=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1138/re4p24
|storemode=property
|title=Pre-Sales Requirements Engineering based on Miller Heiman's Sales Approach
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1138/re4p24.pdf
|volume=Vol-1138
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/refsq/Oemig14
}}
==Pre-Sales Requirements Engineering based on Miller Heiman's Sales Approach
==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1138/re4p24.pdf
Pre-Sales Requirements Engineering based on Miller
Heiman’s Sales Approach
Christoph Oemig
Wincor Nixdorf International GmbH, Germany
christoph.oemig@wincor-nixdorf.com
Abstract. Requirements engineering (RE) is not only part of the process while
delivering or creating a service or product. In the pre-sales phase, RE activities
play an important role during the offer preparation. Although this sounds like
business as usual there is a major difference: the pre-sales phase entails chal-
lenges (e.g., a limited duration or the contractor’s pre-investment) having a tre-
mendous impact on all of these activities. However, from a project manager’s
perspective these challenges are nothing but risks—in the pre-sales phase usual-
ly addressed best by sales approaches like Miller Heiman’s. The latter appears
to be even more interesting since it uses requirements engineering strategies to
mitigate other typical sale’s risks. Therefore a joint approach appears not only
feasible but worth a try. Conducting a risk analysis of the pre-sales phase and
examining the performance of this joint approach reveals how well the two fit
together.
Keywords: Pre-sales requirements engineering, Miller Heiman Conceptual
Selling®, pre-sales risks
1 Introduction
Requirements engineering and management are typically activities associated with
the delivery or creation of a service or product. Usually a contract already exists and
everybody is ready to get to the details. Yet, a lot of requirements engineering activi-
ties already take place during the pre-sales phase. In order to prepare a reasonable
offer, the major objectives are to solve the prospective customer’s problem and to
ensure the offer is sufficiently precise providing the contractor a positive outcome,
i.e., an overall win-win situation. To meet these objectives usually the following ques-
tions have to be answered: What has to be done? Can it be done? What does it cost?
How long does it take? Typical means to answer these questions are a project calcula-
tion that is based on an effort estimation that is based on something that basically
describes what needs to be done which affords some sort of requirements engineering
activity. Although this sounds like business as usual there is a major difference: the
challenges the pre-sales phase entails and their impact on the above mentioned activi-
ties. However, neither project management nor requirements engineering alone ad-
dresses these challenges straight away with appropriate measures. From a project
manager’s perspective they are actually risks: “A risk is an uncertain event or condi-
tion that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on the projects objectives” [1].
Strategies or risk responses are needed to secure the pre-investment, eliminate uncer-
tainty and to safeguard the sale’s aftermath—strategies that typically belong to the
sales discipline.
Talking about sales nearly immediately leads to the company of Miller Heiman and
its sales approach. It provides not only appropriate risk responses sought for the pre-
sales phase: these sales expert realized that merely pushing products or services might
not meet the client’s expectations and even introduces the risk of losing a potential
contract [2]. Listening to the customer first suddenly becomes en vogue or rather a
risk response for sales people—a strategy typically used by requirement engineers.
Therefore a combined approach appears not only to be feasible but to be worth a try.
This paper introduces such a joint approach based on Miller Heiman. In order to
support the idea, the first section outlines the most important risks of the pre-sales
phase. The following section briefly describes the Miller Heiman approach and con-
tributes its risk responses (mostly mitigation strategies). Yet, the Miller Heiman ap-
proach also entails its own risks (aka secondary risks [1]) which are responded by
requirements engineering measures eventually followed by this paper’s final conclu-
sions.
2 Pre-Sales Challenges—The Risks
The pre-sales phase involves lots of challenges. This section focusses on the ones
having the greatest impact on the activities of the contractor. Each one of them is
assigned a name followed by a short description and the area of impact. However, this
list claims not to be comprehensive:
1. Limited time: the duration of the pre-sales phase is limited. Usually there is not
enough time for a detailed requirements analysis which adds a large degree of un-
certainty to the effort estimation and all dependent tasks. All activities are affected
by this, thus they have to be very efficient and focused on the items necessary.
2. Competition: the pre-sales phase is shared with competitors trying to close the
deal on their end. The final offer and solution description has to point out how and
why a solution is the right one for the customer.
3. Pre-investment (time/money): the pre-sales phase takes place at the expense of
the potential contractor. This investment is lost if a competitor closes the deal. All
activities have to prove in advance that they are worth the effort.
4. Bargaining/Negotiating: the pre-sales phase involves a great deal of negotiation.
All negotiation activities must ensure that the contractor is not the loser in the end,
i.e., the outcome of the deal must be acceptable for the contractor.
5. Limited trust: the pre-sales phase not always but often stands at the beginning of a
business relationship where there is only limited trust on both sides. If that is the
case trust building activities have to be considered.
6. Unknown organization and decision making: the pre-sales phase not always but
often stands at the beginning of a business relationship where it is unclear how the
customer’s organization and decision making works. Yet, talking to the wrong
people equates to wasting time and risking the investment. If unknown, activities
revealing this information have to be considered.
7. Fragility: the pre-sales phase may be over before it started. It might also abort due
to reasons that have nothing to do with the proposed solution, i.e., there are other
factors than just technical details. Feelings and attitudes have the potential to break
deals even if the solution offered ranks best of breed.
8. Right time: especially when driven by the contractor, it needs to be determined if
it is the right time for the prospective customer to be approached, otherwise the ef-
fort will be a waste of time and money.
9. Seriousness of interest: not always but sometimes the customer’s interest might
be fake just to acquire some external proficiency or feedback for free (or rather at
the contractor’s expense). It must be possible to derive a discrepancy which urges
him to find a solution. Seriousness is also underlined by providing a budget and
staff that can make decisions.
10. Buying is not selling: both are not one but two processes which need to be
aligned. Disregarding the difference leads to wrong assumptions, e.g., that the cus-
tomer is about to sign the contract only because the contractor reached the end of
his selling process.
All of the above items require risk responses (i.e., actions to avoid, transfer, miti-
gate, or accept a given risk [1]). They also have in common that they allow defining
exit criteria—certain levels at which the contractor ought to quit the pre-sales phase.
This definition of exit criteria is another major difference to the regular “post-sales”
requirements engineering.
3 Mitigating Primary Risks—The Sales Risk Responses
This section introduces the Miller Heiman approach and presents the measures or
risk responses it uses to address the challenges mentioned in the previous section.
3.1 The Miller Heiman Sales Approach in a Nutshell
Miller Heiman is one of the top five companies in sales performance providing
game-changing insights to sales leaders for nearly the last four decades. Their Strate-
gic Selling® [3] and Conceptual Selling® [2] approaches bundle their long-term sales
expertise and experience into methods and tools. This paper focuses on Conceptual
Selling® which aims at the individual sales session while Strategic Selling® provides
a framework for multiple customer interactions gathering feedback from several di-
rections. The central objective of Conceptual Selling® is to get access to the custom-
er’s concept, who wants to achieve, fix, or avoid something for a certain reason. The
approach seeks to find this discrepancy and root cause first, before promoting a spe-
cific product or service requiring the sales staff to listen actively rather than talk. Buy-
ing reason and buying influencers have to be determined since the “customer buys for
her reasons, not yours“[2]. A sales session is comprised of three major building
blocks: “Getting information”, “Giving information”, and “Getting commitment”. The
first tries to capture the customer’s concept by questioning, the second aims to build
specific links to the product or service being offered, and the third negotiates further
customer contributions to the overall process. Especially the third part is to ensure a
win-win situation, a central goal of the approach.
The part “Getting information” provides a questioning framework consisting of
“Confirmation questions”, “New information questions”, and “Attitude questions”.
These check and confirm already existing knowledge about the customer, collect new
aspects of the customer’s concept, and even go beyond technical details by asking for
attitudes and feelings. The Green Sheet is the Conceptual Selling® tool. It helps pre-
paring the session and provides structure and guidance for the abovementioned parts.
3.2 Risk Responses
As a sales approach Miller Heiman provides appropriate responses to the risks of
the pre-sales phases introduced earlier:
1. Limited time: the approach has a strong emphasis on preparation and a strong fo-
cus on the things needed especially expressed by its tool, the Green Sheet.
2. Competition: the approach explicitly requires providing information connecting
customer needs to product/service attributes and to build a dedicated and unique
selling position, which might be more expensive but truly addressing the custom-
er’s need.
3. Pre-investment: the approach explicitly asks why a sales session should take place
from a customer’s perspective and records it as buying reason on the Green Sheet.
A reason for selling is recorded as well. The approach further secures the contrac-
tor’s investment by explicitly asking for customer commitment or otherwise exit.
4. Bargaining/Negotiating: the concept’s central objective is to stay win-win. It
strongly recommends to quit rather than to accept a losing situation for either the
contractor or the customer.
5. Limited trust: the concept and the Green Sheet have a section on trust building
measures, if needed
6. Unknown organization and decision making: the approach contains a detailed
buying influencer analysis. Asking to reveal the decision making process should be
one of the first commitment questions.
7. Fragility: the approach urges its users to look for basic issues and to find them by
using attitude questions. They are marked as “red flags” which mark situations that
have to be taken care of in the tools (e.g., the Green Sheet).
8. Right time: it is mentioned in the concept to address the right people with the right
solution at the right time, though it is not explicitly mentioned in the Green Sheet.
Yet, it can be conceived as part of the buying reason which is to be phrased from
the customer’s perspective.
9. Seriousness of interest: this is monitored by asking for the customer’s commit-
ment, e.g., to provide a budget in combination with offering refunds when closing
the deal instead of free incentives. Another approach is to use the discrepancy
analysis to find out if the customer has true reasons for his interest.
10. Buying is not selling: Miller Heiman explicitly differentiates selling and buying
processes and strongly monitors the buying process using commitments requested
from the customer.
As already mentioned, each of the risk responses allows defining criteria or situations
when the contractor should exit or quit the pre-sales activities in order to save his pre-
investment or not to start an unfavorable business relationship. On the other end, signs
or reasons that the customer might quit for are marked with red flags in the tool.
4 Mitigating Secondary Risks – The Requirements Engineering
Risk Responses
Miller Heiman addresses nearly all of the pre-sales risks, while at the same time,
introducing new ones. Risks like these are also known as secondary risks which are
introduced by risk responses to other risks [1]. However, for the case of Miller
Heiman these can be handled in turn by typical requirements engineering activities or
strategies.
1. No documentation guideline: while Miller Heiman provides a questioning
framework it does not provide any guidelines on how to document the results. User
stories [4] may prove to be useful. They employ a common format and can be
handed over easily to the delivery unit to give them a jump start. These should be
complemented by the “five whys” [5] which allow to track down the root cause
which helps revealing and documenting the original discrepancy.
2. No glossary: Miller Heiman does not prescribe creating a glossary for the terms
used by the customer. Yet, these are an integral part of his concept. In order to
avoid misunderstandings leading to false effort estimates it is strongly recommend-
ed to create one.
3. No scoping guideline: the scoping is left to the skills of the one using the ques-
tioning framework. There is no guideline or tool section guiding the scoping pro-
cess. Yet, scoping is ultimately needed to deliver precise efforts estimates. System
and context have to be defined and documented which turns out to be even more
important than researching the details for each single use case at this point.
4. Only Kano performance attributes: the way Miller Heiman works, i.e., with its
questioning framework, entails that only Kano performance attributes [6] get rec-
orded while missing especially basic attributes which might account for a lot of ex-
tra effort. There are two ways to mitigate this risk: one is transparency by docu-
menting the elicitation method and using increased risk buffers. Another is to com-
plement further methods and techniques capturing additional attributes, e.g. obser-
vations.
Once secondary risks have been taken care of, this joint pre-sales requirements engi-
neering approach promises to deliver reliable results while securing the pre-
investment and handing over a win-win contract to the delivery unit.
5 Conclusions
This paper showed briefly that the major differences between pre- and post-sales
requirements engineering are the phase specific risks, their risk responses (mainly
mitigation strategies), and exit criteria that have to be defined. Mitigation strategies
are borrowed from Miller Heiman’s sales approach, for sales approaches have been
dealing with these risks ever since. Additionally, it proved to be very helpful that
Miller Heiman can be easily combined with requirements engineering activities since
this sales approach uses a very similar focus—the customer’s concept. On the other
hand requirements engineering helps out with the secondary risks Miller Heiman
introduces.
However, this can only be a brief overview. A lot more could be said about the
Green Sheet and its application, or the not even yet mentioned Blue Sheet, about buy-
ing influencer and discrepancy analyses, as well as red flags, the joint venture ap-
proach or the use of golden silence. Other topics skipped completely are the bidding
process or dealing with Requests for Information (RfI) or Requests for Proposal (RfP)
about which Miller Heiman sales people have a certain opinion.
Last but not least this paper should also encourage requirements engineering pro-
fessionals to acquire sales knowledge since they either actively participate in pre-sales
phase or have to deal with its outcome later as part of the delivery unit.
References
1. PMI: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: PMBOK (5. Ed), PMI
2013
2. Miller, R., Heiman, S., Tuleja, T.: The New Conceptual Selling. (2. Ed.). Kogan Page,
2011
3. Miller, R., Heiman, S., Tuleja, T.: The New Strategic Selling. (3. Ed.). Kogan Page, 2011
4. Cohn, M.: User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (1. Ed.) Addison &
Wesley 2004
5. IIBA: A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge: BABOK 2.0, IIBA 2009
6. Kano, N., Tsuji, S., Seraku, N., Takahashi, F.: Attractive Quality and Must-be Quality.
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