The SEven SE Sins. #7: Believing What You Hear
“If X said it, it must be true”. X could be a Customer, Sales Rep, your manager, etc. An SE should never assume what they hear is the whole story. Always assume there is more to a story than meets the eye. Dig below the surface.
Suppose a customer says, “Here is the problem I am trying to solve…”. Do you tend to jump in and quickly begin suggesting solutions for that problem? Who is to say the customer is giving you the complete story, or that there is more to their problems below the surface?
What if instead of launching into solutions, the SE asked questions like, “What is the impact on your business from these problems?” “What is causing these problems to occur?” “Why do you need to address these problems now?”. As a rule of thumb, ask at least 3 “Why” questions about the business problem before thinking about solutions.
Asking these kinds of questions that dig beneath the skin often dredge up more business problems, more pain, more underlying issues — and these often lead to more solution and bigger deals.
Suppose a sales rep says, “Here is what the customer told me…”. Don’t take what the rep says at face value. Leverage your technical credibility to dig deeper. What is motivating the customer? What is driving their business problems? Ask why.
Which brings us to an intriguing thought. If you have been following this series of blogs, have you been assuming there are only SEven SE sins? Are more to follow? and why?
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As an SE (or Pre-Sales Engineer as we cal them in the UK) I find that Sales reps rule the roost in terms of knowledge and information surrounding the prospect. They often give the SE just enough information about the situation, whether it be one or two nuggets regarding their pain points or business drivers for looking at our solutions or in most cases, just the company name, vertical market, number of users and existing solution. I hear the phrase “Can you do an X demo tomorrow?” more times than I are to share!
A major challenge for the SE is to get the sales rep to think of Pre-Sales as valuable consultants rather than people who can answer technical questions. It is something I am working on and hope to achieve in order to create and add more value to the business.
Anyone can answer a technical question but not anyone can work on creating a technical solution. Sales and Pre Sales need to be seen as equally important in the sales cycle. I don’t see that happening any time soon but I would wager that if they were then revenue would increase exponentially as a result.
Comment by Sniganoo — February 3, 2008 @ 2:40 pm