Bottom-Line Boosting Sales Skills Workshop

How you interact with your customer, the questions you ask, the tactics you employ, and how you sell your solutions are as important as knowing the capabilities of your products. Sales Engineers (also called many other titles including Applications Engineers, Systems Engineers, etc.) are often adept at the technical details of your products due to years of engineering focused training yet most get little training to improve their sales skills to motivate your prospects to buy quickly or at all.

This lack of skills training results in a sales approach where the Sales Engineers (SEs) fall into their comfort zone of telling your customers about your products, reacting to their demands, and hoping for a sale. Inevitably that approach will lead to a lengthy and costly sales cycle where your resources are tied up supporting a customer evaluation.

Seasoned sales people know there is a much better way.

This complete workshop is a comprehensive program that will improve the productivity and effectiveness of your Sales Engineers and will produce results that directly improve your company's bottom-line. Sales Engineers will learn easy to remember and apply techniques that will make them more adept at all the tasks they perform on a daily basis: discovery, qualification, demos, presentations, benchmarks, and evaluation support.

SEs will learn how to expedite sales and win more by getting away from the less effective "selling=telling" reactive approach and focusing more on the customer's needs and their buying and decision making process.

High level topics include:

• Why and how to uncover and develop customer needs
• Persuasive demo skills
• Winning with (and without) benchmarks and evaluations

• Repeatable techniques to organize your thought process throughout the sales cycle to help ensure each customer interaction advances you towards a business relationship
• The importance of focusing on your customer's needs before talking about your products to get buy in and commitment on a new and better way of selling
• Questioning methods to fully identify the customer's needs, uncover previously unknown needs, and develop those needs into a motivation to take action
• To articulate how your solution solves the customer s challenges in ways that help your customer understand the compelling value of buying your solution now
• How to differentiate your solution and beat your competition
• How to win over your prospect with a targeted, skillful demo or presentation
• Proficient demo/ presentation techniques compelling presentation skills, effective handling of questions and objections, how to deal with a crash, and more
• How you might convince your customer to purchase your solution without the need for a costly and lengthy evaluation (or proof on concept) of your products
• When to engage in an evaluation and procedures to plan, manage, and execute evaluations to improve your rate of success and shorten time to win new business
• How to navigate your customer's organization - understand your customer roles, identify and involve decision makers, and cultivate relationships to develop customer allies
• Five sales strategies and how and when to apply each of them to defeat your competition
• Customer engagement and prioritization skills to win more business in less time

The ability to deliver a targeted software demonstration that hits the heart of your customer s challenges, establishes the value of your solution, and shows why your solution is better than the competition s embodies one of the most important skills Sales Engineers can develop. It is usually the first look your customer has at your solution and first impressions are vital. An exceptional demo can significantly reduce the length of your costly sales cycle. It can mean the difference between quickly generating profitable business for your company and handing the business to your competition.

What is the impact of losing one business opportunity due to a suboptimal demo? It is usually hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of lost business opportunity. And you often don t get a second chance.

The instructor ensures learning through engaging the participation of all students with very interactive presentations and exercises.

The last day of the course is dedicated to giving the SEs the opportunity to exercise and internalize the skills they learned in the class by presenting a demo or presentation to their peers who pose as their customer. This course has a pre-work assignment where each attendee is required to prepare a short demo or presentation. They will present that demo during the workshop and receive honest, constructive feedback on how they might improve. Teaching is one of the best forms of learning and students will also fortify their skills by providing feedback to others. Learning is further reinforced by providing each student a videotape of their demo and feedback for their personal review.

The workshop caters to all sales engineers including marketing representatives who are involved in the sales process. Technical content is not a focus so engineers involved in any technical discipline will learn valuable skills. Since everyone has room to improve on and polish their sales and presentation skills, the course has been very highly regarded by both new SEs and experienced SEs.

The standard class is 2. 5 days or we can create a custom program tailored to your needs. The recommended class size is 8 to 16 people. Small class sizes provide a more personal and valuable learning experience by increasing the participation and interactivity of the class.

The class is usually taught on-site at your facility. This provides several advantages:

• The course can be customized as needed to meet your specific requirements
• Facilitated discussions are more valuable as they can contain proprietary information such as high level details about how to differentiate your products and company, or job responsibilities in your organization and how to get things done
• Save travel expenses since local students don't have to travel
• Students use your facilities during the demo/ presentation exercise giving them a more realistic and valuable learning experience