Friday, August 14, 2020

Let’s Talk About Empathy…

 

Many, many folks have commented that having empathy is critical to connecting in the current COVID environment.  However, just saying “you must have empathy” isn’t sufficient…!

 

How often are you on a call with someone who “empathizes” with a statement from you in a way that is clearly fake?  What is your reaction to that?  (Not good…!)

 

Simply stated, empathy is “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” 

 

But this often requires a true understanding of the other person’s situation – if you haven’t experienced their situation, it is hard or impossible to be empathetic!

 

If you have never been a customer, it is difficult to understand the customer’s true feelings about their situation. 

  • If you’ve never had their pain;
  • If you've never invested time exploring solution options;
  • If you've never been the "customer" in Discovery calls, demos, or POC's; 
  • If you’ve never driven the purchase of enterprise software or been a part of the buying committee;
  • If you’ve never participated in an implementation and roll-out process;
  • If you’ve never had a software project succeed (or fail);
  • If you’ve never been a project “burn victim”;

Then it is hard to truly be empathetic.  Perhaps impossible.


You can be sympathetic, which is quite different..!

 

Example:

 

If you’ve never broken your leg or other bone, how can you really understand the shock, surprise, pain, fear and worry associated with such an event?

 

Real empathy comes from shared experiences.  So, please be mindful of this when you are attempting to demonstrate “empathy” in your Discovery conversations and demos…!

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Handy Zoom Tool in PowerPoint

PowerPoint has a very useful but rarely used zoom/magnify tool in Slideshow mode (in PowerPoint 365 for Windows only, sorry Macintosh folks…).  It works as follows:

 

(Assuming you are in Slideshow mode)

-     In the lower left corner of the presenter view (lower left corner of your slide), click the magnifying glass icon.

-     A bright rectangle appears on the slide and the mouse pointer changes to a hand.

-     Point your mouse over the area of the slide that you want to magnify, then click to zoom in on-screen. The mouse pointer becomes a hand to indicate that you can click and drag to move the zoom effect to a different area of the slide.

-     To turn off the zoom effect, press the Esc key or click the magnifying glass icon again.

 

This is very useful for (smoothly) focusing on specific areas of your screen – and/or enlarging sections that are hard to view or read for the audience.  Try it!

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

More Presales Tools!



Here are two more tools to explore.  Success is a dream-come-true for managing POC’s; Jiminny is another call-recording analysis/coaching tool with a focus on the practitioner first.

 

 

Success

 

From the Vendor:

 

Success is the Proof of Concept (POC) management platform purpose built for Sales Engineering teams. It is the first Sales Engineering platform that is listed by Gartner as Cool Vendor in the CRM Sales category. Success provides Sales Engineering teams the much-needed visibility into POC activities, customer engagements and overall health of POCs. Here are some of the key features that Success offers:

 

- POC Dashboard with health and POC data

- POC Reports, Insights and Analytics

- Automated workflows (Salesforce 2-way sync with Pudding)

- Customer engagement portal during active POCs

- Scope library and templates

- Task management and collaboration

- Documents management (with one click document sharing with customers)

- Notes for tracking POC activities (2-way synced with Salesforce)

- POC status and health checks

- Role based access control

- Inventory tracking module

 

Success is SOC2 certified and already used by many well-known companies. [Our] Customers love Success for its simple, intuitive user interface, and ease of use. Schedule a time with the Success team (https://Success.app), experience the platform yourself.

 

Our Comments:

 

Wow.  Wow!  If you have been looking for something to help manage POC’s (and POV’s, etc.) you need to check this out.  This is not an “emerging tool”; it is surprisingly mature.  It is intelligently designed and implemented, providing rich sets of capabilities for presales practitioners, presales managers – and for the customer, as well!

 

 

Jiminny

 

From the Vendor:

 

At Jiminny, we believe it is time to use technology to make coaching our sales people easier.  Jiminny is the platform for all your customer conversations.  Use Automation & AI to help your team grow and develop.  Never before has your teams performance been this visible across the whole sales cycle.  Now you can coach with impact.  Imagine making your sales rep's job 3 x easier, whilst giving you better data at the same time.

 

Our Comments:

 

Jiminny focuses on enabling reps to coach themselves – and to want to coach themselves and be coached by their managers.  Accordingly, this tool emphasizes usage and benefits for the reps themselves, first – a grass-roots approach.  If the reps love it, then the data that managers need will be generated willingly.