Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

There are no be-backs: make it happen on the first call

I got a call this past week from a prospect that wants us to deliver an inside sales training course, and one of his main challenges is that his reps aren’t always asking a closing questions when they have the opportunity, and he’s convinced that sales are being lost because of it. And they probably are, because if his reps aren’t asking closing questions, his competitors’ reps probably will. 

I’ve always believed that you have to fully qualify on the first call, and close on the next step, too.  I learned this technique from Bob Tumbleson, so was my boss during the first sales job I ever had. This was an outside sales position, something of a misnomer, because we were at a sales office, and our prospects came in to see us. They visited us because we had a service that interested them. Bob always said that we had to close them on an order when they came in, because they’d never be back. “There are no be-backs,” Bob used to say. My first week on the job, I let a prospect leave who promised to return, and Bob told me that he would use that instance to prove his point. 

And sure enough, the prospect never returned. So I made it a point after that to close every prospect. Sometimes they’d want to go out to the car “to get the checkbook.” I told them that was great, because “I need to get some fresh air, too,” and walked out with them, just in case they decided to drive away without signing up, like they told us they would. This tended to  really flesh out price objections, and we did have some leeway, so I had an 80% close rate. I had no “drive-offs.” Our service was great, too, and just about every prospect became an enthusiastic customer. 

One of my most popular posts is on the subject of the one-call close, and it’s worth reading if you haven’t done so, because it describes how to do this effectively in an 8 minute telephone call. What I learned from Bob Tumbleson years ago, I still believe today. There are no be-backs. You've only got one shot at a conversation, because the prospect may never ever take your call again. This is an extremely important concept for enterprise sales, and it goes without saying that this is critical for transcational sales as well. If you adopt this philosophy and act on it, you’ll close more business faster, and your sales pipeline will be more meaningful, too.  Now that you’re starting a new month/quarter, it’s worth kicking it off by seriously considering this strategy. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook.

What other solutions are you considering? A can’t miss question that will save you time and trouble on RFPs and RFQs

One of my most popular blog posts is the one dealing with getting "shopped" by purchasing folks that ask you to bid on a project that you've already lost. Now that the economy is nicely rebounding, my inside sales training customers are telling me that unsolicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and RFQs (requests for quotes) are starting to come in over the transom, from telephone and email from prospects to whom they've never spoken. 

Answering these blindly without talking to someone first is always a mistake, because in all probability, some competitor of yours has already gotten there, the decision has been made against you, and the person that contacted you did so to do some price comparison for the purpose of grinding your competitor's price down a bit.

So you've really got to have a telephone conversation with the individual requesting the RFP or RFQ. And when you do, you'll always want to ask this great question:

"What other solutions are you considering?"

The answer to this question should tell you where you are in the sales process. It will tell you who got there first, and your follow-on questions will tell you if you have a ghost of a chance to get the business. If a known competitor is involved, I always ask what the prospect likes about the competitor, and if he or she could "wave the magic wand," how could the competitor be better?  I'm looking for holes in my competitor's offering that will open the business for me. If I hear a lot of good about the competitor and no negatives, I'll ask the following tricky question:

"It sounds like you like [competitor] really well. Is there anything preventing you from just going with them?"

And one of two things will happen. The prospect will come clean and tell you he or she is doing "due diligence," another term for "you lose." Or, as has happened a few times in my own sales world, the contact will tell me that there are some perceived issues with the competitor that weren't flushed out earlier. Now we've got something going!

Of course there are other factors of importance, too. What is the title of the individual that is asking for the RFQ? If he or she is in Purchasing or HR, it's far enough away from your technology focus area that you're probably being shopped. In this case, I'd recommend calling high into your product solution area, and talk to an exec that can tell you if an initiative is on the table. If so, you may be able to break into the sales process and get some real traction.

Unless you're dealing in commodities, unsolicited RFPs and RFQs are always a red flag. And even in commodities sales, you do want to have a conversation before you take the time to craft a proposal and put it in your sales pipeline. It's always worth doing a check up to ensure that your company is the front-runner. Add those all-important front-end conversations to your Best Practices playbook.

How to shine when giving an in-house product presentation

Particularly if you're selling a technically sophisticated solution, you may, as an inside salesperson, be called on to make a product/solution presentation to your own in-house sales or engineering team, as proof that you know your product. Such a presentation can be fraught with pitfalls, as more than occasionally you'll be expected to provide a product feature dump, particularly if your engineers are the intended audience. While we touch on presentation skills as part of our telesales training courses, it's worth reading this blog post if this presentation task is coming up for you.

The worst mistake you can make is trying to make sense out of a 400 page technical manual, then trying to craft the data into a presentation. This happened to me one time, and I made a really great presentation because I distilled three concepts before I started to craft my presentation to the brain trust. These three concepts are:

1) What customer problem does my solution solve?
2) What do I need to know about my solution in order to sell it?
3) What do I not need to know in order to sell it?

Presenting these three concepts will not only provide a "wow" factor for your in-house folks, but it provides a distillation that you can use effectively on the phone with prospects. It will also help you to avoid "feature dumping," or reading a list of features, a practice that bores colleagues and prospects alike.

Example: a software debugger

In an example from my own sales world, I sold a product called an Atron AT Probe, which was a hardware-based software debugger, a really techie product. Here's how I used the model.

1) The problem it solved was engineers spending long hours debugging software problems by manually debugging. Our solution saved dozens, occasionally hundreds of hours of engineering time. With the debugging time reduced, engineers could be put on new projects, reducing design and development schedules all over the company. The ROI could be put in engineering hours multiplied by the hourly engineering rate, or in getting the prospect's product to market faster.

2) What I needed to know: I needed to know that my debugger worked each time, every time. And I needed a pre-sales tech support person if there were technical specs I couldn't fathom. I needed to know what product my prospect was building, so I could talk about increased time-to-market, and how my solution could accelerate that, so my prospects could make money faster. I also wanted to know my prospect's anticipated release date of the finished product. This way I could use a "fear of loss" closing approach. I needed to know the decision process, because I might have to call others on the team (often, my engineer contacts would encourage me to "call high" to a director or VP to make a case). And I needed to know the meaning of commonly used technical acronyms and jargon.

3) I didn't need to know exactly how the solution worked, or go deep into the technology. Concepts like "sticky breakpoints" were commonly brought up. I knew we did that, but didn't know exactly how we did it. That's what pre-sales tech support was all about. We had a great pre-sales engineer that loved to talk tech. My technical expertise was limited to about ½ page of tech specs. The term I used to describe my approach was to be "intelligently ignorant."

Bottom line, my job was to make lots of good calls and move product. By having a clear understanding of how much I didn't need to know, I could flood my market with calls and make my company profitable.

So circling back to you, try using this technique next time you're asked to make an in-house presentation. You can even use something that, in the education biz, is called an "advance organizer," developed by an educator named David Ausubel. You begin your presentation by saying: "I'm going to tell you the major problem this product solves. Then I'm going to tell you what I need to know to sell it. Then I'm going to tell you what I don't need to know to sell it." Add this presentation skill to your Best Practices playbook, and I'll bet your presentations will be a lot more fun, effective and to the point.

How do I get my PO in faster?

In addition to writing my weekly blog posts on telesales training topics, I monitor a few other blogs in which sales questions arise. A few weeks ago, the following question popped up about getting POs in faster. We're closing in on year-end now, so I think it's topical to repeat the question in today's post, as well as my answer. Have a look:

Question: What methods do you use to put a time limit on a quote without exposing yourself to pressure? Let's say it is two weeks before the end of the quarter. You want to get a sale before the end of the quarter. What methods do you find effective to get the PO in the time you need it? I find that discounting does not contribute to that and that I am not able to back up from the discount even after the time limit. In other words, the discount is gone forever, even if the Purchase Order was not submitted on time. Please assume the customer is ready to decide, that is all other conditions for the purchase are already met.

(Geoff's answer) "You did the right thing by not further lowering the price. But you have to determine how the prospect perceives that your solution will either help him or her make money, or stop losing money. 99% of the time, companies buy for these reasons. This is always best done early in the sales process, but you can still do it now. Call the prospect and ask, and then try to quantify it. For example, let's say the prospect tells you that she will be using your solution to get her product to market faster. You can then ask how much faster she perceives your product will get it to market. Once you find that out, ask how much revenue is projected for that product in the next 12 months. Once you get that figure, divide by 52 (weeks), and you will know how much his or her company is losing based on lost opportunity costs, per week. Then you can tell her that for each week the decision is delayed, his or her company will be losing that much money. Those are real numbers, based on what she just told you, and you've given her a compelling reason to get the PO to you now. In addition, you'll have given her a good, financially sound argument she may have to take to her CFO. I've probably got a dozen examples of how to build an ROI model like this, but this one's one of the most common (for more on "Selling by ROI," read my whitepaper).

"This technique works equally well if your target company is building an external project (for use by their customers) or an internal project (for use by themselves). Ultimately, people buy solutions because they make financial sense, and sometimes the finances are based on projections. But you do have to ask what their thoughts are as to how the implementation of your solution will pass muster on both the technology and the financial sides of the fence. It sounds like you've won the technology battle. Now you've got to tackle the financial element."

(Back in the present again) The technique of drilling down on the financial reasons people perceive a need for your solution is critical to accelerating the sales process, and it's most effective when you're early in the sales cycle (I encourage you to do it on the very first call) because the prospect is not yet in price negotiation mode, and much of the time will be fairly comfortable giving you some hard numbers. Add this technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and you'll be getting those POs in a lot faster, and with less resistance.

One-call close on the first call: if you don’t, the prospect may not return your second call

Later this week, I'm giving a presentation in front of some very savvy high tech inside sales executives and managers. They've heard just about everything about telesales courses you can imagine, and I've been asked to tell them --- among other things --- why my sales training is different. Those of you who subscribe to my blog know I stay away from actively promoting my training classes on it. Instead, I provide inside sales tips that you can use right now, today, to make more money. But in that presentation this week, I'm going to give them the differentiator that I'm blogging about today, because it's important, and most inside sales reps aren't doing it. And the bigger the deal, the larger the enterprise prospect is, its importance becomes greater. It's the one-call, 8 minute close. And it's got to be done on the first call.

It's my firm belief that on the first call to a prospect, you've got to get everything done in 8 minutes or fewer. That means opening the call well, asking your qualification questions, finding out about the prospect's business, determining how ROI fits into the equation, then closing on the next step. Most of the time, about 8 minutes is all the prospect will give you. Your delivery is a lot like show biz. It has to be interesting, concise, entertaining, and leave the prospect wanting more. And if you've done your job well, but forgotten to get the ROI data you need, the prospect is likely never to return your subsequent calls, even though he or she is interested. Why? Because the prospect has gotten a lot of data from you, and feel he or she now "owns" the sales process.

If you are fortunate enough to have a second conversation, the prospect will almost never tell you how much it's costing his or her company not to have a solution, although he or she would have on that first call. That's because he or she may be seriously thinking about buying your solution, and is already thinking about price negotiation. Giving you ROI data in this phase of the sales process puts your prospect at a competitive disadvantage, doesn't it? He or she knows it, too.

There's lots out there in the sales training world focusing on "charting," personality types, New-Age mysticism, psedo-psychology, pseudo-science, and communication styles. I think it's all junk, and lots of it's there to sell books, CDs, DVDs,  magazines, and audio courses. It's not that complicated. You don't have to be a mind-reader to be a great sales person, but you do have to have a sense of urgency. You need to ask great questions, get elaboration on the answers, and find the ROI hole on that first call. And you'll need a call for action within a specific timeframe, too. It's a one-call close, and I recommend doing it in 8 minutes. Plenty of times, the prospect will give you more time or a few more phone calls. But don't bet on it. If you add this one-call technique to your Best Practices playbook, you'll improve call metrics, increase sales, and be better at price negotiation.

 

6 “follow-up failure” mistakes that can cost you sales

My colleague Art Sobczak asked me to participate in an audio seminar on the subject of "following up after initial sales contacts, and then continuing to follow up while in an active sales cycle, or to stay in contact if an immediate opportunity is not present." In other words, you've already had the initial conversation. Now what do you do to ensure you stay in touch in timely fashion?  I cover this material in my telesales training courses, but preparing it for the audio seminar caused me to narrow it down to the 6 most common "staying in touch" errors I've witnessed. And here they are... any of them sound familiar?

1) Failure to wrap up the initial conversation with action items for the next call, and gaining agreement from the prospect as to what they are, and when you'll call back. At the end of the initial conversation, you'll know whether your contact is a valid prospect or not, according to your qualification criteria. If you've got some action items, discuss them with the prospect, and gain agreement as to when and for what reason you'll call again.

2) Failure to call back in a timely fashion. A "timely fashion" depends on the urgency of the sales situation, but if you have a "live" opportunity, you should be calling at least once a week to discuss progress and action items.

3) Failure to have an exciting, compelling reason for your next call. Your call should make the prospect happy that you called. Have a valid new response to one of his or her concerns, a new solution offering that will improve your prospect's life, or discuss some good news about your prospect's company that might positively impact your sales situation. If you're involved in price negotiation and have a new angle on pricing, make it exciting!

4) Failure to log conversation results and scheduled callbacks in your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). None of us can remember much about a conversation after it goes away, so important points have to be logged so that you can remember. If your pres-sales tech support people or sales engineers have access to your CRM, they'll need that info too, when they call to assist you in helping to qualify or sell to the prospect. And be sure to use your automated call scheduler to remind you when to make your next call.

5) Failure to use creative contact techniques when your prospect hasn't returned your call. Maybe your prospect is difficult to reach. Maybe he or she just doesn't want to talk to you right now, when your caller ID comes up on his or her phone. You really do have to get through, though, to find out what's going on. Three creative techniques you can use here are:

a) Use *67 to hide your caller ID before you place   the call.           
b) Listen to his or her voicemail all the way through to see if he or she lists an alternative contact. If so, call that person, and ask him or her to find your prospect.
c) Upon getting your prospect's outgoing voicemail message, hit 0#, then ask the receptionist to put you through to someone in the department who can track down your prospect.

The three techniques I mentioned under item #5 are especially important when you have a proposal in front of the prospect. If you do, using the above techniques will rarely result in the prospect being upset with you, and will enable you to manage the sales process more effectively.

6) Not checking in at least once a quarter with good-prospect, no current opportunity people. We talk to these people every day. They are ideal for our solutions, but have valid reasons for not moving forward. You've done your ROI questioning, you're at a high level, but there's no traction. I ask these folks when they'd like me to call them back. If it's beyond 90 days, I'll call them at the 90 day period, as anything can change, and I want them thinking about me. These are the prospects I don't want slipping by, and they're always on my radar screen.

So those are the six "staying in touch" mistakes I most frequently encounter, but I could add a whole lot more to the list. To keep things positive, there are great things you can do too, that your competitors may not do. One of my prospects is a big baseball fan of a particular team. I found a fascinating article written on the other coast about his team, so I emailed it to him. I don't do this kind of stuff to sell them anything, I do it because I genuinely like my prospects, and try to brighten their days when they hear from me. There's a little bit of that element in #3 above.

So try to avoid the poor contact skils "deal killers" I've listed above, and add the solutions to your Best Practices Playbook. Now how about you? What follow-on call errors have you heard or experienced yourself?

Web surfing while at work: maybe it’s really not a problem

There's been an awful lot of buzz recently in the press and around corporate water coolers about how much productivity is being lost by workers surfing the web while at work. Inside sales people are always a good target for complaints like these, because they work on computers virtually from 8 to 5. Martha Irvine, who writes for the Associated Press, wrote an interesting article highlighting some of the corporate concerns that was picked up on Google (URL at the bottom of this post). But I have a different take on what's going on here, and it shouldn't present a problem for any telesales department that judges productivity based on sales numbers and key performance indicators (KPI).

When I was a sales rep, I used my break time to catch up on the newspaper, but never got corporate grumbles, because I always exceeded my sales numbers. I had cobbled together my own spread sheet, telling me how many calls I had to make each day to make my sales numbers, and frankly my main concern was beating my quota every month (if you're not sure how to develop your own KPIs, read my post on the subject and get crackin'!) As Irvine points out in her article, companies are installing blocking technology to screen out various social websites, so naturally reps are responding by doing it anyway on their mobile devices. I would make a strong guess that any company using this type of filtering technology with its telesales department isn't practicing "Management by Objectives" a concept popularized by Peter Drucker way back in the 1950s. If that's the case, these companies are guessing that by removing social media access, the numbers will improve. By filtering web access, companies run the risk of putting a serious dent in team communication as it relates to worker-management relations. And in doing so, they hurt themselves personnel-wise when the word gets out that the company's draconian web practices make it a not-so-fun place to work.

In my telesales training courses, I teach people to use social sites like LinkedIn as a way to increase sales, and those of you who do just that know how effective it is. That's one of several reasons I don't like the idea of web filtering at work. I want the reps I train to make lots of money, and the web helps them get there. Now we all know there are excesses. One company of which I'm aware had a web-shopping mania in its midst, but guess what? There were no KPIs enforced, and only a minority of the reps were meeting their quotas. That's just poor management.

So if you're an inside sales manager, enforce strong sales or lead qualification objectives, and don't worry too much about your overachievers looking at Facebook occasionally. You'll have a happier crew that will want to perform for you. And add valid KPIs to your Best Management playbook.

Read Martha Irvine's article.

Upselling: Don’t forget to ask for “The Next Best Thing”

As salespeople, sometimes we're so happy about getting an order that we forget to do an important bit of upselling, namely telling the prospect what he or she could get with a little more of an investment. When I go out shopping, I'm sometimes confused by the vast number of products and options available in virtually everything I buy. And frankly, many salespeople don't do a very good job helping me. A classic example is what happened recently when a friend bought a laptop computer, as I was along for the shopping trip. And yes, there's a sales tip here that is relevant for telesales people.

My friend was focused on getting a certain brand of computer, looked at all the models, read the specs, and decided which one he wanted. So he asked the sales rep to pull one out of stock and write up the order. "Just another question," I said, "what's the next step up?" The rep showed us a more pricey unit, but with a better screen. As it turns out, my friend often views multiple documents on the same screen, and that better screen was worth the money, so my friend bought it. But the salesperson never asked, so I had to!

In my inside sales courses, I preach a lot on the value of asking the prospects' needs, but even the best reps sometimes forget. So here's a sales tip want you to consider. The next time you're writing up an order,  just stop for a moment and tell the prospect the following:   

"From what we've discussed, I think this solution is going to fit your needs very well. Before we start on the paperwork, let me take a moment to tell you what just a little more of an investment will buy you." Then tell the prospect, and let him or her make the decision.

As a consumer, I can't tell you how many things I've bought that were upgrades from what I originally intended to buy, from cars, to electronics, to antiquities. In each case, I had to ask the salesperson about "the next best thing." About 50% of the time, I bought the higher-end item. Sometimes it was thousands of dollars more, but I was a lot happier with my purchase. You can get into this habit yourself while shopping for almost anything. Always ask about the next step up. Once you do, you'll probably finding yourself paying a bit more, but getting better stuff! An old sales adage says that "when you buy quality, you only cry once."  And you can transfer this habit to your own sales prospects. Make this one of your call objectives. Always tell them about what they'll get if they pay a little more, and add this sales technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and I'll bet you'll increase sales numbers, too.

Increase sales through improved Daily Call Metrics

There has been quite a bit of discussion on this site on the subject of Call Metrics, or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Just how many calls per day should a rep make, anyway? Much of the talk has been about whether telesales reps' KPIs are fair, and how the numbers are derived in the first place. In my opinion, the only valid call metrics are the ones are quantitively tied to quota.

Here's a model that you can use to determine if yours are meaningful. If you're an inside sales rep, see if these synch with the ones you're using now. If you're not using metrics right now, create your own chart, and you can see how many calls you'll need to make each week to make quota. If you're a manager, building a model using the formula below can be a great way to help your inside sales reps meet quota. If your ultimate objective is qualified leads or appointments, just substitute those outcomes for "sales."  

You'll want to devise both a Weekly Sales Quota sheet, and a Daily Call Quota sheet. I've added straw figures as examples, and they'll be different than yours. In my telesales training courses, we always cover how measuring success is an important way to increase sales numbers. Use this model to chart your sales success.

How to derive a Weekly Sales Quota sheet for Telesales Reps:

1) What's the rep's total monthly sales quota? (Let's say $100K)
2) What's your company's Average Sale Price? (Let's say $5K)
3) Divide sales quota by ASP to get Total Number Monthly Sales needed to make the rep's sales quota: (Result is 20 sales)
4) Divide Total Number Monthly Sales by 4 to get Total Weekly number of Sales to meet quota (Result is 5 sales per week)

How to derive a Daily Call Quota sheet for Telesales Reps:

To begin determining your own company's Daily Call Quota sheets, you'll need to know:

1) Your rep's monthly sales quota (see above)
2) Your ASP (see above)
3) What your company's suspects-to-prospects ratio is
4) What your company's prospects-to-proposals ratio is
5) What your company's proposals-to-close ratio is

Here's a model used by one company: Let's say that for every 100 suspects:

1) 20 become prospects
2) 5 of them typically reach the proposal stage
3) 3 of them close

Therefore, a rep would have to call 200 suspects per week (40 calls per day):

1) To get 40 prospects (8 per day)
2) To generate 10 proposals per week
3) To generate the 6 closes per week needed to slightly exceed quota

Ramp-up time: How long after a proposal is generated does it typically take for a sale to close?

If you use this model, there will be a ramp-up time equaling the time it takes a sale to move from proposal-to-close stage. If the time is typically one month, then your reps should be fully productive using this model by the second month of its implementation.

As an exercise, plug in your own figures, and you'll have a good idea of the call numbers you'll need to make to succeed.  Constantly exceeding quota is one of the 20 characteristics of a superior inside sales rep. Develop your own KPI figures, and add them to your Best Practices playbook.

So that's a formula I've found successful. What's yours?

 

5 Rules to help your sales engineer to help you to close the sale

As a telesales rep selling technical products and services, you're probably using presales tech support, a sales engineer, or a systems engineer, often popularly known as an SE. This provides high value to the prospect as a major part of the consultative sales process, but it also provides high value to you, the inside sales rep. Without the SE, sales wouldn't happen. In my experience, SEs love being part of the sale, they celebrate when sales are made based on their expertise, and frankly, aren't appreciated enough. I always bring this up in my telesales training courses, because it's so important. There are 5 important rules in working efficiently with your SEs, and if you follow them, you can increase sales pretty dramatically. Here they are:

Basic SE rule #1:  You don't have to (nor, in many cases, should you) be on the telephone with your SE during a tech call.  Because:    

1. Your time is better spent making sales calls to prospects and customers
2. Your SE is capable of handing the call in your absence, provided you've given him or her the data needed to represent you
3. SEs expect to be able to handle the call alone

Basic SE rule #2:  Provide a feedback loop to your SE, so he or she can assess team-prospect progress

1. After you've fully qualified the opportunity, try to get your SE engaged right away. SEs enjoy being part of the sales process.
2. SEs might be able to help you to propose a more effective solution. (And by the way, SEs are typically trained to suggest more effective solutions to you, not the prospect).
3. In pre and post-call debriefing, discuss ways your SE can help you in upselling (expanded feature sets) and cross-selling (complimentary products and services).
4. Post-demonstration: ask the SE to send all relevant issues to you, to use in your follow-up call to the prospect.
5. Ask your SE to copy you on all prospect-SE correspondence (you can then cut & paste it into your CRM, or drag & drop into a correspondence folder particular to each field rep
6. Tell the SE about any account-specific needs (e.g. a larger-than-usual opportunity, a "challenging" prospect, etc.)

Basic SE rule #3:  Respect (and work with) your SE's time constraints.  An example?  Short-time calls. SEs can field ad-hoc calls on an as-needed basis, but there are several things you can do to help them use the time efficiently (so they can help as many of your telesales colleagues as possible). Here they are:

1. Tell the prospect that you can get him or her five minutes or so with an SE right now, provided that one is available and off the phone. This will help set the expectation on the part of both parties that the call will not be a long one.
2. Recognize that "a quick sec" is never just that, from you to an SE, or a prospect to an SE.
3. As an alternative, you can set up a scheduled time for the prospect to talk with an SE, if longer is needed.
4. Best of all worlds: ask the prospect to forward an email to you, with the tech issues defined. The SE can then get back to the prospect efficiently, and effectively.
5. When using a calendar to schedule a prospect-SE discussion or demonstration, always tell the prospect that it's tentatively scheduled, based on confirmation that the time hasn't been booked simultaneously by the SE. Fill out the schedule in your calendar, then email the SE, requesting confirmation.
6. Use instant messaging for quick questions, when you're engaged in another task.
7. Ask your SE to let you know when the evaluation you've sent out has been "handed off" to someone else.
8. On scheduled demonstrations, make sure to invite all prospects well ahead of time, to ensure your SE's time allotment is well-used.

That leads to Basic SE rule #4:  Always provide the SE with the information he or she needs to make the call successful for you.  The information consists of:

1. The URL for the prospect's company (the SE can help you more if he or she knows what your prospect makes)
2. Your CRM data filled out properly, so the SE can see what you've been discussing with the prospect, and how far you've gone in the qualification process. Make sure you have the title of your contact, as well as his or her mobile number. Important qualification for the SE to know would include:

• the business reason that your solution makes sense for the prospect
• when the prospect needs to have a solution on board
• what the prospect needs to see or hear in order to say "yes"
• what your next step is with the prospect, after the tech call has taken place
• an explanation to your SE the logical reasoning behind any unusual/non- standard request regarding a prospect transaction.
• Information about any other competitors that may be involved

Basic SE rule #5:  Make sure your SEs know they are appreciated. Here are four ideas:

1. SEs need to hear about sales wins as much as you do. Let them know how much they've helped to make the sale go through, and thank them.
2. Don't burn their time on unqualified calls. Ensure that each call you refer to an SE has been qualified first.
3. If you have a number of SEs, ask your least-familiar SE to help you with a prospect, then take him or her out to lunch to discuss business, philosophy, and fun.
4. Make sure they always get credit on the OPF (order processing form).

So now you have some great thoughts on better ways to work closely with your sales engineers. They are an extremely critical piece in the technical sale, and far too often they're taken for granted. But believe me, every sales person cries when a great one leaves the company. And if you treat them right, they won't want to leave the company, and will continue facilitating your sales success. Why don't you do something nice today, and take your SE out to lunch. While you're at it, you can ask how you can make his or her job easier in trying to win you the sale. And add superior communication with your SEs to your Best Practices playbook.