Eleven Ubiquitous Words & Phrases that Hold Back the SharePoint™ Industry

There are lots of words that insidiously creep into our psyche and become fashionable from time to time and when used in context or in isolation do no harm at all and may inform, enlighten and indeed enliven any appropriate conversation. All industries tend to develop their own vocabulary for a variety of reasons, from exclusivity through to a need to narrate and describe. Due to the nature of the tech industry it is no surprise that new words and phrases develop regularly, some take hold and some do not.  However, some words and phrases unwittingly hold back an industry from its own potential growth and care is therefore well advised.

The following words and phrases are ubiquitous in their use not only in the SharePoint industry itself but beyond and all in some way can be said to be hindering rather than advancing the progression of the platform and its services to a wider market. Here is my rationale for some of the more obvious ones:

1. Intranet

What does the word ‘intranet’ say to you? Now what does it really say to you? For many business users ‘intranet’ speaks of a confused, out of date, badly constructed, impossible to navigate, out of touch, irrelevant, arcane, archaic, legacy investment which today cannot be trusted as authoritative. Therefore when you come to introduce a new intranet on SharePoint, for many, you are simply using the latest technology to replace something unpopular and repeat the problems of yesteryear. Intranet is not an obligatory term and neither does it adequately describe the power of SharePoint, so why use it at all?

2. T&M

T&M, more accurately termed Time and Materials describe the all-too-common approach by solution integrators to costing SharePoint solutions. More importantly T&M describes the frequent unwillingness by Partners to commit to a fixed price for a solution based primarily on the one-way argument that the client may change their mind and scope may vary. Worse is the argument that detailed requirements are unknown and therefore a fixed price is not plausible.

If one applied the same rationale to SAP or similar, one would be writing a blank cheque that could end up costing tens of millions of dollars and it comes as no surprise in the current global economic climate that client organisations are increasingly wary and weary of the constant surprise regarding SharePoint costs. After a decade of SharePoint installations and solution development, a large proportion of the more common solutions are well known in terms of cost and T&M is far less appropriate than ten years ago in many cases.

The future of packaged applications and cloud, SaaS services may well see the demise of wholesale use of the T&M model. If we cannot be clear to a global client market what things cost, or that services are expensive and not easy to budget for then be assured that engagements may be limited or difficult to attract.

3. Point solution

Point solutions have supported a global SharePoint industry for years. A point solution is a solution developed in isolation for a specific requirement and not linked to any other relational service. More commonly put, ‘tell us what you want and we will build it’. In part this occurred through a common misconception that SharePoint is best sold as a development platform. In turn single solutions required single disconnected projects and most corporate IT departments are based on a project-centric model.

Single projects largely fail to employ an economy of scale, budget or resource and are packaged as single entities that live for their own selfish reasons. Multiple disconnected projects on the same platform using one or (worse still) multiple vendors on the same platform quickly start to trip each other up and place a budget burden not on a business stakeholder group but on multiple single project sponsors.

It is the failure to take a business program approach to the platform that has meant that SharePoint to date has squandered an intrinsically valuable opportunity to establish itself at the heart of organisations for a wide range of interconnected enterprise services that themselves are mapped out using a business roadmap and blueprint like Salem™.

Ultimately the project centric approach has left SharePoint as being seen as unnecessarily  expensive, slow to develop, release and adopt and cumbersome. Far too many SharePoint implementations have run out of steam due to a lack of long term program budget planning, resource and role planning and business program alignment.

4. Developer

Let’s make it clear, I believe that SharePoint’s versatility is an extremely strong value proposition and the ability to develop an eternal number of business solutions makes SharePoint extremely valuable to every organisation. Consequently I am not against ‘development’ in any way, when warranted. The term ‘developer’ however has increasingly become equated to unmanageable expense, slow delivery, and bespoke services that are difficult to maintain, particularly with version upgrades.

Microsoft has demonstrated the issue clearly with its new SharePoint 2013 model where code does not interfere with the kernel and remains separate thus un-hindering clients from future core SharePoint platform upgrades.

For far too long the recruitment industry, together with portions of the SharePoint industry have been guilty of perpetuating the myth that if you are implementing SharePoint you must begin by employing a team of developers. Therefore from the very outset clients have taken a view that it is impossible to make any headway with SharePoint without developing using skilled developers.

You can imagine their surprise therefore when client organisations have later discovered out-of-the box services they had not been shown previously and therefore realised that there were many less costly opportunities to make early headway. Therefore whilst there is absolutely nothing wrong with the role of the SharePoint developer it has largely been the misuse of the role of the developer in the overall SharePoint strategic program that has upset many clients and made them wary of further development investment. 

5. Extranet

Similar to Intranet but leading to even more confusion, 'extranet' is largely a technology term that has little obvious business meaning behind it as it is not one of common parlance. Essentially people in an organisation wish to collaborate and share with people outside the organisation identified by name, that’s not so hard to explain and is common in terms of requirement. The word extranet is symbolic more than anything else of the major problem still facing organisations. 

In many respects the word 'extranet' represents the larger techno-centric argument that nothing can be explained in plain English when it can instead have a term that no one finds easy to comprehend. It is as if technology is buried deep in the psyche of science fiction where abstraction is a necessity and deliberate through choice to the exclusion of the masses.

6. Social

'Social' is the word du jour and a word that is increasingly being over-used and misinterpreted as well as being incorporated into phraseology such as the even more diverse ‘enterprise social’, ‘social enterprise’ or even ‘social collaboration’. Let’s make a bold statement here, in the context of business there is nothing truly social about social technology in the workplace, but instead and far more importantly what social really means is ‘applied social networking techniques’. This means that rather than using software to announce how much beer you drank last night, you are using the services found in the common social network platforms reassigned for business subjects. Gartner backs up the issue by demonstrating that only 10% of 'social collaboration' scenarios achieve a degree of success.

Be in no doubt that many business directors request that social tools are switched off, that they distract workers from daily tasks and offer difficult governance for overstretched HR departments. This is no different to the slow embrace of instant messaging a decade or more ago. 'Social' for them is something that happens after work, not during work hours. Therefore the tech industry needs to decide and agree what ‘social’ actually means in the context of business and work. Rather than scaring organisations, use appropriate terminology that attracts and enhances an organisation instead of presenting technology that may not be, in many instances, interpreted as business appropriate.

 7. Partner

The word ‘partner’ is extremely common in the Microsoft ecosystem and something that is passed through to the end customer. Partnering is of course a very worthy objective and one that many aspire too.  Partnering with anyone is of course very difficult to achieve well whether with an individual or indeed a large corporation and therefore grand statements such as ‘our mission statement is to partner 110% with all our clients’ is largely meaningless. Most ‘partners’ are in fact effective deliverers of SharePoint solutions for which they get paid specifically for their time and effort and which is indeed exactly what most clients want.

Partnering takes the deliverer to an entirely different level of business relationship which requires sharing, including the sharing of risk, closeness and embrace of distinct corporate cultures which in practice most solution delivery companies find very difficult or costly to achieve. Therefore the word ‘partner’ comes to mean something akin to over-promising in a way that undermines the value proposition of the intrinsic relationship itself.

Due to the fact that many clients have failed to find true partnership from their solution integrators then it may be far more appropriate to make the statement that one is an expert SharePoint solution integrator than an expert SharePoint partner and not define a relationship that will never really materialise.

 8. Governance

Probably the most misused and much-maligned term in the SharePoint industry and one that continues to cause debate to rage to this day. Do you mean technical governance, business governance, administrative governance, product governance, what? Governance simply means the ‘act of governing’ and in which case the act of governing of SharePoint is performed by its stakeholders and business sponsor, beyond this there are many other ‘acts of governing’ required to be performed in various ways and to various degrees by various parties en route to SharePoint success.

However because the SharePoint industry continues to squabble as to what governance means and which software company owns the ‘right’ to the term governance, so the client audience is left cold, detached and disinterested. For many client organisations governance sounds like a complex turn off that in turn ensures that SharePoint itself appears difficult to embrace.

 9. SharePoint

This is probably the most difficult word of them all and one that causes the most issues. We have had SharePoint Portal Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Foundation Services, SharePoint Online and finally SharePoint, phew!  So they finally agreed on the word SharePoint as a brand identity and just when it was safe to come out and face the music in point 11 its not SharePoint anymore, now its the cloud and Office 365. Are you thinking what I am thinking?!

The issue isn’t with the word 'SharePoint' as a brand name, though its  recent agreed naming convention does make things easier to progress its identity in the long term (see point 11 though). No the issue is with how one describes SharePoint, what is it? You can describe Excel as a spreadsheet you can describe PowerPoint as a presentation-maker and you could describe Word as a word processor to keep things simple. If you can’t describe something to your mother in 60 seconds what hope do we really have?

The issue with the word SharePoint is that it does not have a single identity and indeed has so many identities that it suffers from a form of extreme schizophrenia where it can be one thing to one person and something completely different to another. Yet at its core, SharePoint contains a set of common features and services that every organization can and should benefit from.

It is due to the fact that over  decade later, whilst the global SharePoint industry still refuses to agree on a simple way to describe its platform that it struggles to demonstrate real business value with ease and why other platforms and services continue to make ground. There may come a tipping point where, however great SharePoint is, client organisations simply start to move in a different direction.

 10. Requirements Gathering

‘Requirements gathering’ is a phrase that sends the fear of God into the heart of many potential clients and yet one used by the majority of solution integrators, it is a phrase that sets out a process of finding out in detail what the client wants incorporated into a specific solution. The problem is that many organisations simply aren’t sure what they want, or of the detail that must be defined within a solution.

The thought that clients need to undergo weeks of relatively expensive, business-impacting requirements-gathering workshops is off-putting to the extent that many organisations are now actively seeking shrink-wrapped solutions (latterly known as Apps) that take away the arduous process of discussing in fine detail the opinions and requirements that will lead to a final cost proposal. Ask a client if they will forego an exact service match for one that is fast to deliver, requires no requirements-gathering but only meets 70% of understood criteria and many will absolutely say yes please.

The world is quickly moving on and the inference that anything built on SharePoint requires a long-winded requirements-gathering process that can be costly, time-consuming, politically troublesome and difficult to finalise can lead to early disaffection by stakeholders that they then refuse to repeat. Many organisations have stated that their technology partners should provide clear thought-leadership by demonstrating what many other organisations have already achieved thus removing the requirements gathering hurdle.

 11. Office 365 (or 'Cloud')

An odd choice you might think and a topic that is currently flavour of the year, the SharePoint transition to the cloud. The problem is that the brand name Office 365 dilutes SharePoint, hides its presence and appears to suggest SharePoint is something far less than it really is, something slightly inconsequential, light and ad hoc. There is an inference that SharePoint Online requires far less thought, due diligence, structure, strategy and planning to adopt now that it is ready made but indeed the requirement for business aligned strategy for SharePoint does not change whether it be onsite or online. Office 365 does not take away much of the strategic requirements found with on premise SharePoint implementations. 

More worryingly still is the idea that this dilution of SharePoint may be deliberate to move by those who have never grasped what it actually is and have had no strategy for it. There have indeed been suggestions in some articles that Office 365 heralds the end of SharePoint and its parts will become independent services in the cloud.

Could you imagine SAP as being part of an Office suite or any other enterprise product for that matter? No, neither can I. As SharePoint is an extensive and powerful enterprise platform, placing it within a package offering and taking away its primary name thus taking away its independent identity is itself something that may stifle its long term growth. Add Yammer into the mix in Office 365 and one can see how the cloud branding can cause real issues for an increasingly bewildered corporate consumer market.

These are only some of the many words I could have chosen for this article but the tech industry continues to define itself largely by being distant and distinct from the businesses it services through its fashionable and all too often abstract use of vocabulary. In the time we now live in, the ability to be succinct, clear, and drive real business value quickly is a high priority for many organisations and it is for this reason that the words and phrases that the SharePoint industry chooses to engage with and define itself by, may well define whether it remains in the dictionary a decade from now.

Our Sales are all at Sea: Lets Hit the Deck !

“Have you got the updated sales deck”, shouted Dave across the office, “the one with the latest client logos for Financial Services?! We will need it for the meeting tomorrow at 9am.”

For someone who has been in the technology industry for almost quarter of a century I have seen many things come and go and all too often good things go and many bad things stay. One of those things that has unfortunately stayed and which by now should have long since evolved out of the window is the traditional sales manager approach with their rather old-hat presentation pitches to clients framed perfectly against a back-drop of inane ‘sales slides’ that clients continue to endure to this day.

What makes me see things from a slightly unusual angle is that I have sat on both sides of the IT/Business relationship fence, having been both the seller and the business buyer. Having spent almost four years buying technology as a client I can tell anyone willing to listen that it is not a pretty place to be. As a technology buyer when faced with daily and monthly cold calls from sales people followed inevitably by (when I have run out of excuses) the ubiquitous sales pitch, face to face. 

“Do you have a projector?” requests Dave hopefully.

 It is the general view of some that to sell a value proposition is to repeatedly call a client by wearing down their barriers and eventually winning them over. In today’s sophisticated marketed-to-hell-and-back society, buyers are somewhat more sophisticated than they were back in 1855 (or 1985 for that matter) but that does not stop the tried and tested method of bothering a client until they sign that purchase order.

You know what I mean. It is weekend, month end, quarter end, year end, or the edge of my sanity. Sorry it has taken me three weeks to reply to your email as it has been quarter-end (if you are selling to a seller) becomes “sorry I have emailed you 13 times today” (if you are the buyer from a seller) as “it’s our month-end you see”, ah yes 13, unlucky for some! If its quarter-end be prepared to take the phone of the hook, turn on the answerphone and head for a holiday on the international space station.

Every old trick in the book is seemingly still thrown onto the field of sales play by the ageing sales diehards including the free-lunch (I can buy my own lunches really), free sporting incentives (I’m not ever going to be good at golf) and the ’drinks after work’ thing (being sold to in the pub through the pseudo friendship approach, that old chestnut). I was recently hypocritically at a complimentary sporting event for research purposes only you understand which, looking at the thousands of people choking on mass-cooked steak and Chianti in hospitality, demonstrates that corporate hospitality remains an (inter)national sales pastime for those in the club and is very much alive and well. I actually went to watch the sport and bought nothing.

It appears that the old adage, “If you throw money at them or comp them they will buy won’t they as they will like me for who I am and feel grateful?” Ehm no, not any more. Over the years these tactics have all been tried and believe me I have been tested, to the very edge of my patience. It is true to say that sometimes things are purchased simply because there is a sort of need but you like the person selling to you enough to buy. Therefore people buying from people is true, well kind of.

Going back to 1990 I remember the IT Director of a corporate giant revealing how he had selected SuperCalc 5 as the spreadsheet of choice for the global organisation because his son was using it at school. I rest my case.   I have news: the buyer has advanced their approach to buying and being sold to in these modern times and in part this is because purchasing decisions are made by a wider landscape of business and IT personnel than before and they don’t know, or want to know the rules of being sold to.

Why is it therefore that old sales-presentation techniques have not adapted and modernised in parallel? Whilst there will always be a few who fall for the outmoded techniques of drinks, sports and the “what’s in it for me personally” approach , as if it were part and parcel of some massive executive club, the majority have long since moved on and do buy in a different way. What ever happened to purchasing something because it simply is rather good and useful and beneficial and of actual value to me and my business? Ah perhaps rather naively that would be far too easy in this throw-away, try-it-now-and-bin-it-later global economy. Perhaps some believe that people rather enjoy being sold to as it justifies their superior  position and the responsibility this bestows.

The purpose of this article is not to bash the salesman, the buyer or indeed the act of ‘selling’ as everyone is trying to sell something, even if it is just their own personas. One only has to look at the nonsense promoted through personal profiles on social network to appreciate that – brand generation Y (why) anyone?!

In fact the desire to write this article was actually prompted by recently sitting through what I can only describe as the most tortuous opening presentation of yesteryear and one that sadly still haunts the vast majority of Microsoft partner sales openers today – the ubiquitous (death by) PowerPoint slide deck, partner sales presentation with accompanying rather hopeful, companion narrative, regarding uniqueness and differentiation – or the ‘sales deck’ in short.

“On the next slide on the screen, we have a sales team of 12 and 14 developers, making us the largest partner in…”, extolled the salesman.

You have seen them haven’t you, the people in sharp suits with the latest laptop or tablet and a dongle in hand hurrying to a meeting whilst requesting a projector.

Let’s dig deeper. Deep down in the psyche of some sales managers appears to be a dictat, some ancient rule set in a tablet of stone or carved into a biblical granite rock from time immemorial that before engaging ANY client in ANY useful way of ANY kind apart from ordering a coffee with sugar, even if there are only 30 minutes available in total, the client must first endure without ANY form of input, a PowerPoint slideshow demonstrating ANY, some or indeed all of the following:

·         The Partner Company Title (with a name that is frequently unpronounceable or Greek for something irrelevant)

·         The Partner Locations (often based on the irrelevant value of convenience)

·         The Partner Owners/ Directors (who you will never actually meet as they live in Nassau, Bahamas)

·         The Partner Background in bulleted form (with phrases like ‘key milestones and “high bandwidth value’)

·         The Partner History in bulleted form (we will come to that later)

·         The Partner Offerings to Market  - (Microsoft graphics such as the segmented pie included)

·         The Partner Differentiation in bulleted form (which usually provides absolutely no clear differentiation)

·         The Partner Case Studies (in a generally unreadable format - send them out later as PDF)

·         The Partner Website & Contact Details (the client will have the details already, that’s why the salesman is sitting in front of them right now)

·         And worst of all – Next Steps with the Partner…..(rather optimistic at this stage I’d say)

 

Every sales slide all too frequently contains any or most the following:

·         A peppering of Microsoft and other vendor logos

·         Any Silver or Gold competency partner logos

·         Phrases du jour (typically gobbledegook – ‘enterprise social’ anyone)

·         A consistent slide theme( irrespective of whether the slides have any visual impact whatsoever)

·         A constant peppering of the Partner logo (as if by repeating it everywhere subliminally the client will cave in and be mesmerised. They won’t, trust me.)

·         Traditional & unqualified sales speak phraseology (including classics such as “the Country’s leading…”

·         An Office 365 logo and a website domain name (now with the word ‘cloud’ in it, it used to be the word ‘soft’)

 

For those on the sales team who have secretly seen through the sales deck, its long windedness, lack of specific value, time wasting capabilities and its general inadequacies they will still be forced to present it which causes further issues. You will have seen the presenter, tab quickly through a number of slides muttering that they are irrelevant or no use today and move swiftly on. In this instance, therefore you are enduring a speed reading version of the slides but gaining absolutely zero value except being slightly entertained by an annoyed sales presenter. Even the act of tabbing quickly through the many irrelevant slides is already presenting an image of client disconnection, even if the presenter is to be congratulated by being their own person.

So let’s clarify tell what the sales deck may have just revealed to me about the partner company:

·         The partner company may lack originality – there is a ton of multimedia outlets and styles out there, much of which I can watch before the partner salesman even arrives to see me and only one of which the partner has chosen to use - slides. Where are the companion videos, animations, podcasts and engaging reference materials that are interesting to watch, listen to and read and could I view them on my new tablet or smart phone? If the partner isn’t using the latest technologies to promote their company, how on earth can they convince me they know how to work with the latest technologies and bring the greatest value to my own organisation?! I have decided that they can’t.

 

·         The partner appears to be the same as almost every other potential partner as I have seen the same logos, messages, templates, designs and images and presentation method time and time again on other people’s decks already. Shakespeare could have written the sales script, yes it’s that old. It is like reading an online dating profile where everyone is 29 and everyone loves reading and swimming. Next.

 

·         The partner is typically NOT the ‘UK’s or US leading..’ anything and if they say this without proving it accurately & convincingly I cannot believe anything else they say either. It’s like using the word ‘quality’ – is that ‘good quality’ or ‘bad quality’?! Therefore making statements like the #1 cloud partner means nothing more that they believe their own PR which worries me as a client from the very start and makes me not want to buy. If they can actually evidence it, prove it and demonstrate it then good and we can move on. Even if they are the world-leader in Office 365 sales, this still doesn’t tell me that they are any good for my organisation; it just tells me that they are good at selling online cloud seats. Being the oldest, longest, largest doesn’t actually tell me anything except that someone somewhere is being just a little bit egotistical. And as for ‘Partner of the…’, yes, it really doesn’t mean anything at all.

 

·         In parallel, industry jargon really does start to punch major holes in the good ship ‘partner’ and slides can be heavily sprinkled with these as if they are some kind of marketing magic, fairy dust.  Consider some of the most overworked and over used phrases that need a serious reality check. Phrases such as “mission statement” or “trusted partner” are used to perpetuate a myth that in some way the partner is actually the house of the holy, is separate from a larger heathen rabble which simply cannot be trusted, whilst is simultaneously sponsored by NASA. There are over half a million Microsoft partners and most can very much be trusted and almost all have a mission statement, it’s called making profit whilst delivering good service.

 

·         Organisational statistics in slides out of context tell me absolutely nothing about the partner organisation as we all know the phrase “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”. Telling me that the partner organisations has 100 SharePoint Consultants, work in 13 countries, have over 1300 clients and 5 corporate offices probably also tells me the Directors drive Aston Martins and that I am about to be fleeced. I may add that telling me they have three MVPs on the team doesn’t add to the value proposition either, though it might. A tricky, fickle business this.

 

·         The slide-presenting partner has at this stage demonstrated no clear differentiation to market because everyone and anyone can and does present a technical demonstration of software features and functions which I can be absolutely sure is what is coming next after these slides. Why? Because there is someone silently sitting patiently in the corner tapping away on their laptop not listening to a word their companion sales person is saying. What I want is a quick view that the partner is indeed the de facto strategic partner of choice as demonstrated by everything I am being shown. Instead I am now going to choose a partner purely on price as I have nothing else whatsoever to go on except ‘likeability’ and ‘cultural fit’. I have had four partner slide presentations today and they all looked the same to me.

 

·         As an aside ‘cultural fit’ is usually based on client budget which in turn means that you will ‘culturally fit’ if you don’t appear too big, too small, too smart, too cheap, too expensive or too frightening.  You are going to struggle preparing for that in a slide deck as the initial budget tends to be as random as a roulette wheel.

 

·         The partner is clearly not a thought-leader or perhaps leader in anything much at this stage simply because they have not provided our client with anything in the deck that reflects originality or uniqueness as demonstrated by the existence of the deck itself in the format it is presented in. Perhaps the thought-leadership will show itself at a later stage. Worse still the sales person feel able to waste time and that of the team by dragging us through these slides knowing that they really don’t bring any value at this juncture and if they REALLY believe that they do then you can be sure they are not the partner for us.

 

·         There has been a recent trend to re-style partner websites with lots of squares to make them feel very ‘current’, like the Windows 8 and cloud (I am not allowed to say ‘metro’) interface. Because so many websites have done this, what it actuals says is we lack originality and copied everyone else. Which also puts a word into my client-orientated head, that word is ‘avoid’. Any link between slides and any form of tile based graphics makes me wonder if we live in a world where there is any originality left.

 

·         Worth mentioning is that if the partner presents me with far too many client logos then I may start to believe that they do not value client confidentiality of non-disclosure agreements which makes me rather concerned? Similarly, sector specific client logos don’t necessarily tell me what I want to know because I may like to know how their methods transcend business verticals as much as can be accurately applied to any one in particular. In other words it appears they are trying to second guess me and make themselves appear relevant and I can see through it.

 

·         Having a ‘memorable’ company name or a domain name with the word ‘cloud’ in it or anything Greek, or indeed anything else intellectually pompous will not make us more likely to see the partner as cool, techno-relevant and buy from them, no. Neither is the Director’s history or background of any interest at all. The fact that they went to Harvard or Oxford and started the company aged 23 with their college friend really doesn’t make the slightest difference to the quality of the solution the partner is trying to sell me.

 

·         “Established in 1994” doesn’t necessarily sell me anything positive. Indeed it can also have negative connotations when a slide spells out partner history and longevity. Now you might think this can’t be true but a SharePoint practice established in 1994 means that the practice was doing something else probably until around 2003 which makes any relevancy only true since 2003. As it takes time to build case studies and history as well as a decent client base the practice has been around since 1994 but really been a full SharePoint practice since around 2005. In which case the first 11 years offered no value at all to the pitch. A practice of 2 to 5 years may actually be more fresh, more up to date, indeed far more relevant for my organisation. Therefore old is not necessarily good, it will depend if our partner is offering a wider range of services or something more niche and focused.

 

·         The inclusion of the SharePoint segmented Microsoft pie (graphic) or anything remotely similar tells me that they have nothing else and therefore no original business value proposition for me and they will be leaving my office earlier than they thought therefore we can move past the Next Steps slide right now. It certainly tells me that they have not put in any effort and developed more suitable materials or considered a business-aligned framework approach. If they seemingly won’t make the effort now, what happens later?

 

By now you should be getting my drift here and it’s all for good reason. Clients deserve great engagements from the very start. It is quite remarkable why some sales personnel feel that anything up to 30 minutes for a one-way, slide-deck introduction is acceptable to drag and trawl everyone through as if it was some perverse engagement right-of-passage. It isn’t, the only right-of-passage will be the passage marked Exit. All too often these sales slide decks are composites created by good natured marketing people who have never marketed their own way out of their marketing office, together with sales managers who have wound up in IT companies and who have failed to adapt a technique that was lasts seen selling mainframes in 1979.

I prevaricate unnecessarily. The purpose of the PowerPoint (it always is PowerPoint, isn’t it) sales-deck presentation is to achieve what exactly? Is it any of the following?

·         Introduce the potential partner as the knowledgeable, subject matter expert in the relevant field – in other words demonstrate they know what they are doing and can prove it

·         Introduce the partner as professional, established, preferable and distinguished in achievements and better than anyone else out there who may do the work instead

·         Explain who else thinks they are the partner of choice,  worthy in what they do and will stand up and say it independently and without meals, sporting visits or after work drinks

·         Align the partner company with what the client does to demonstrate that they understand what they do and how they work and how they can fit right in

·         Display relevant badges of distinction that demonstrate end to a degree prove, skills and talents and knowledge

·         Tell the client where the partner is, who they are and  how they typically engage

·         Make the client like them or want to like them as well as believe them as well as demonstrate that they have something of real value to offer at a price that ‘culturally fits’

·         Demonstrate history which literally means that they have time to practice their speciality subject,  know the answers and are likely to still be around next year when maintenance and support is required

·         Offer some real, tangible, palatable evidence to back every statement they make to reassure and address and provide confidence in what they say is true.

 

Ask yourself this question: How much of the above could actually have been achieved without having to say it through slides but instead through web evidence and other materials that can be consumed in advance of your meeting and without wasting valuable time or boring anyone? I am sure the answer is that most of it can, should and therefore be simply abbreviated and confirmed by email in advance of the session. In my own experience, a partner wouldn’t get through the door if I hadn’t learned enough in advance to invite them and establish an early value proposition. If they could address these points without a face-to-face, sales-deck-pitch approach then why didn’t they take the time instead to achieve those things and why instead did they present the sales deck to me?!

As an aside, it always makes me laugh when I receive emails and communication from sales people purporting to be experts in SEO (search engine optimisation). “We have looked at your website and can assist you in getting to number one in your sector and search engine phrase”. Really?! “Well I have looked up your company under the term SEO and can’t even locate you by page ten of the search results, so goodbye”.

Let me stress this for those that do not yet wish to understand, the sales deck at the beginning of a partner meeting more often than not undermines most things of value that you go on to present and it eats into everyone’s valuable time, all too frequently wasting the sales opportunity. From a Microsoft partner perspective what a sales deck does more often than not is undermine the value proposition that a partner is in fact trying to establish.

The sales deck all too often achieves the following:

·         It can undermine the potential partner position with negative connotations to the extent that potential clients are no longer sure they want to work with the partner

·         It demonstrates that the partner company appears to lack any real form of originality, creativity or inspiration due to its lack of soul

·         It can undermine the partner company credibility, not enhances it, due to wild, misleading, inaccurate or boastful statements or ones that are simply unnecessarily audacious

·         It can accidentally define the partner as part of the pack not leading the pack as it’s a version of the same deck that most others present in many cases

·         It can easily waste time as the deck takes time to go through when it could have been covered in a different format at a different time e.g. in advance

Okay so let’s say that we buy this argument and we are either going to cut down the opening sales deck pitch, radically change its format to something far more useful or else drop it like a hot potato (oh how I wish). Well what does the client really want instead?

In engaging with any client at all as part of pre-sales, one may wish to consider and address the following:

·         All clients have limited time, just like resumes and CVs so partner materials are selling the partner fast in a few headlines. Therefore think about the format of your partner resume (website, multimedia, other engaging collateral etc.)

·         Volume of clients doesn’t reassure the client, but original, independent referencability does

·         All clients can see through boastfulness, exaggeration, outlandish statements and statistics

·         Industry speak, jargon and techno-babble can make a partner irrelevant rather than relevant

·         Overt sector alignment can actually often be anything from a distraction to a complete turn off so be careful

·         Originality, creativity, thought-leadership and strategy are all attractive propositions

·         Technical must always be replaced or at the very least aligned with true business value proposition to succeed

As a final comment, the vast majority of IT sales presentations I have endured (yes endured) over 25 years have been dull, lifeless, too casual, sometimes overly-familiar but generally lacking in engaging delivery and story-telling. It amazes me still how relatively few people can actually present to an audience effectively, and present in a thoroughly engaging way. Professional presentation skills-training should be part and parcel of almost every practice with a sales or pre-sales division with no excuses. Monotonous, monotone voices are not attractive or acceptable in presentation scenarios.   Clients really do want to buy and they most likely do want to buy from you but from the moment that first sales slide projects up onto the wall, the foundations inevitably start to crumble.

Surely this cannot be true you may think, we present with our deck and we already win. Perhaps people already like you or view you as the inevitable choice, or that you are currently being recommended from a particular source or that there are only worse alternatives or that simply that you are the cheapest. Nothing stays the same for ever either, as off-shoring and the cloud have so ably proven in recent times. Business failure occurs when sales strategy is slow to adapt and evolve.

Potential clients are frequently desperate for a sales session to be valuable, insightful, thought-provoking, engaging and dynamic, but sadly largely they are simply not.  People frequently ask why the Salem™ framework sessions as pre-sales scenarios go down so very well with clients? The answer is because Certified Salem™ Professionals practice what we preach here. So here comes our own selling bit and without any form of sales deck! The Certified Salem™ Sales Expert has been deliberately designed to teach sales professionals exactly how to present SharePoint™ and the associated Microsoft stack in a dynamic, engaging way that has meaning, huge quantities of thought-provoking, thought-leadership and a logical, sequential approach to services using business language that anyone can grasp fast.

The Salem™ framework is fun, interesting, clear and insightful and it is as flexible, as dependable and as adaptable as any potential client could possibly wish for. You couldn’t ask for a better introduction to any Microsoft partner practice than that now could you?

 

Copyright Genius! by Morgan & Wolfe. All Rights Reserved 2013