From the "Karma is a Booger" Files

Something About Mary

"Mary" was new to our sales team. Being a part of our virtual team, she worked from her home-base in the Mid West. As we all know, being the "new guy/girl" on the team is always awkward and we tried our best to make her feel welcomed.

Mary missed several of our weekly pipeline review sessions. Since this was the primary opportunity to interact with the rest of the team, and to show her progress on her deals, we were concerned.

I called Mary one day to get a "temp" check and to make sure she was going to make our next session. Mary was always enthusiastic when I called. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I asked if she was going to join us in our next pipeline review.

Mary shared that while she would love to join us, she was unfortunately not going to be able to make it because she had to go to court to keep our streets safe.

Mary shared with me the following vignette:

While she was returning from a downtown meeting, she grabs a cab. The cabbie, not realizing she was a local, begins to give her the "scenic tour" in order to run up the fare. When she confronts the cabbie, he evidently goes berserk and refuses to let her out of the cab. He then proceeds to floor it and is weaving in and out of downtown traffic at speeds ranging from 60 to 100mph.

Finally, after 40 minutes of her constant screaming he stops and dumps her in the ghetto and she had to use a payphone to get home.

A few days later the police caught the guy. He had pulled this stunt numerous times, and it was up to Mary to go to court and testify against him before he killed someone. God Bless Mary.

So I clearly understood why Mary would miss another weekly meeting. I wished her well, thanked her for her courage.

Yes, I am that gullible.

"So, did you hear about Mary's DUI?" came the off hours comment from one of my sales engineers.

It seems that Mary was going to court alright. She had gotten wasted at a party, was too drunk to drive home, did it anyway, and got caught.

What about Karma?

At some point in your career, someone will need to stand up for you. Either as an internal vote of confidence for a promotion, or in Mary's case, someone to help you hold onto your job. When that time came for Mary, that well was dry.

Perceived Death as a Negotiation Tactic

This one is from a linkedin connection.

After training some great new sales people, I finished the course off with some reminders on the reasons people can employ NOT to buy - and in view of their inexperience, asked them to just use their first couple of presentations as 'target practice' and carry on with a full presentation if at all possible.

One of the trainees (a slightly built Norwegian lady) gave her first presentation perfectly, kept the price to the very end and delivered it perfectly too. The gentleman chose this moment to have a fit. Not throw a temper - a proper medical condition, falling from his chair and going into spasms on the floor.

I saw this going on and immediately went over to help. The guy was on the floor, foaming from the mouth and in need of urgent help. My trusty trainee unfortunately saw this as his reason to leave her presentation, leant over his body shouting, "SO, JUST HOW MUCH TOO MUCH IS THE DEPOSIT?" The young lady went on to be a super salesperson - but did learn to chill out a little from that point........

By the way, we did get a doctor on the scene, the man was OK after some insulin and a rest :-)

- John P.
www.linkedin.com

"Nice Shoes" is not sexual harassment

When people think of the topic of sexual harassment, they usually think in extremes, because "extremes" are newsworthy. We hear about workers who suffered prolonged humiliation, loss of dignity, and sabotaged careers under the oppression of a manager with carnal motives. On the flip side, we've heard of the frivolous lawsuits because an individual felt that "Your Shoes Look Nice" was some sort of secret code for "Let's go back to my place and play naked twister".

Lets be honest, try as we might, guys have a different view on sexual harassment. The odds are extremely low that it will ever happen to us. In fact, in the movie "Disclosure" where Demi Moore is throwing herself at a married Michael Douglas, and he stops her in mid-foreplay. Every guy is like "DUDE, NOOOOO!!!!". Yeah, most guys are really like that.

With my computer programmer physique, I have never been a candidate as a potential sexual harassment victim. However, one of my female associates shared her experience with me. Ill be honest, I didn't think this kind of stuff went on anymore. After she shared her story, I realized that my experience with mandatory "sensitivity training" had actually desensitized me to how powerful and destructive sexual harassment can be.

"During my tenure with a mid-sized professional services firm, I used to be given 'advice' from the CEO's secretary on what to wear to certain meetings. Depending on the location, purpose, and the number of existing or potential clients, some meetings required a little more exposed skin than others. One of my female colleagues, who used to travel with the big bosses, was asked to join the CEO, President, and a prospective client in a hot tub in her bikini. When I asked about what transpired beyond the hot tub and champagne the only feedback I received was "we landed the deal". Later I accompanied the CEO on a business trip to South Beach. Even though I was married, with a small child, the CEO kept flirting with me and repeatedly requested that I show him my underwear. I felt so disgusted that it permanently affected how I felt about the company, my job, and myself.

The Legend of the Purple Squirrel

Part III

You are a sales team in an enterprise deal and here's the situation:

You're up against a behemoth of a competitor

The evaluation is poorly managed and you have been forbidden access to the decision makers

You have one last shot to win

What do you do?

To recap the previous installment, my team was working on an opportunity with a DC non-profit organization. We were hastily called in and provided a straightforward, sincere, presentation on our capabilities, followed by an awesome lunch at the Capital Grille, and we made the final list of two. It was down to us and Microsoft.

To win, we had to win. A "tie" and my competitor wins. And lets not forget the whole "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft factor". We were the riskier purchase. To top it all off, every bit of technology in that shop was Microsoft and we were written in Java.

All things being equal we really were a better fit. The prospect had over 20 sites that they wanted in multiple languages, with pdf download, and xml syndication requirements. This was our sweet spot. However, because we had limited communications with the prospect, we needed a hook, an easily-consumed message that would resonate with the audience and strengthen our claim as a better fit for their requirements.

"The Purple Squirrel" idea actually came about as a result of a conversation with a seasoned consultant who claimed that given enough time, money, and resources, you could build (in software) anything, even a purple squirrel.

Now, before you go nuts and try something in your sale pitch that has only been successful in the cartoons, it is important to know that there are three criteria for anything included in your sales presentation:

Relevancy

Uniqueness

Timeliness

In short, you want to be talking about the right things, to the right people, at the right time. Miss one of these criteria and you lower your chances of moving forward in the deal.

Cahill and I surmised that our most valuable advantage was that we had functionality relevant to the project that was part of our standard software install that would otherwise have to be custom built in the Microsoft software. The challenge was that the last scheduled meeting would be timed and scripted. When your meeting is scripted you can't veer too far off topic without looking like a real schmuck.

So we devised a way to draw a great deal of attention to our advantages, without veering off script.

We arranged our presentation accordingly with only the following modifications:

Early in the presentation we had a graphic of our purple friend with the words "Purple Squirrels = Time and Money" emblazoned across the screen.

Secondly we placed two types of small graphics throughout the presentation. The first was our friend, sized about .75" x .75", on those slides that discussed features that would have to be custom built in the Microsoft solution, underscoring the message that there was expenses involved with our competitor that where not applicable to our solution. For example in our solution you could have an unlimited number of stages in a document's work flow approval process. At that time, Microsoft's could only support five stages before custom code had to be used.

The second graphic was the squirrel with a red circle and line superimposed on it, in a manner that you see "No Smoking" signs. We placed those on the slides where we offered a feature out of the box that they would normally have to build. For example our solution would automatically manage embedded hyperlinks within content. So if a press release had a link to product information that had been updated or removed from the site, the link would automatically be removed or updated.

We pack up and fly to DC. We were a bit nervous, because if our audience didn't really "get" what we are doing, we are going to look real stupid, real fast.

We arrived for our meeting, exchanged introductions, and started on the first exercise in the script, using PowerPoint to explain what we were about to accomplish in the software and to highlight any relevant advantages of our approach, followed by a software demonstration. At the beginning, we explained that the squirrel logo was simply there to highlight those areas where we offer more value than our competitor. We proceed through each section of the script, without drawing any additional attention to the squirrel, but it was obvious the audience had conditioned themselves to look for the graphic as we progressed along, because every time the squirrel appeared the number of questions increased vs those slides without the squirrel.

After a meeting like this, you can feel good about it, but you really do not know how well you did. I have been in meetings where I thought we hit a home run, only to find out we were practically eliminated in the first 15 minutes. Conversely, we've all had those client experiences where you would rather have gone through a severe IRS audit, only to find out that you were the best presentation they had seen. After this stunt, I didn't have the courage to fathom a guess on how well we ranked.

"Sasser, what in the hell is a purple squirrel?" This is how my VP of North American Sales greeted me on our Monday Morning conference call the following week. A quick lesson, if you are going to try a Purple Squirrel Maneuver, and you have the experience and seniority to suffer the consequences if you fall flat on your ass, tell as few people as possible. It is usually those with the least amount of field experience that will try and stop you.

Anywho, my inside team had followed up with the prospect while I was on the plane ride back home. The prospect responded that they really enjoyed the "rodent" in our presentation, and went on to share that during the meeting with the other vendor, the phrase "Oh we can do that with a little extra code" by the vendor was answered with an almost group wide cry of "PURPLE SQUIRREL!!!!".

Yeah we won. My team looked like heroes and the Purple Squirrel became a legend.

Mainly because the circumstances never aligned where we deemed it necessary, we never used the squirrel again.