When the Presentation Is the Configuration

by Thomas M. Siebel and Michael S. Malone

In retrospect, one of the most telling features of the traditional model of face-to-face selling is how unintegrated it is. First, you identify a qualified prospect. Then you make the pitch, which is often deliberately tangential and only remotely connected to the sale itself. This is the story telling phase, and once you detect signals from the potential customer you quickly switch out of this mode and into the configuration mode. This second interval is relatively brief because traditionally there aren't that many options. ("We got it in any color you want, as long as it is black.") Then, once you've roughly determined the customer's taste (and psychologically gotten them to make their first commitment) you then launch into a programmatic close.

What most sales automation tools accomplish is to accentuate your ability to perform the first three tasks. The underlying model remains essentially intact.

But if we look at the same process through the lens of virtual selling, odd things begin to happen. In particular, the walls between the steps begin to disappear.

Consider the case of 3M Telecom Systems. In 1994, this 3M division announced that it would be conducting field trials of new multimedia software for its sales force's laptop computers. This software would manage onboard CD-ROM drives in the laptops which would contain the catalogs, product data sheet, and promotional materials covering all of the company's 750 products and many times that number of accessories. According to James Diaz, the company's international marketing services manager, the system "will contain text and photos plus animation sequences that show how products work."

Now, imagine you are a 3M Telecom salesperson using one of these laptops on a customer visit. You open up the computer and launch into a presentation. You are showing colorful promotion graphics, demonstrating products, and pulling up spec sheets into windows on the computer screen. With perhaps twenty thousand different product combinations, how do you know what to talk about? You ask the customer. What are your current needs? Are there any special performance requirements? How about accessories? Do you have a budget for this purchase? The answers you get tell you what presentation tools to draw up next. Notice that in pulling up both catalog and promotional materials you are covering both sides of the charmer/techie coin.

But also notice something else: The presentation is the configuration. By the time you've interactively customized your pitch to the prospective customer's needs, you also have managed to not only gather reams of knowledge about the customer that will be useful in the future, but also designed the product that the customer wants. More precisely, both of you have done the designing. Therefore, your customer, by joining in the presentation, finds himself two-thirds of the way through the entire sales process.

One interesting side effect of virtual selling is that it not only focuses the process down upon the most appropriate configuration of a particular product for a customer but, when that pathway proves unacceptable (because the company doesn't make that product configuration, the customer really doesn't know what he or she wants, etc.), it also allows you to smoothly change directions. For example, at Hewlett-Packard, Jim Kucharczyk, the national manager of sales programs for computer products, says, "The best compliment I've received is that this system eliminates the 'I'll get back to you' syndrome. Deals are closed on the spot because, if the customer inquires about another product, the rep has been able to pull up the necessary data [on the computer], rather than leave and return with another three-ring binder."

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.