Shadowing Experience

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The best way to understand something is to experience it. With that sprit in mind, I shadowed one the professional salespeople from my current company to observe an onsite sales call, and hopefully better understand the role of a salesperson. I accompanied Reese Stern, an Advanced Technology Account Executive (ATAE) from CDW. The following essay will summarize this shadowing experience
CDW is one the largest value added technology resellers in the United States. We sell just about any business related technology product you can think of, with more than 1,000 partner logos. Reese in the ATAE role, as the title implies, focuses on advanced technology. This is a subset of the total CDW portfolio, covering data center solutions like; servers,
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On the ride over I asked Reese some questions about what he likes and dislikes about his job and some the sales tools made available to him. He told me his favorite part of the job is making friends (he considers many of his customers as personal friends) and helping his customers solve problems and look good to their respective management. He told me one of his least favorite aspects of the job is if a customer is wasting his time. He gave an example of a particular customer that was always asking to go out to lunch and for tickets to events we host, but would never actually do any business with him. Regarding the question about sales tools, Reese discussed our home grown CRM and sales ordering tool called SPR. He told me that the tool is great for keeping customer contact information and notes as well as being a great tool to lookup sales orders and customers purchase history. The only thing that Reese didn’t like about the tool was its pipeline reporting …show more content…
Most of his prospecting is within his existing accounts, trying to meet new contacts or build relationship at a higher level in the organization. Additionally, he told me that one of his most successful prospecting techniques is to have Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with his existing customers. In a QBR, Reese will present to the customer on what business they have done with CDW over the previous quarter and ask the customer what initiatives they have coming in the future quarter or coming year. One of the things that Reese explained to me is there is a lot of pressure from his management team to accurately project his sales forecast, he has to report it weekly.
The sales call that Reese brought me to was for a Law Firm that wanted to discuss virtualizing their client desktop experience. This was the first meeting on the topic with this customer. The presentation style implored by the ATAE was to make it conversational, asking pointed questions and mostly letting the customer do the talking while he feverishly took notes. Whenever the customer would pause enough to indicate they were done, Reese read back or reiterated what he heard and clearly defined follow-up actions that would lead to another