2010 September « Dave Stelzl's Blog

Archive for September, 2010

Sep

Singapore – Day 13; Heading out

Categories: Marketing and Sales Strategy
Tags: bangalore, changi airport, linkedIn, upgrading linkedin, using ilnkedIn for selling

Changi airport is amazing with it’s gardens, shopping, and best of all security…you march right through customs without the hassle of scanners, undressing, laptops on belts, etc.

Preparing for India, I spent my last morning here catching up with class attendees and following up on LinkedIn connections. This is an important part of sales – one I’ve often overlooked out of sheer busyness. When you’ve completed a meeting or presentation, be diligent to enter new contacts into your CRM, but take the extra step of connecting through LinkedIn…if you completed a project, as I have this week, it’s also important to request recommendations through LinkedIn while your delivery is on the minds of the customers you’ve worked with. LinkedIn has tremendous power as over 40 million business people are on it, and every one of your connections is receiving your updates. Keep your name in front of those you work with, and be sure to keep tabs on where people go. As people move around in this industry, they’ll create more opportunities for you if you maintain a solid reputation. Don’t allow yourself to skip this step – your future depends on it.

This evening I am sitting in the Changi airport preparing to catch my flight to Bangalore. For some reason India flights all arrive late in the evening…the good news is, I have arranged a ride through the hotel to avoid the taxi mess I’ve read and heard about. One person recommended I bring my own water, but that just didn’t seem possible. Stay tuned for pictures of India over the weekend!

Sep

Singapore – Day 12; Wrapping up in Singapore

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Categories: Real Life
Tags: bangalore, channel partner, sales presentation skills, security sales training, security value proposition, Singapore, Value Proposition

Finishing up in Singapore today, I spent my day following up with class attendees, meeting with the class sponsors and stakeholders, and catching up on some work to prepare for my trip to Bangalore. In addition, I took some time to visit the shopping areas surrounding my hotel in the shopping district. Singapore has an amazing network of underground tunnels similar to a NYC subway system, but with a much cleaner and modern appeal. The picture to the left was taken 3 stories underground at a food court featuring all kinds of Asian food choices.

Feedback from class stakeholders included:

1. Presales people are used to putting their focus on a point product. They become great at demos and evals, but the larger deals are going to require their presence higher in the organization. The messaging focus from our class is rare but greatly needed.

2. Account reps will value presales resources more as they demonstrate their effectiveness as consultants – getting up in front of the class the present was a great step toward doing just that, but practice is needed. People become great presenters when they commit to practice and feedback.

3. Competition is the security space is fierce. The ability to gain access to decision makers it critical – this class was a great first step to getting there.

4. It’s difficult to take 3 days out of the field, but necessary. You can cut all day, but if your saw is dull, you won’t make much progress. It’s better to stop periodically and fine tune things.

Travel Plans:

This evening I’ll be heading to Bangalore for the final leg of my trip this month. Bangalore is fast becoming a high-tech growth area in our global economy! it’s a 4 hour flight with a 2 hour time change…and I’m looking forward to great customer service on Singapore Air! The hardest part of this job is leaving a city and group of people after having established new friends and familiarity with the surroundings.

Sep

Singapore – Day 11; Mastering Board Room Presentations

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Categories: Pizza and Value Proposition
Tags: great presentations, singapore pizza, what makes a presentation great, writing great marketing plans

I finally had Singapore pizza! This is not the actual pizza I ate, and if you know me, you know vegetables are an abomination to great pizza (in my list of acceptable foods). I had a picture but ran into some technical difficulties, so I simply did a Google search on frozen pizza to find something that looked like my pizza experience. As you can tell, it’s nothing to write home about. Stick to the local Asian food and you’ll be in good shape here – but I did have to have pizza once just to say I did.

We did complete our three day workshop, the last day being on presentation skills. One attendee asked a very important question following several in-class presentations which I’ll answer right here. “Can we communicate the message in a short ten minute presentation?” I then demonstrated such as speed in under 5…to which he asked, how long did it take for you to be able to communicate our message so effectively…in other words, how many times did you have to give the speech. I replied, “Hundreds”. That is the key – practice, record, listen, critique, improve, practice, record,…etc. Only a hand full of sales people will give great presentations without practice.

A few key points from the class:

1. Most of the presentations I see sales people give are boring. Why? They haven’t put time into writing great material.

2. Presentations can’t deliver the obvious. Most do…come up with something new and opinionated. Something that gives me fresh ideas.

3. Interrupt my thinking. If it’s predictable from slide to slide, you will lose me.

Sep

Singapore – Day 10; The Value Proposition Workshop

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Categories: Value Proposition

Pictured to the left is the Capital Tower in Singapore where I completed the Value Proposition workshop on Day 10. In the class we have people from all over the APAC region including local Singaporean, people from Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and others. As you can see, the city if very modern much like my home city, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Some of the key points on messaging covered today:

1. The message must lead with predictably urgent issues. Policy work is rarely urgent where as data theft in progress in highly motivating.

2. The presentation you use to introduce your company must be different! It must interrupt the thinking of those in attendance, providing some controversial issues to show your unique position.

3. By using testimonies, you build emotion and confidence in your listeners. You can’t argue with a testimony…

4. It must be concrete – people must be able to picture what you are talking about. Quoting statistics regarding amounts of data, speed, threat numbers, etc. all use giant numbers – millions, billions, and trillions. The brain cannot process these large numbers, so you must relate them to tangible things we can see and understand.

5. The message must be simple and short – to the point, yet interesting and unique.

6. All of this takes some work. You can’t make it up when you get to the meeting.

Sep

Singapore – Day 9; Making Money with Security

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Categories: Real Life and Sales Strategy
Tags: information security sales training, sales process, security assessment, selling security

We kicked off day 1 – the Making Money with Security workshop on Monday morning after a busy weekend of sight seeing. One challenge that always comes up – can a sales rep or overlay rep conduct some type of discovery or assessment, or is this too time consuming? It’s tempting to think that it would just be faster to take a traditional sales approach and sell the features…if someone hands you the money for product, go ahead and take it. If you’re over quota and deals just keep coming in, go for it! But with new prospects that are not standing there with PO in hand, justification will be required and a typical sales cycle may last for many months; 3 – 6 – 9…the assessment approach may last a few weeks if you find something urgent.

Following class, our good friends the Tan family treated me to a river boat tour, dinner at local “hawker center” (which is like an outdoor food court with all kinds of local food stands) in the downtown China town district. Here are some of the pictures… (CLICK)

Sep

Singapore – Day 7; Sight Seeing

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Categories: Real Life
Tags: Singapore, singapore sight seeing

We spent Saturday sight-seeing with the Lo family. Starting with a meal in their home, we had local foods, listened to the children perform musical pieces, and planned our afternoon. From there we visited the shipyards, the water center where they purify water, little India, and the Skywalk – a walkway that runs far above the trees offering great views of the city, ports, and surrounding parks. The day ended with a trip to the local food court where the Lo’s introduced me to all kinds of authentic local and Chinese foods (and we ate with chop sticks). Here are a few pictures (Click).

This picture to the left is a view of the Marriott entrance – one of the nicer Marriott locations I’ve visited.

Sep

Singapore – Day 6

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Categories: Real Life
Tags: homeschool, Laksa, Singapore, travel

It’s a 7 1/2 hour flight on the Airbus 380-800 pictured in yesterday’s post – traveling at 80% of the speed of sound (which is just shy of 800 mph). As expected, the service was excellent, great food, but not a lot of rest. Given it’s the weekend I have some downtime to look around and am looking forward to adding photos to my growing Picassa album tomorrow.

The Lo family, a connection my daughter made last year through a home school retreat in the states, hosted me for dinner, treating me to local favorites at a nearby church fellowship in the evening. It’s not often that I have opportunity to interact with families abroad, so I made the most of it, trying different cuisines from areas surrounding Singapore. Laksa is a favorite local dish here (pictured to the left). It’s made with chicken, thick noodles, coconut milk, an egg, local vegetables, and a bunch of seasonings. The small lime on the side of the dish then is squeezed over the noodles just before eating. I was expecting to be served with chop sticks, but they graciously handed me a fork. Meeting various families and touring the grounds made this evening exceptional. I was surprised to learn that their 82 year old pastor and his wife are from the Savannah Georgia area, not far from my home town. Tomorrow the Lo’s have planned a sight-seeing trip where I hope to capture numerous photos and sample mooncakes (an important part of the Mid-Autumn Festival here in Singapore)!

Sep

Sydney Austalia – Day 5; Mastering Board Room Presentations

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Categories: Value Proposition
Tags: learning to speak, presentation skills training, sales training, speaker training, speaking skills, sydney australia

The final training day – Mastering Board Room Presentations was completed yesterday. Today I’ll be heading to Singapore to work through similar material…I am looking forward to flying an airline with a great customer service reputation! Remember, “You have a choice”, unless you are flying out of Charlotte or any other hub with only one airline.

Some favorite Sydney tidbits:

- Tomato Sauce comes on fries – looks and tastes like ketchup to me.

- Pickles is something you spread on the sandwich, while gerkins (probably spelled this incorrectly) are the cucumber things soaked in vinegar.

- Everyone carries a diary of some type – this is the daily planner (paper of electronic)

- Meat pies are a local favorite for sale on the steets

- The cabs are clean!

- Even while a million miles from home, Obama seems to dominate the news paper and radio news.

- Whether from the north or south, we’re all Yanks over here (Americans that is)

- It’s fun to be a day ahead of the family, that way I can let them know ahead of time if they need to change course before it’s too late. It’s like have prophetic insight.

Feel free to contribute any other interesting sayings, phrases, word differences….

A few comments from the last class:

1. You can’t wing it when it comes to presentations. In every MBP class I teach, it is clear that new presentation material requires practice. This is why even highly successful speakers continue to practice new material – they never “Just wing it”.

2. It is tempting to pepper your presentations with sound bites – analytics, statistics, data, etc. While this is interesting information, it does not put the brain into a state ready to buy or even take action. You need stories, and your stories have to be great.

3. Great stories take work. I recommend working with someone who understands the mechanics of a good story line, write it in such a way as to build that emotion, and refine it – in other words, edit it. This is a great marketing group project. Then memorize it, refine it, practice it…make it perfect.

While in Sydney I had the opportunity to watch as a film crew was filming a new motion picture. I have no idea what movie they are making or who the actors are, but it was clearly high-end production. I watched for about 30 minutes, then came back that way for another 15. Over the course of at least 90 minutes, I actually observed about 45 minutes, as they worked on the same mundane scene….a crowd of city people walking different directions in front of an office building while two men stood in the center discussing a business deal. It was a 2 minute scene yet they filmed it over and over, making minor tweaks that were not evident to me as a bystander. While we don’t need this type of detailed perfection, it makes the point that even the professionals don’t just “wing it”. They practice, memorize, practice, then film and re-film for hours, until it finally works. If you want to close the million dollar deal, consider putting more time into the rehearsal, and less time into meetings. The scene above will probably be cut…

Sep

Sydney Australia – Day 4; Building the Value Proposition

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Categories: Real Life and Value Proposition
Tags: Earthwave, marketing information technology, marketing strategy, MSSP, SOC, Value Proposition

I thought New Taxi’s were scary – I started day 4 with an over zealous cabby, working hard to get to his next fare. Crossing the Sydney harbor bridge in rush hour traffic, he repeatedly tested his car’s 0 – 60 capability, only to be stopped every few meters in stand still traffic. (locals will have to translate this to km/hr – sorry). That combined with my brains desire to enter traffic circles in a clockwise manner and hug the curb during a right hand turn are enough to give anyone a heart attack.

We spent the day working on value proposition messaging; everything from positioning and introductions to corporate presentation and the effective use of social networking tools. A few debates on the value of complementary assessments, the timing on proposal delivery and strategies for moving past gate keepers, livened up our day. (Not to mention debates on whether it’s better to live in Perth or the remote regions of Canberra).

In the evening I was hosted by the founder and managers of Earthwave, “The real-time threat management company” and leading MSSP in the Australian region. Dining at one of Sydney’s more upscale after-work meeting places (The Establishment on George Street pictured above), we sampled sushi and talked business strategy. I was extremely impressed with the level of sophistication they’ve brought to the MSSP business and excited to see their implementation of the “Making Money with Security” business practices and how they’ve adopted the House & the Cloud sales strategies.

Sep

Sydney Australia – Day 3: Making Money with Security

By Dave Stelzl's Blog 2 Comments

Categories: Real Life and Value Proposition
Tags: information security sales training, ironport sales training, presales engineer training, presales support, security overlay, security se sales training, Value Proposition

Day 3 started our first day of a three day workshop on developing security sales. Our topic: Making Money with Security – the Power of Security To Open New Doors…we have people from all of the major cities attending, including Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, as well as some from New Zealand. A few key take-aways from day 1:

Great messaging is more important than great products – of course the product must work, but a lack of great messaging will kill any good technology.
Sales people must make it a priority to study marketing concepts. Marketing is a science as well an an art and is sorely lacking in most sales efforts.
Security products require a risk based justification model. ROI is a poor choice and waiting on budget and customer need is purely opportunistic. You’ll never consistently achieve quota with either approach.
General account managers may not give security the attention it deserves, especially when it is a small part of the overall deal revenue. It is incumbent on overlay sales, presales, and security division managers to demonstrate the importance of security and it’s power to open new doors of opportunity.
Being demoted by asset owners is a surface problem. The root problem is poor messaging and a lack of risk focused justification.
Every company has an urgent security need. Your job is to discover it and present in with compelling messaging.
Security jargon diminishes all urgency – effective security proposals are delivered verbally, to asset owners, in business language, with a focus on impact and likelihood.

Our day ended with dinner outdoors in front of the Opera House with a beautiful view of the city skyline and bridge pictured above.

PLUS: 5 great things about working in Sydney:

1. People show up on time!

2. Seating fills in from the front (rather the rear as in most US events)

3. Fast food is limited, so people tend to be more alert after lunch.

4. The city is safe so you can walk to work or dinner if you are staying in the city.

5. I really enjoy the Australian accent which they tell me is much different than the British accent, although I really can’t tell.