Running a Trial

If you are put in charge of a trial, be sure you are ready for the responsibility. Evaluations are costly, high risk, and high visibility. If your trial melts down because you did a poor job, it can taint you for the rest of your career with the company. Ideally you will have prior experience in project management and a deep understanding of your solution. Without these two strengths, you will have a difficult time succeeding. If you feel weak in either area, consider asking your manager to bring in a more experienced person from whom you could learn the appropriate skills. Table 9.1 shows the high-level steps for a trial.

Table 9.1: High-Level Trial Steps
Ask the customer why they want a trial and begin to define success criteria. Try to find ways to limit the scope of the trial by using references, published documentation, and so forth. If necessary skill sets are in short supply, confirm a tentative schedule with key team members. Determine whether you have the solution and the resources necessary to win. If you think you do, continue. If not, you must either change the requirements or refuse to compete. Confirm new success criteria with the customer after you are comfortable that you can win. Work with the salesperson to write a "win agreement" for the customer. Build a storyboard for presenting winning results to the customer. Work to get customer executives to sign off on the win agreement and storyboard. Build...

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Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer's Handbook

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