Personalizing the Presentation

by Thomas M. Siebel and Michael S. Malone

For a decade, Marla Silbernagel, a salesperson at Waters Chromatography in Milford, Massachusetts, searched for more effective sales presentational materials to help her describe her company's complicated products (devices that measure the chemical components of liquids) to prospective customers. She used overhead slides, charts, "anything I could get my hands on to make my presentations more effective. I would hoard brochures, handouts, anything that might enhance my presentations." Even then, she was forced to carry stacks of three-ring binders.

By 1993, however, Silbernagel and the rest of Waters' 120-person sales force were carrying only color notebook computers. Everything in Silbernagel's stack of binders was now on a hard disk on her computer; but more than that, she can now personalize the result for each customer.

The manager behind the shift was Neal David, director of marketing systems for the company. For David, the challenge was to find a way to get all of the complex information about the company to the field and then the equally complex orders back to headquarters. Passing printed material back and forth just wasn't adequate anymore. In particular, what David concluded his company needed was a format to bring together all of the best presentations that had been created by company salespeople and then cut and paste those old presentations together to create new ones tailored for the sales opportunity at hand.

The result, using NEC notebook computers and Lotus Freelance-Graphics software, is a library database which can be accessed at any time by company salespeople. "The sales rep does not have to create a new sales presentation every time," says David. "He can browse through what's available on the server and just detach one. [He] also can take part of a presentation, or parts of several, to make up a very dynamic presentation. Our customers have been impressed by what they've seen - sales calls are more effective now, and the sales cycle time -- from the initial contact to the time the order is placed -- has shortened significantly."

The new system has transformed selling at Waters. A survey in early 1994 found that there were more than 600 users of the program throughout the company, all in de facto collaboration. In one celebrated instance, when a customer couldn't analyze a chemical sample with Waters equipment, Waters' own R&D lab did the test, then transmitted the results directly to the company salesman -- who was sitting in the customer's office.

Certainly the new program has changed the life of Marla Silbernagel: "I want to communicate to my customers the fact that I take their needs seriously and that I consider them individually," Silbernagel told Selling magazine. "Personalizing my presentations is a key factor in being able to do that_[and] we get more business because we look more professional and because these tools make us more credible."

From Virtual Selling by Thomas Siebel and Michael Malone. Copyright ©1996 by Thomas Siebel. Reprinted by permission of The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.