It’s happened to us all. The solution we so proudly represent rolled over and died, and left the customer’s mission critical system in ruins. Rome is on fire, tech support dropped the ball, and you have been called in to face the music. How do we recover and save face?

There is a nice structured approach to regaining lost credibility called the 6 A’s.

A 1) Accept Responsibility. The first three steps are very important in conveying empathy to the customer. Empathy is a critical component in establishing credibility, in this case re-establishing credibility. A customer needs to know that you, personally, are leading the charge to resolve their crisis.

A 2) Admit the Problem. Admission goes a long way in conveying empathy. It breaks down any perception of defensive posturing. If we don’t admit the problem, we are at risk of getting caught in a lie. If we do admit the problem and then later find we weren’t at fault, then we are the better for having taken the high road to begin with.

A 3) Apologize For It. A “we’re sorry” also goes a long way in conveying empathy. Right on the heals of falling on our sword we then say, “and we want to make it right.”, which is Step 4.

A 4) Act Quickly. Immediately and mutually create a get well plan. You and the customer must walk through this crisis together – get their “skin in the game”. Define specific goals, dates, and milestones. You will need the customer’s time, resources, and general assistance to resolve the crisis. Set proper expectations, and don’t over promise. Hedge your bets and develop a Plan B and Plan C.

A 5) Amend. Fix it. Execute the plan hand in hand with the customer. Become personally involved in providing the resolution. Become the “project manager” for the resolution. Provide frequent status reports to the customer’s appointed owners.

A 6) Attend. Stay on top of it. Get feedback. Show you care. Follow through to ensure long term satisfaction and success. Mutually define a plan with the customer to prevent such a crisis from occurring again, and define procedures to follow should another crisis occur. Setting these expectations goes a long way toward approaching the next crisis in a more rational manner.

Very often, once the crisis has passed, that customer will become a great reference for you. How great is it when a customer says, “You know, we had our issues, but they were there for us and got us through a rough patch.”

Now and then, it never hurts to ask ourselves if we are doing the basics, and doing them well. Here are a few reminders of basic SE behaviors.

Be Early. Plan to arrive 10-15 minutes early for customer calls. Give yourself time to walk to the meeting room, get a drink, arrange the room to your liking, etc. And finish early. Don’t eat up all your time with the formal meeting. Finish 10-15 minutes early so there is time for an “after meeting”. The best selling happens during the informal discussions afterwards.

Be Prepared. Know who you are presenting to. Adapt your presentation to the participants, their personality and level of tolerance for risk. Know their business. Adapt your presentation to their business challenges suitable for their job title. Presentations and demos are not “one size fits all”.

Be Pro-active. Don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. Take the initiative to make deals move forward. Contact the customer to get a status. Chase your sales rep. Do what it takes to make technical decisions happen.

Be Salesy. As much as some of us hate it, our job is to sell something. We like to say, “Sell while you teach”. Leverage your technical credibility to explain the quantified value of your solution. Explain how it maximizes the customer’s value and minimizes their risk better than the other alternatives they are considering.

Be Strategic. Get pre-sales strategic skills training. Sharpen your pre-sales skills at least once a year. Use strategic skills to manage your time, get technical decisions faster, grow deals, and improve customer satisfaction. Pre-sales strategic training programs are hard to find, but they are out there.

Be Happy. Are you happy being an SE? Is your time at the whim of your customers and/or sales reps? How is your quality of life? Are you a road warrior, or putting in 80 hour weeks? If your professional life is spiraling out of control, do something about it. It is important to set boundaries (based on strategic training). Don’t be afraid to set priorities for your time. Don’t be afraid to say “No” based on those priorities. People will take advantage of your time and push you until you do say “No”.

To turn my attention to more tactical skills, here are 5 tips for giving killer demos.

1) Avoid Feature Blab. Feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature get a drink of water feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature. Pace your demo. The customer’s problem, the quantified impact of that problem on the customer’s operations or job, your feature that addresses the problem and its function, the quantified value or business impact your feature provides. Problem, impact, feature, function, value, problem, impact, feature, function, value, etc. Every 5 minutes or so, there is a new “Wow!” statement.

Remember, you are there to persuade them to choose your solution, not play with toys.

2) Use Flow Breakers. Don’t use the PC as a crutch. Get up and use the white board. Get up and move around, be animated. Change media now and then — Bring up a powerpoint, charts, graphs, customer video. Mix it up. Flow breakers help command attention.

3) Q&A. Leave 1/3 of your allotted time for questions. If they give you an hour, plan on 30-40 minutes for the demo, and 20-30 minutes for questions when you are done. The Q&A is when the real selling begins.

4) Get the Customer to Do Your Selling For You. When the time is right, ask your coach or sponsor, “Could you go to the white board and show us how this would apply to your environment?”. What they say will be 10 times more powerful than anything you could say. This works well in a web based demo too — Make them the presenter and have them use a drawing tool. AVOID CANNED DEMOS — When you can, use the customer’s data, and have a laser focus on features that will best benefit THAT customer.

5) Visually Imprint 3 Major Points. Using a white board or a pre-prepared single sheet of paper (that can be passed around the customer organization), write down the 3 major bullet points you want to leave them with. One of these points should be the customer’s quantified business problem and the quantified value your solution will provide them. Writing it down makes a visual imprint on the customer’s brain so it is easier to later recall and remember.

“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?

This is the sixth in a series. As an SE, if you read any of the blogs in this series and wince, ask yourself if maybe there is room for improvement. Are you wasting your time, or worse, are you wasting time and you don’t realize it! Do your teammates do the same thing? If so, perhaps your team should consider acquiring professional guidance to improve your skills.

SE Sin #6: Can’t Say No. Some SEs have a real hard time saying “No”. “No” to their sales rep. “No” to their customer. “No” to their channel partner. “No” to their manager (just kidding). They try to please everybody, and in the process, their calendar fills with tons of pointless activities. But the SE’s job isn’t to submit to everybody’s whim, their job is to sell something. Saying “No” is an important skill for an SE in prioritizing and managing control over their valuable time.

Of course, they should say “No” in a diplomatic manner. “No, and here’s why”. Invariably conflicts will arise. Attempts will be made to overrule the SE’s attempt to prioritize their time. Management should have a well-defined escalation procedure in place to address such conflicts. Both sales and SE management should trust the SE’s judgment in managing their time.

At the end of the day, the SE has to learn to just say “No”.

SE Sin #5: The Mystery SDM. Sometimes in a large meeting sales call, a stranger joins midway through. Sometimes, the SE (or sales rep) keeps right on going instead of stopping and asking, “Who is that masked man?”. Sometimes, the mystery person is our Solution Decision Maker (SDM).

One of the worst things that can happen to an SE at the critical moment of solution closure is to ask our the assumed SDM, “Do you have all the information you need to choose our solution?”, and the SDM says (in effect), “Oh, Fred needs to make that decision.” Oh No! If Fred really is the SDM and has a killer issue we didn’t know about, months of effort may have been wasted.

Be absolutely certain you know who the Solution Decision Maker is. Make no assumptions. Ask yourself two key questions: “Who does the alleged SDM take their recommendation to?” and “Can that person say ‘No’ for technical reasons?”. If the answer is “Yes” or “I don’t know”, you don’t know who the SDM is. Time to go find out, do the due diligence, and make absolutely certain.

Avoid unpleasant surprises. Know who you don’t know.

SE Sin #4: Failed Demos. During a product demo, managers hate it when an SE says “oops”. Demos should be rehearsed and bulletproof. Avoid ad hoc demos to the extent that you avoid features you’ve never tried at least once in a row. Only show the feature if you are 100% certain it will not fail.

When a customer asks, “Can it do X Y Z?”, the SE should first respond, “Why will you need that feature?” or “How will you be using that?”. Is the customer just asking out of curiousity or do they have a real need? Knowing the answer helps you determine how much time you give to the answer and to what extent you dive into the functionality, if at all.

Use demos as a closing tool, not an interest builder. Do not offer a demo until you completely understand the customer’s business problem and requirements. You can position it that you need to understand their requirements so you can provide a demo specific to their needs. Use the demo as a way to explain the quantified benefit for the customer. The pace of the demo is feature-function-quantified_value, feature-function-quantified_value. The demo is a sales tool, not a feature-blab (see sin #1).

Don’t be a demo daemon. Your job is to “sell while you teach”, so use demos as a tool of persuasion.

SE Sin #3: Automatic Proof-of-Concepts. Customer: “We’d like to bring this in for a test drive.” Sales rep: “No problem, when do you need it?”. And the poor SE is thinking, “Oh great, there goes another two months of my life”.

Knee-jerk POCs are a huge waste of time considering how many of them do not lead to revenue. To help ensure a high success rate, sales teams should routinely qualify POCs and consider alternatives to POCs.

If a POC is unavoidable, work out a test plan with the customer and get them to commit people and resources to its success. Get some skin in the game — if they don’t commit people and resources, they’re not serious.

Use POCs as a closing tool. Ask the customer to commit that if the POC is successful, they will choose your solution. If they are unwilling to make such a commitment, red flags should go up.

Avoid automatic POCs — They can be a huge waste of time.

SE Sin #2: Blind Sales Calls. Every SE has been in a sales call where they ask themselves, “What am I doing here?”. That should never ever happen. Instead, before they commit their time, the SE should ask the sales rep or channel partner a series of basic sales-worthiness questions.

For example, “What’s the business problem the customer is trying to solve?” “Why do they have to do something now?” “When do they need to make a decision?” “Who is driving the project?” “How much budget do they have to solve the whole problem?” “Who owns the budget?”. If you rep or partner can’t answer some basic questions about the deal, then you should second guess spending your time on it.

The questions assure the SE that the opportunity will be a good use of their time. There is nothing wrong in asking yourself, “Is this a good use of my time?”. Don’t get caught asking yourself, “What am I doing here?”.

SE Sin #1: Feature Blabbing. Aka: Spill your candy in the lobby, spray and pray, show up and throw up, demo daemon… Some SEs try to prove how smart they are instead of “selling while they teach”.

Think about telling a doctor, “Doc, my chest hurts”, and the first thing the doctor says is, “Let me show you my rib spreader! It’s tungsten reinforced with fast electric powered trigger action like a jaws of life so we can perform several retractions and rib spreadings in just seconds…”. Yikes! As a patient, you’d run for the hills.

A good SE is like a good doctor: “Where does it hurt?” “How much does it hurt?” “How did this happen?” “Why do you need to fix this?” “How does it affect your job?” This approach is consultative and strives to understand the cause of the pain so a complete and proper solution can be identified.

In summary, SEs often commit serious sales sins, sometimes because they don’t know any better. Many SEs are guilty of feature blabbing at some point in their career. Acquiring regular soft skills training can promote good habits and avoid ugly surprises.