CLASS : Credibility- Listening- Accountability- Style-Sell

PRE-SALES BRINGS CLASS TO THE SALES PROCESS

Great statement on the value of Pre-Sales in the selling process... The PreSales professional has been affectionately called “Doctor Demo” or “Demo Monkey”. The PreSales job title varies from company to company. From Sales Engineer to Solution Consultant... no matter what a PreSalesRep is called, they should consistently bring CLASS to the sales process.

In this case,
CLASS is more than an elegance of style, taste, and manner. CLASS is an acronym that stands for qualities and characteristics found in top PreSales professionals. The CLASS acronymn has been developed over several years of serving as a PreSales representative in addition to building several PreSales organizations. It is a simple way of describing the essence of a quality PreSales team member wherein each letter in the word CLASS stands for a desirable characteristic:

C - The “C” stands for Credibility. No doubt the PreSalesRep (PSR) represents their company’s products and/or services with greater depth and breadth than any other person on the sales team. Credibility is established with the prospect through the knowledge of products and solution opportunities offered by the PSR. The credibility the PSR builds allows them to have a relationship with the functional and technical interest parties of the potential customer. When a PSR establishes their credibility, additional benefits result... such as Confidence with Commitment to do what it takes to make the sale.

L - The “L” stands for Listener. A PSR may seem credible with lots of product and/or technical knowledge... but if he or she does not listen to the customer, the sale is less likely to be successful. A good PSR listens to the desires of the prospect and does an effective job of relating that information to the rest of the sales team. Listening is also crucial in the relationship between the Lead Sales Rep and the PSR, in order that the team functions effectively.

A - The “A” represents Accountability. Being accountable to both the sales team and prospect means doing what it takes to get answers when an important question arises about product functionality, technical capabilities, or service commitments. An effective PSR must be willing to diligently research the answers to questions. Providing well-researched, accurate answers trumps a spur-of-the-moment educated guess every time. It takes a team Attitude to win business; the PSR who proves his or her accountability to the team is truly an asset.

S - The “S” indicates Style. Style is that intangible presence the Sales Rep brings to the table. When the PSR has been brought in to support the sale, the PSR and the Sales Rep must work in tandem to represent the company and solutions for prospects. Style involves methodology—the manner in which information is relayed to the prospect. It includes identifying the level of simplicity or detail necessary to communicate that information. A PSR’s style should always convey Support and Sincerity and compliment the sales team.

S - The last “S” in CLASS stands for Selling. Never forget that the object is to eventually make the sale! An effective PSR should be intentional about focusing on the selling process. A prospect does not need all the answers to all the questions at once. A productive PSR participates in the sale rather than trying to control it. Keep this in mind with the previous qualities and you’ll end up being a strong selling influence with credibility, listening skills, accountability, and style.

In summary, the top notch PreSalesRep brings CLASS to the selling process and is a valuable asset to the sales team, the prospective customer, and the company he/she represents.

Source By William Champion.

Finally Succeeded - PLM Implementation!!

Most of PLM blogs tells these days whenever I come across any PLM blog posts about PLM, the first impression I get is that PLM Implementations are  real challenge to take and nothing but failures. There are many blogs which say where, why and how it fails. But there are no PLM blogs ever address these implementation failures or real needs/requirements of PLM Projects.

I get clear understanding that organizations need to implement PLM to address their challenges and later issues will be solved. Is it really true?

PLM Vendors, PLM Implementing teams and PLM Customers need to set a process of implementation usually, what should be the methodology? What should be the road map? Which people are required at many stages of PLM Implementation? Those I already mentioned in my previous posts.

Many have worked on various PLM tools over various domains; I worked in PLM implementation for Plant Design domain and I just want to highlight success stories of my two implementations after all discussions over failures, difficulties and limitations.

I have worked for a client in Energy and Plant Design domain, an EPC compnay, on

Enovia SmarTeam Implementation integration with CATIA V5 for Energy Plant Design industry: where I have got breakthrough and is stating as follow

Project & Technical Lead Role:
Participate in client discussions, understand problems faced by client and articulate same to internal stakeholders to develop effective solution.

>Bring in best practices of industry and provide options & Develop proposal.

>Prepare As-Is and To-be documentation, Technical Scope preparation.

>Provide inputs based on secondary research in Clients Environment.

>Give inputs on solutions; based on areas of expertise.

>Conduct product demonstration and Training on PLM product with Acceptance test Plan document and configuration as per Technical scope.

>Analyse the requirements by demonstrating strong process, solution & product knowledge, IT scenario, implementation and technology constraints, look at end to end perspective with implications in related functional & product areas.

>Lead solution in all engagements and review work of team members as per project schedule.

>Plan activities for configuration, conduct conference and prepare configuration and Project completion Report.

>Customer offline Technical Support & Troubleshooting
Accomplishments:
*Plant Design Layout methodology Establishment in ENOVIA SMARTEAM system,
*Full CATIA Catalogue Management with ENOVIA SMARTEAM,
*CATIA Piping Design Integration and Management with ENOVIA SmarTeam,
*CATIA HVAC, Electrical & Civil Structure Module ENOVIA SMARTEAM Integration
*Brought in Best working Methodology

It is almost two years project and after all initial difficulties, failures; the implementation  went successful and live 1.5 years back and still as of today it is working fine and I am very happy to state here that Implementing ENOVIA V5 SmarTeam and CATIA V5 integration in Energy and Plant Design domain is first in the history and its working fine.

Bye for now,

Anil Kumar J R

People's PLM mindset

Many people assume that PLM is a magic tool that will establish huge ROI once after installed in an organization. It is truly wrong view developed with many organization management people over various sections of PLM focuses.  As per my knowledge PLM domain need vast experienced and visionary people to carry forward the project implementation, unless it would be dead investment. Also it is not so easy to execute the flow process throughout the life cycle of PLM projects in any department of organizations. It is my view that what I observed in two implementations with two minds set people and how it impacts the vision of PLM chooser. It is not only responsibility of the top management to have visionary goal to establish strategic PLM tool, it is also responsibility of each and every senior technical management team and engineers to work collaborative involvement to provide right requirements and questions to address their departments obstacles effectively. The main challenge is to identify the challenges in daily work area rather than finding out unplanned solutions without robust system in place. Mainly one should always think about saving the wastage of time, energy, resource, cost with quality output product, in such cases we can build the vision of PLM implementation.

Constraints for these visions are to have gripped technical awareness over the particular industry domain with knowledge of managing of Data and resource transparently, securely and collaboratively physically and over virtually. 

Bye for now, 

Anil Kumar J R

Challenges – starting PLM Projects till Rollout and Go-Live

Previous posts were discussed on PLM, start of PLM implementation till Roll Out of project. While executing the project most of the PLM vendors will face many challenges, I just want to record the challenges what we faced in two implementation for typical domains, one in Thermal Power Energy & Plant Design Organization and another one Mid-sized Mechanical Design and development for Defense products and automotive supplier Organization.

Ø  Lack of preparations and sudden call to start the PLM Implementation.

Ø  New domain and cumbersome Plant Design process of execution

Ø  Very tight project schedule to complete implementation as per the PO size.

Ø  No prior case studies and expertise guidance in the combination of chosen PLM tool and Plant Design domain.

Ø  Social responsibilities and other organizational regularities.

Ø  Pressure to meet over promises and commitments in presales phase.

Ø  Management Mind set about old PDM system and new PDM system.

Ø  Very beginning of project and no clear visionary path and objectives to drive and setting project best methodology.

Ø  Prestige and Egoism issues between many people, lack of openness, blame games etc.

Above challengers are common in the PLM implementation and we handle effectively the above stoppers, then confidently PLM implementation will be succeeded.

Bye for now,

Anil Kumar J R

Testing Environment and Deployment of Production database of PLM configuration Go-Live phase

As discussed in last post PLM service vendor develops plan of architecture of PLM system, hardware setups and other security prerequisites and later once all set in, the test Database which included OOTB offerings of PLM tool and the special functional Requirements can be customized in the tool as agreed at the scope sign-off level by both customer and service vendor. Once Test DB configured fully, service vendor will start test the system rigorously to get the output properly and effectively in front of customer’s representative. In case if any issues or miss-matches found during the testing phases will be recorded and again discussions will be done to settle out the required solutions and configuration. Once both Customer and Service vendors agreed and sign-off on the Testing Acceptance Certificate, vendor will plan for configuring the Production environment. This phase will take minimum one month to six months depending upon the Technical Scope and functional requirements in the respective organizations.

Deployment phase comes once after testing done and both representitive will be present while deploying the testing configured Database to production environment. Testing Environment database can be replicated to Prodcution ENvironemnt and in most of the PLM systems this the case and the fully tested and approved configured database will be replicated to Production environment to establish strong and robust system in place. Again after deploying Production system, one more round of testing with respect to functional, performance, hardware, will be done till it comes to level of declaring the production system is live and ready to work with users. This phase takes again a month of time depending upon the number client setup and functional setup. Once Server application, database server, vault server, PLM client installations & configurations, Integrations, etc. are completed, training will be given on functional scope of Imlemented PLM system. Once Training completed and users feel comfortable to start work in the system the service vendor will declare PLM Implementation is completed successfully and Proejct is Roll Out and its Go Live, it should be sign-off mutually to agree the project is Live phase.

Depending upon the project and its situation we can set this Go-Livep hase, service vendor will provide handhold support to users at cleitns premises for two to three weeks or a month as decided by both.

Bye for now,

Anil Kumar J R