You can be a T/A with a low “P” score – many finance, legal, and medical professionals fit into that category. After visiting John, my accountant, I rarely feel uplifted and full of joie de vivre. However, I usually leave the meeting feeling reassured and confident that my taxes are in order and that I will not get in trouble with the myriad of

Firstly, you need to establish control of your time (calendar) and your inbox, as it is far more likely that lack of time, rather than lack of desire or talent, will hurt your reliability. Secondly, you need to be realistic and not always follow the SE instinct of automatically pleasing the customer or the salesperson.

Discovery is not an event but a constant process. Although we Sales Engineers like to place Discovery early in the sales cycle (because it prevents big problems later), we should have the attitude that we are always in Discovery mode. That said, Discovery is usually the #1 place where there is friction between the SE and the salesperson. Many

you say, “did I make that clear?” The first version puts pressure on the student to say that they didn’t understand, whilst the second version puts pressure on the teacher for not clearly explaining. It’s a minor point, but when I implemented this in my workshops some 10-12 years ago and suggested the technique to my other instructors, we noted a

Take The Blame. It is your fault if something goes wrong or doesn’t work or there is a communication failure. That’s both internal and external. Do Right. Be more concerned about doing the right thing than about being right.

SE: “Well, Mr. Customer, based on what I know about your environment, there seems to be a couple of ways to do it. Let me walk you through those options, and we can come up with an initial decision.” (Note that the customer does not want to hear that your product is so flexible that there are 29 ways of doing it. That will scare him and extend your

Yes, I do mean “decrease”! Remember that high S is bad. You want the relationship to be about the customer, not all about you. Feelings. As well as going for hard data, try asking the client, “how do you feel about that?” It’s that touchy-feely area that SEs hate – but it can reveal a lot about what a client is honestly thinking. It’s an excellent

Remember that as S is the denominator (bottom) of the equation, a low score is good, and a high score is terrible. This measures how much you think about yourself and your company versus the customer’s needs. When you find yourself thinking about selling instead of solving, of quota instead of discovery questions, or of transactions instead of

had exhibited extreme reliability to me, I would assume their response would always take 50% longer. I would also assume that customer and internal issues would erode the big block of time I had reserved for myself tomorrow, so I would only have 50% of that. Maybe that is a pessimistic view, but I feel that is life in the corporate world, plus it