Tech Driven Sales

Table of Contents

Intro

Strategic Thinking

Tactical Techniques

Operational Support

Understanding Customer Appreciation in Sales

When you're in the sales process, the time and effort you put in often don't matter to the customer. I realized this when I was a junior engineer involved in a demo for a large US retail and real estate firm. They were looking to implement a new customer relationship management product called Vantive for their customer support.

Our contacts shared two major issues they were facing. They told us that if we could solve these problems, the project would be ours. The first issue was that whenever a support ticket was created, the assigned agent needed to receive a pager notification. The second issue was that they were making mistakes with entering the expected date of closure when raising tickets, so they needed an easier way to enter dates.

We were eager to tackle these problems. Keep in mind, this was 25 years ago, and sending emails was not easy. We didn't have mailguns and API based email gateways. A colleague and I spent two days figuring out how to send an email automatically from shell and the format to send it for pagers. After two long nights, we finally got it working. The second problem with the calendar was much simpler. It took us only about 10 minutes because Vantive supported ActiveX controls. We just had to drag and drop an ActiveX calendar control to the right field, and that was done.

During our demo, we first showcased the pager notifications. We explained, 'Here’s the email ID, now you’re going to create a ticket, and here’s the pager—you’ll get the notification.' The pager beeped. The agent said he got the notification. That was it. There was no other discussion. Then we moved on to the calendar demo. When the calendar popped up, everyone stood up, clapped, and said, 'Wow, you are the experts! The project is yours.'

We were perplexed. We spent two nights on the pager notifications and got no appreciation, but the 10-minute calendar solution won us the project. This taught me that it doesn’t matter how much effort you put in; what really counts is whether the customers are delighted.