How to sell Microsoft Technologies efficiently

microsoft

We had a lot of sales tracks yesterday and today, so I want to blog about these aspects today as I really learned a lot in these tracks.
Microsoft is of course interested in teaching partners how to sell their technologies. I believe that a customer benefits much from a company that does the sales process efficiently, although some might disagree. Some people may argue that someone is good at sales probably sells you something you do not need. So a good seller is bad for you, as he might cheat you.

But on the long term this idea does not work out. If I persuade you to buy something you do not need, I will probably make some money, but I make the money just one time. If you feel cheated, you won’t buy something a second time from me. So it is better to sell you something, from what you benefit, so we both benefit and it is very likely that you will reorder. But in the end, you might wonder why a CTO writes about selling Microsoft products. Isn’t this the job of a sales representative? Well yes and no!
First of all, there is the “the cold black-hearted” CFO that signs your contract. No matter what you tell them, he will smile and say no, even if you the nicest person in the world, unless you tell him what he wants to hear. You might try to convince him by showing off him, how cool the new Visual Studio is and that the new technologies are sophisticated and that his employees will enjoy it to work with the product, you are about to sell. In the end, his job is to archive business success.

So how can you argue the benefits? So if cool features and technologies are probably not the best way to promote your product, how about payback and ROI. If you spend 10.000 Euros for my product, you will get 15.000 until the end of this year. Only an idiot will turn this down, unless somebody offers something to make more than 15.00 until the end of the year or the offer is lacking of credibility.
But this argumentation can be done by the sales person. So why do we need developers to participate in the sales process? Just think about one thing. IT is complex, a lot of people believe that they can create solutions, but a few of them can really deliver what they promise. A CFO will have learned much about economy or financial calculations, but in most cases, the most sophisticated technical achievement he ever did was setting up a computer or installing wireless LAN.

If we talking about generations, there is an age limit, where people did not learn much about computers at school. But with every year, this limit increases. More and more people get into decision making positions that have a technical background. There are a lot of people that started as a developer and after some years of development they did advance into management positions. Some of them even got a MBA degree. A lot of these people make the decisions or at least influence those who do.

With these people it is the other way round. You might tell them about good paybacks or ROIs, but in the end they know the details of the problems you are talking about. They have been struggling with the same things for years. So they want to know exactly how you solve these issues. Normally, a good sales representative knows everything what your solution can do, but mostly it is not their business to know how the problems are solved. Nearly no salesman I know would probably argue like: “The performance issues? We did some profiler runs and discovered some redundant calls in the business layer. While removed these calls, we also addressed the concurrency issue by integrating a complex locking mechanism to solve…” – I personally would rather expect an answer like: “The travelling salesman problem? How we do address it? Well,… we all drive fast cars with hands-free telephones. So we are in time at every appointment (If you do not get the joke, you are probably not a developer. If you didn’t get it and you are a developer, please do look this topic up immediately)
So probably now it is a good time to argue why I believe our company provides some kind of service that solves some kind of situation better that our competition.

In my opinion, you can have two extremes of software companies that will try to sell you their solutions. The salesman of company A has probably the best suit in town and could illustrate every cover of a business magazine. He is charismatic, you enjoy his company, he tells you a lot, but after he left, you realize that he did tell you nothing you did not know already and you know that this wouldn’t change even if you give him a lot of money. The salesman of company B is a developer. Instead of Zegna or Armani, he is dressed in ThinkGeek and he tells you also a lot things. After he left, you realize that you didn’t understand a word that he said and you know that this wouldn’t change even if you give him a lot of money.

For years, Hagenberg is using a combination of two worlds. We can talk about payback and ROI or what we intend to do in detail to provide benefits for your company and which technologies we use for that and why we are using them. We didn’t learn this in one day; but after some years practice in it, we can guarantee, that we do whatever it is possible to prevent to waste your (and also our) time by telling you something you do not want to hear.

That’s for today. Tomorrow, I will tell you about the details of the new Visual Studio 2010. There are a lot of cool features. Don’t miss the blog.

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Oct200921

Stefan Papp

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