Bottom-Line Focused Evaluations & Benchmarks

Evaluations and Benchmarks (proof of concepts) are the most resource intensive methods of selling your solutions, delay new business, and drive up your cost of sales. Sales Reps are usually compensated on revenue alone and often don't pay as much attention to the judicious use of the precious and costly Sales Engineer resources as they should. It is for these reasons that we teach your SEs how to team with the sales reps to explore cheaper and quicker alternatives for winning over your prospects. When evaluations or benchmarks are appropriate, your SEs will learn how to eliminate "evaluation creep" and minimize time to closure by developing and executing a winning plan.

This seminar is a subset of the complete Bottom-Line Boosting Sales Skills Workshop

• 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
• How to differentiate your solution and beat your competition
• Customer engagement and prioritization skills to win more business in less time

What is the impact of losing one ill advised or poorly executed software evaluation? In addition to the loss of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of business opportunity, your cost of sales increases, and your precious AE resources are tied up without reward.

You'll learn how to win more business without engaging in the costly and time consuming frontal strategy. When an evaluation makes sense, you'll learn how to improve your win rate and reduce time to closure.

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

The workshop caters to all sales engineers including marketing representatives who are involved in the sales process. Further benefit will be recognized by including your sales reps in this program to ensure effective teamwork and better results. Technical content is not a focus so engineers and sales reps involved in any technical discipline will learn valuable skills. Since everyone has room to improve on and polish their sales skills, the course benefits both new and experienced customer facing employees.

The standard class is one half day 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