A quick disclaimer to start this one off: A great call can be had under any circumstances. Some of the best calls I've ever done as a sales engineer have been completely off the cuff with zero preparation. At the same time, I've also been caught with my pants down not knowing something I should have to help close the deal. I'm not saying you always need to do this thorough prep, but it's far more likely that you're about to bomb your call if you haven't prepped than if you had. At the very least it won't be as effective.
Step 1: If your current sales engineering gig is anything like mine have been, most days you're most likely going to be doing more than one call per day (if not, you probably need a new sales rep). As all those prospective customers are going to be talking to you about the same thing, they're probably all in relatively similar professions. My area of expertise is network security, so the majority of people I'm going to be speaking with are somewhere on the "security engineer" totem pole; be it individual contributor role, manager, director, or CISO.
So, in the morning before any of my calls I take a look at my newsfeed for relevant content for the day. I use feedly, but there are hundreds of other aggregators out there that all do basically the same thing: go through your list of sites/blogs and bring them to you in a nice, curated list. Mine looks something like this:
Where to find said blogs you ask? Google my friend. I googled "top security blogs to follow 2016" and I got a veritable bevy of content. Don't just follow any douche with a megaphone and good SEO, make sure they're proper thought leaders in your industry.
Every morning before your calls for the day, spend 10 minutes and look at the top stories of the day for your blogs and find something to talk about. They don't have to be super in-depth, scholarly explanations of the issue at hand, more something interesting and topical to come to the call with to grab their attention. On calls you're always trying to establish yourself as an industry insider, so the more information you can come with, the more engaged your prospect will be. Plus you may learn something. Be interested, be interesting.
Step 2: Now that we have our topical factoid, it's time to move onto our prospect. Every deal is all about the who, so we need to first know WHO we're talking to. There are three places I always look for this (and in this order):
1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter
3. Personal Blog
The reason I do it in this order is I am purposely going from business relevance to personal relevance. Why? Typically, things we have in common business-wise are going to be more effective in the beginning. As the personal relationship progresses, we may find out we both enjoy hiking or cheer for the same football team, but in the beginning I'm looking for shared VALUES rather than shared hobbies. There's also a big difference between doing your due diligence and just being creepy, but we'll get into that later.
The first thing I look at on LI is shared connections. If we know some of the same people, it's a quick way to establish rapport. If there's nothing there, maybe something about their company is interesting. Do you know anyone who works/worked there? Do you know anyone who has given them a recommendation? How about previous companies? What about where they're based? Do you know someone who lives there? Have you traveled there in the past? What about companies they follow (if there are any other than the company they're currently working for)? I focus on these points first, as they're less cheesy in my mind. If none of these things pop, I move on to their college. To me, this is a stretch... because the chances that the person you know that went to the same school as your customer is slim to none... and your customer knows it. I never look at the skills they've been endorsed for or their groups, unless I want to pop it in as a tongue-in-cheek aside about the craziness of LI.
There are also those folks who have a skeleton LI profile... being in security I run into it all the time. So my search then takes me to Twitter and/or their personal blog. Twitter is a great place to get to know your customer... I look at it as a kind of halfway platform between professional and personal. Most folks will tweet about business-related issues, but with a personal touch on it. I'm not that guy who's gonna dig back through 5 years of someone's tweets, but I'll typically look back a few mos to see if anything relevant comes up (interesting retweets, opinions, etc).
Personal blogs, same thing. I don't have the time to read everything they've ever written in the <10 mins I have to prep before a call, but I'll usually have enough time to skim through a post or two.
I have heard of folks leveraging Facebook for prep as well, but I don't and I would caution you on this one. It's considered good form for a SE to do their due diligence on the normal business channels (LI, twitter, blog), but if you're not careful on FB you can look like a stalker... and nobody likes a stalker. In my experience, your prospect is going to be much more receptive to the fact that you were both interested in a recent news story or share a skill than a comment about his kids or something.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you talk to your Account Executive before the call. Prep work is only good if the subject is going to be receptive to it. Between the two of you, you should be able to get a proper plan in place. Also, in the many years I've been practicing these techniques, I have never once been called out for being too intrusive. On the contrary, most folks appreciate it. If my customer says something like "wow, you spent a lot of time researching me" I simply respond "Absolutely I do my homework. I want to make my demos as curated as possible, plus I like to know who I'm talking to so I can keep my comments relevant." The last thing your customer wants is just another generic commercial.
The last thing I do before any call is take a deep breath and clear my head. Sounds kind of silly and zen-ish for a tech guy I know, but there's a lot going on in my mind at any given moment, and the key to a good call is giving my customer my undivided attention. People on the other end of the line can sense if you're focused or not (ever get the sense someone is doing email instead of watching your presentation?), so stay focused.
Prep and focus... do it.
Anything else anyone likes to do before their calls? Drop me a line.
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