DISQUS

David S. Rose · 1 year ago

Whoa! That's a heavy post! i think I understand the theory behind it, but would you (do you) go so far as that with your own sales guys??

Mark I LaRosa · 1 year ago

In order for this theory to work exactly this way, you need to have sales engineers in place - someone that can truly understand the inner workings of the software and can work that through with the customer. What we wound up doing at Air2Web was the salespeople worked the value with the decision maker - and the details of HOW it got done was done with the SE (Sales Engineer). If the SE identified something that was sold that really couldn't be done, we would circle back and try to solve it. But, if I did my job correctly, the customer understood WHY they were doing business with us, and bought into the ultimate value that A2W was delivering - and therefore some small workarounds were usually OK.

Currently, my sales guys don't have that luxury and have to both serve as sales person and sales engineer. Therefore, they have to log in and understand all the inner workings of how to do everything in the software.

That said, what I do try to teach them is that they need to really focus on selling value over function. Software can always change (and does), so what you need to make sure is that you don't put an imagined obstacle in front of yourself regarding HOW the software does something.

For example, in our software a customer may think that he needs a notification to work a certain way that it doesn't. Well, we all know that we can always change and add that feature. But if they buy into the fact that Angelsoft is going to change their world like it has for so many investment groups - then living with a small change in their process is worth it.

In an ideal world, I think I would have my sales guys use engineers and focus only on working with customers at the high level and sell value. One of the first things I did at Angelsoft was to replace the salespitch from a "walk thru the software" to a "feature overview / value of ecosystem" pitch. Given that we don't have sales engineers, I think that my team now does a great job of selling value and showing function next.