How to Destroy Your Presales Career in 10 Easy Steps

1. Talk features, features, features:  Value…benefits…ROI.  Too many excess terms to confuse customers.  Just focus on features. They’ll think your smart using all that jargon.
2. Be difficult to manage:  Be late with administrative tasks or, heck, don’t do them at all.  Make your employment a challenge to make your manager prove their ability to manage.
3. Memorize your presentations:  And don’t let customer’s silly questions make you stray from the flow. Most important is that you get to the end of you presentation before you run out of time.
4. Don’t have demo backups:  It’s a waste of time. If it doesn’t work with the demo system you have, it just wasn’t meant to be.  Demos are long and boring anyway.
5. Use lots of slides with lots of text:  It makes you look smarter, and lots of text on slides gives you immense credibility.
6. Constantly berate your competitors:  Tell customers truths such as your competitors cause global warming and ask them why in the world they would work with such degenerates.
7. Preparation is overrated…Just wing it:  Look, there just isn’t time for prep, so don’t bother.  Besides, customer executives want to see if you can perform without prep — everyone loves good ad lib!
8. Empathy is for weak people:  Customers want strong, overbearing types that force solutions down their throats so they don’t have to think or decide themselves.
9. Focus on making everything complex:  It will make you sound smarter, and customers are far more likely to purchase solutions they don’t understand because complicated means powerful.
10. Work all of the time…Always:  Never take a break.  Your family and friends need to understand that work is #1 and if they don’t, well maybe you don’t need them.

Small, yet easy-to-avoid mistakes add up.  They can quickly get you “on the radar” of management.  And even worse, “off the radar” of working with customers.  Good news – applying the easy to understand best practices from 3D Presales will separate you from the pack – in a good way.

Look for 101 ways to improve your Presales career in a future blog.

In the meantime, don’t be this Presales person:  https://tiny.cc/3dpresales

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