Excellence-SELL:
1) Serving with Skill! “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men,” Solomon is quoted as saying; And the way I say it today is that the skilled stand before the great. You will if you work your skill. How well does the sales candidate ask questions, play back what they heard, align with you and get agreement? How well do they paint a picture of successes they’ve had that compel you to take them off the market?
2) Expecting the best with exceptional ethic! Top people cast vision for a brighter tomorrow and show up in that today to make that real. When I was promoted to take over the Boston Branch for Information Builders, they were in the basement but I told them: “You can be #1!” In one year they went from worst to first by saying and showing up in that. Meeting people in blizzards by getting out the reps Range Rover and surprising everyone but my team as we took the prize.
Sales is not only about persuading others. It is about persuading yourself to do the best for yourself, your customer, your boss and your family. Getting up earlier than most; calling more executives before they get started and showing up and following up even when it’s tough and others are going home or having fun. Ask candidates about when it looked bleak and how you came from behind. How did you message a better vision to your team and customer and what extraordinary things did you have to do as a leader to make it all come true? What does their work ethic look like? Were you a paperboy before you grew up?!
3) Loving sales and people at the same time! Sales is an awesome gift and game and I enjoy playing it every day. It’s a rare gift to play, get paid and enjoy it! Play it all the way! Ask them what they love in life. Love to make money? Love to lead? They better love to sell and love people. You go after what you love. When you saw someone you loved you went after it didn’t you? “I love showing up in pay time!” (In front of new customers between 9-5 every day!) Do you?
4) Learning to Leverage: Covey said “Sharpen the Saw.” At least that’s the first time I heard it! But then I saw he got it from Abe Lincoln who said that if he had a job to do he’d rather spend 75% of the time sharpening his axe and the other 25% effectively cutting! How does that work in sales? Well first you commit to lifelong learning. Prideful execs say I already know how to sell! Really? Remember Randy Moss? He knows how to catch too but did not work out because he wasn’t humbly and continually learning to leverage his God given talent. Get good coaches and mentors into your life. Ask them who their best mentors, coaches and partners are! What is the best business book they just read? Also find out about how eager they are to leverage new approaches and techniques. When are the best times to call executives for you? Did you know it is 6-8 in the mornings Tuesday through Friday (or Thursday and Friday 1-5)? Do they get up that early? Where are they Friday afternoon: Are they in the office late calling or playing golf? When and how are they reaching out to open up new relationships and are thy open to new more effective ways to reach the fish when and where they are biting?
Find the SELL in your hires and you will always sell well! Enjoy these tips to the most rewarding sales hire yet! It may give you the best hires of your life!
Stay hungry and SELL well my friends!
Posted by Elissa Jane Mastel on Mon, Apr 11, 2011 @ 01:06 PM
by Guest Blogger Holger Schulze
Major shifts are taking place in B2B marketing that started a few years ago but have accelerated in recent months – in the marketplace as well as inside vendor organizations. Prospects and customers are becoming more sophisticated and better informed than ever before. They are tuning out a lot of the marketing noise they receive which makes it harder for marketers to reach audiences the old fashioned way. Customers are are in the driver’s seat today. This has profound implications on marketing and the way companies engage with prospects.
Until recently, the mainstream B2B marketing approach was to interrupt and engage prospects, educate them on the vendors offering and move them through the sale cycle towards a transaction – a very vendor and product centric approach. Contrast this with the sophisticated and networked and community-embedded buyer today, who conducts research and talks with their peers in online communities long before identifying and narrowing down the list of potential vendors that can solve the problem.
These buyers and decision makers don’t want to get interrupted by a product promo email or a cold call that likely doesn’t come at the exact time they have a specific problem the caller can help with. And today’s customers are busier than ever. They want to be able to engage with a vendor when they are ready and actively seek out advice, often very late in the buying cycle, and have the vendor guide them through a complex buying and problem solving process - outsourcing part of the buying process to the vendor community if you will.
A simple 5 step program can help you refocus your marketing efforts and adjust to the new requirements for B2B marketing success:
Understand Your Audience
Customer focus begins with understanding your customer and their market environment. What business problems do they face? What are the drivers in their industry that impact profitability? Also make sure you segment your target markets according to demographics, psychographics, and business environment to identify the segments that are the best fit for your company's offering; segments that have the most to gain by becoming your customers.
Build a Strong Value Proposition
Build a strong customer-centric value proposition that puts your product and services in the context of the customer's problem, communicates the value you provide and your differentiators vis-a-vis competing alternatives.
Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey
Map the customer's buying cycle from problem awareness, identifying generic solutions, identifying potential vendors, selecting vendors that make the short list, evaluating solutions in detail and ultimately selecting a solution. Build a simplified model of your customers’ world, the journey they take from problem to solution. This exercise will help you understand how your customers are progressing through the steps of the buying cycle. What are their goals, concerns, what data do they need to move to the next step, where do they look for information?
Build Compelling Messages and Content
With this information you get a pretty good idea for how to influence the prospect along every step, how to educate them, how to guide them to purchase. Build a simple matrix of messages, marketing collateral and sales tools mapped against each phase of the buying cycle. Also add how you want to get your information to your audience - how will they find you. Focus on social networks and Google and special interest sites for the early phases; that's where buyers will often look first and find your content to make sense of their problem and the solution space and identify potential vendors. Make sure your content is problem and solution focused and doesn’t only talk about your product.
Build call to actions into each content piece to encourage your prospect to keep engaging with you as they move through the buying cycle. Also, make content easily accessible, especially in the early phase of the buying cycle where prospects don't care about specific vendors but want to understand their options and the implications of available choices to solve a problem. So let your educational content (white papers, Webinars) go free so it gets consumed and shared by prospects across social networks, don't hide it behind registration forms, but add a strong call to action into the content asset to move your prospects to the next interaction with you.
Invest in Marketing Automation
One size fits all mass email blasts, for example, don’t provide the level of return you are looking for. Marketing automation will allow you to have very targeted digital conversations with your audience triggered by prospect profile and behavior, driven by their buying cycle. Help prospects follow paths that you have defined to guide them, offering content that matches every step of their buying process from white papers and webinars in the early discovery stages to case studies, ROI studies and competitive comparisons during vendor selection at which point your sales will be heavily engaged in the relationship. With each interaction, you collect more data about the prospect which allows you to build a score to identify the hottest leads that you want to engage with directly and focus your time and sales resources on. With sophisticated analytics and reporting, MA tools will also give you insight into what is working and what not so you can adjust and improve your campaigns.
Buyers expect B2B vendors to help them make sense of the options they have available to solve a particular problem, and their pros and cons. A very consultative, solution, and customer centric approach to marketing and sales that is very different from yesterday’s paradigms. For marketing teams, this means engaging with prospects much earlier in the buying cycle, educating them long before prospects consider specific vendors, and matching each phase of the customer buying cycle with appropriate message, content and marketing tools designed to ease the buyers journey - from problem to solution and carefully steer them to the favorable outcome - to be selected by the buyer.
It also means using new ways to reach the buyer, including social networks. This approach requires much greater domain, industry and business expertise on the vendor side, to really understand the customer, which in turn requires more targeted segmentation, more intelligent messaging, better sales tools, etc. Time to get ready.
About Holger Schulze
Holger Schulze is a B2B technology marketing expert with over 10 years of experience driving market awareness, demand, and revenue for high-tech companies in the US and Europe. Currently serving as the Director of Marketing for information security vendor SafeNet, Holger has a proven success record of creating and executing global marketing strategies that increase revenue and market share. Holger is also a prolific blogger and social media community builder. Marketing professionals worldwide read his syndicated B2B Technology Marketing blog, and Holger's B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn has rapidly grown to over 20,000 members. And Holger's LinkedIn Information Security Community, with over 80,000 members, is the single biggest community of its kind in the information security industry.
Posted by Elissa Jane Mastel on Thu, Apr 07, 2011 @ 11:08 AM
By Guest Blogger Jim Novy, President, IT Marketing World LLC
What J.Patrick & Associates is to IT recruiting, IT Marketing World is to marketing best practices. As the first and most social-savvy online community of IT marketing professionals, IT Marketing World is seeking the best and brightest minds in the industry to establish and refine long-elusive industry best practices.
Although nearly every industry relies on information technology to drive growth and innovation, IT marketing standards have woefully lagged behind other industries due to ill-defined, inefficient and ad hoc practices. IT Marketing World fills the gap between tech-heavy IT trade publications and general B2B marketing resources, essentially picking up where blogs and LinkedIn Group discussions leave off.
“Marketing planning and implementation varies widely from company to company, and point pieces of information about successes and failures are spread around the industry,” said Marije Gould, vice president of marketing for Tandberg Data. “This new community gives IT marketing professionals a sorely-needed platform to share their experiences in order to fine-tune best practices and raise the bar throughout the industry.”
“General marketing practices are well defined but IT marketing best practices are not,” said Holger Schulze, director of worldwide marketing for SafeNet and ubiquitous IT marketing blogger who manages the 18,000-member B2B Technology Marketing Community LinkedIn Group. “The industry transition from old media to social media has been terribly inefficient and there has been a void in structure driving IT marketing standards. IT Marketing World fills that void by harnessing the industry’s brightest marketing minds in an interactive community, essentially picking up where LinkedIn Group discussions leave off.”
Specifically, IT Marketing World members provide content, comments, survey insights and resource referrals based on their respective job functions, technology focus and sales channels. From this data stream, advisory committee leaders develop best practice models for review and implementation by members, providing continuously improved and actionable industry standards. Other services on the site include a job board and a referral-based directory of marketing services. The community is currently seeking IT marketing subject matter experts to serve as advisory committee members to manage category topics, content and best practice models.
The community offers marketing vendors a palatable way to reach members through the directory and online advertising. IT Marketing World research shows 92.3% of IT marketing buyers solicit referrals from their peers when shopping for third-party service providers, and 65% of vendors’ new business comes from client referrals. Therefore, IT Marketing World’s promotional vehicles are based on member (client) referrals to ensure integrity. Additionally, vendors do not have access to the site’s interactive features, thus minimizing sales-oriented spam.
Community founders Jim Novy and Frank Berry, who have a combined 50+ years experience in technology marketing, developed the concept for IT Marketing World while collaborating on a model to measure IT marketing effectiveness. They determined the best way to identify, validate and benchmark IT marketing best practices was to create a central clearinghouse and vetting process for the tremendous volume of IT marketing data found in industry blogs, company web sites, online discussion groups and other valuable resources. IT Marketing World leverages social media techniques to begin the process of building IT best practice models for members to share and refine.
Jim Novy, president and chief editor of IT Marketing World, held senior marketing positions with several leading IT companies since 1987 including Quantum Corporation, NetApp and CA Technologies. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Illinois.
IT Marketing World is currently recruiting members, soliciting content and inviting category experts to serve as Advisory Committee members. Membership is free, though IT marketing professionals must register on the site in order to participate in interactive features. Members can register at www.itmarketingworld.com/account/register/.
Posted by Elissa Jane Mastel on Fri, Mar 18, 2011 @ 11:13 AM
by special guest contributor John Care, Author of Mastering Technical Sales
I’m constantly amazed at how little time most Sales Engineers put into a debrief after the sales call. It’s strange when you compare it to the amount of preparation that actually goes in before the call.
There are two really good reasons why a structured debrief is worth your time. Firstly, you can determine if you hit the mark during the call, figure out next steps and make any necessary strategy changes – that’s all standard sales 101. Secondly, it’s the only way you can improve your professional skills – by obtaining and then acting on feedback. I’m going to focus on the feedback mechanism because a “the demo went great” really doesn’t help you get any better.
If you’ve ever attended one of my Mastering Technical Sales workshops you’ve been exposed to the T3-B3-N3 model of getting constructive feedback. I routinely use this both to give and receive feedback. So here it is..
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T3 – Top 3
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What are the top three things I did in the sales call that I should repeat every time I’m in that kind of situation?
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B3 – Bottom 3
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What are the three things I did in the sales call that I should never do again?
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N3 – Next 3
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What are three things I didn’t even do in the sales call that I should consider including next time?
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It’s a non-threatening collection of positive reinforcement, constructive feedback and new ideas mixed in with a little “don’t do that”. Now you need to take notes, try to get specific examples (my example: “When you interrupt the customer before he finishes asking his question it shows a lack of respect and professionalism. Next time pause and count to two before you answer”) and if appropriate, put a plan in place to fix or to reinforce the behavior. Then follow-up with that person within a few weeks – that way they will give you some more feedback once they know you are listening to them.
Feedback is a gift, and together with learning more about your own solution, it’s the #1 way you have of improving. You may not always like what you hear, but it is still a gift.
So after the next sales call – if you want more than “you did good”, try the T3-B3-N3 approach and see what happens!
John Care (john@masteringtechnicalsales.com) is Managing Director of Mastering Technical Sales, a consulting company dedicated to improving the professional skills and capabilities of presales organizations worldwide. For more information on this and other Sales Engineering topics, or to sign up for the newsletter visit the website at www.masteringtechnicalsales.com.