 Technology:
Evolution of Storage Sales
Evolution must occur if the salesperson is to
succeed in a high tech, hyper-competitive market. Why? Because the prey (i.e.,
customer) is no longer uninformed and gullible. No way!
Reality Check: Customers today 'prey' on
salespeople who don't know how to sell. The food chain may have very well been
inverted with the diffusion of information into the hands of the masses. No
longer the gullible guppies, today's customers are a highly evolved group who
will pit salesperson against salesperson to get the best deal and best product.
Can you blame them?
My concern here has less to do with the customer and more to do with my
salespeople. Have we as salespeople evolved along with the new demands of a
well informed marketplace? Have sales strategies evolved to better position a
product or service knowing customer are wanting more 'quantitative' proof
regarding solutions? I'm going to err on the side that there are signs that
salespeople are "getting it".
Many in high tech sales have come to grips with the needing to understand the
product and learning how to position in order to minimize objections and
accelerate the sales process.
The non-evolved sales Sapients continue to use the standard, "Check out my
products, what do you like, can I take your order" approach. We call these
salespeople, catalogue openers. To them, selling is showing the customer the
product, asking a few questions about their needs and then ramming the
proverbial sales pitch down their throats.
But these highly evolved clients (aka super guppies) want more. They want
answers to tough questions about measuring performance, especially in the area
of data storage. The super guppies want metrics.
They want a way to consistently measure
storage performance. Customer are dm
As Mike
Karp of Network World Storage
confirms in the Enterprise Newsletter, 03/13/03,
the industry has given the super guppies tools: "The Transaction Processing
Performance Council offers the TPC-x benchmark for measuring database
operations. The Storage Performance Council has provided the SPC-1 benchmark, a
more storage-specific test that measures throughput, sustainability, response
time, repeatability and data persistence of storage systems. Storage
efficiency is more than just supporting business processes, it's about measuring
throughput as well."
A salesperson today has to be
better prepared than in
previous years. The evolved salesperson can: recite benchmarks and other
technology assessments, give you return on investment (ROI) numbers, payback
analysis and other quantifiable ways to show you how their product can help the
customer save money and time.
1) Measuring the cost of
storage will go beyond the simple equation of Storage (gigabytes) divided by
cost to get a dollar per gigabyte. Most buyers will tell you this is a
'nice-to-know' factoid but is not indicative of the system's performance.
2)
The question of how much
storage under management will begin to play a more prominent role. This figure
is calculated by taking the storage and dividing by the number of people who
will use the storage, yielding you a storage per person figure.
Here are some questions the
storage buyer will ask: What will be the cost per managed gigabyte of storage?
How many gigabytes will each person be able to manage? What is actually going
to be managed on the system? By whom? What impact will that have on
performance?
Selling simplicity is no longer an option. As sales professionals, the need to
understand your product and the need to know how to sell those advantages gets
more relevant with every revision and upgrade in technology.
Those salespeople who evolve with technology will find their path to higher
sales and company profitability. Successful salespeople will attest to the fact
that the customer too is evolving. Sales strategies of yesterday have no role
today in the world of high tech selling. Quantification of results in the end
will be the litmus test for selling high tech solutions.
©
2003. Victor Gonzalez. All Rights in All Media Reserved. Victor Gonzalez is a
sales trainer and motivational coach.
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