Jul 27 2008
Selling Geek podcast #8 - Adobe Acrobat 9
Sales professionals live and die by the quality of their communications with customers and prospects. Misunderstandings lead only to incorrect expectations – for the buyer, the seller, or both – which lead ultimately to bad feelings at best, or bad business at worst. And as a result, the best salespeople take extra care to keep their communications clear and well documented.
However, in this age of electronic file transfers and computer-based word processing, documents are easily changed. That’s great for accelerating negotiations and closing business, but it also means that misunderstandings can creep easily into proposals, price quotations, contracts and agreements.
I learned this lesson the hard way. I remember one potential buyer that I worked with several years ago. I’d provided them with a summary of pricing for my services, sent to them in a common word processing file. We quickly came to an agreement to do business together. And then the trouble started.
I wrote up a contract, using my original price quotation as a basis, and sent it to my prospect. But then I received an urgent phone call.
“What the *&%@ is this?!”, my prospect exclaimed.
“Uh, that’s the contract for services – is there a problem?”, I stammered.
“You bet your @$$ there is! This isn’t what we agreed to at all!”, he retorted.
After some investigation, I discovered that someone had edited my original quotation, inserting services they wanted me to provide – at no additional cost – and they had “forgotten” to send the amended quote back to me. Well, no wonder I’d thought that sale was so easy – someone had inserted a 50% discount into my original pricing, and neglected to tell me about it!
I tried to explain to my prospect that someone had changed my original quote, and that I couldn’t deliver the services they wanted at those prices. But they wouldn’t listen – their unreasonable expectations had been set, and no amount of diplomacy on my part would deter them from their position. In the end, we agreed not to agree – and I lost the business.
Behold: PDF, Protector of Sales Pros
I vowed henceforth never to let such a mistake happen again, and after a little research, I found a solution: Adobe Acrobat, which enables you to produce documents in the Portable Document Format, also known as PDF.
A PDF file retains all the graphics, fonts, illustrations, charts, pictures and formatting of the original document, and it can be viewed on virtually any platform. In other words, PDFs allow you to produce documents that will appear exactly as you produced them, no matter what kind of computer system your recipient uses.
Even more important to sales pros, PDFs can be made un-changeable. So, you can produce price quotations, RFP responses, proposals, contracts and agreements, secure in the knowledge that someone isn’t going to mess with your carefully worded content. For salespeople that depend on crisp, clear communications – and who among us doesn’t? – PDFs are a very cool thing indeed.
Now, Adobe has released a major update to Acrobat, version 9. And this latest version includes a lot of new features that enable document creators to get… well, very creative, if they are so inclined. But are the new enhancements in Acrobat 9 useful for sales professionals?
Don’t be stingy
Perhaps only to torment buyers with difficult choices, Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors: Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended, with progressively more features in each version. Although you’ll be tempted to save some money and acquire one of the cheaper versions of Acrobat 9, I recommend that you don’t do it. If you deliver presentation files to customers, and you use Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, you’ll want the Pro Extended version for that integration feature alone. Also, the Pro Extended version provides many more options for converting and embedding a wider variety of file formats into PDFs, which just flat-out makes it safer and simpler to use.
You’ll also need some pretty hefty hardware to run Acrobat 9 – if you don’t have at least a 1.3GHz processor running Windows Vista or XP, or a comparable Macintosh, then you’re going to find using Acrobat 9 to be a maddeningly slow experience.
Now, multimedia PDFs
Prior versions of PDF files were great for protecting static documents, or some limited interactive forms. But Acrobat 9 now includes support for embedded multi-media content. Now, if you wish, your PDFs can play convert movies in eight different formats into embedded Flash content.
Imagine what this means for your sales proposals. You could create a company introduction movie using a tool like Camtasia Studio 5, for example, and insert it into a clickable box inside your proposal. Your prospect only has to click on the movie box to watch your recording, all inside your protected proposal file.
That, as I’ve said before, is a very cool thing indeed.
You can embed all sorts of other useful multi-media content into PDFs with Acrobat 9. If you sell online products or services, for example, Acrobat 9 will take snapshots of Web pages and convert them to a PDF that includes links and screen animation. If you sell services that require communications about physical locations, you can insert interactive maps that allow users to mark locations and measure distances. For sellers of products requiring technical designs, you can embed interactive 3D models from CAD applications.
Online document collaboration and forms
Acrobat 9 also includes access to Adobe Systems’ online community, Acrobat.com. You can post documents to the community, and use it to collaboratively edit and comment on those documents with prospects. Now you can have one copy of a document and build it together with a prospect, and then mutually agree on the final result.
Oh, if only I had this when I had my earlier trouble with my edit-happy prospect.
You can also use Acrobat 9 to set up online intelligent forms, with full tracking capability. You could use this to set up marketing event registration, for example, and then use the data collected to send reminders or distribute supporting literature.
Acrobat’s best feature: document security
With all of these neat new features, it’d be easy to overlook Acrobat 9’s fundamental ability to lock down your carefully crafted documents. Acrobat 9 enables you to produce PDF documents from any application from which you can print, or from Acrobat 9 itself. Your document recipient does not need the full Adobe Acrobat 9 application to be able to view what you send to them. Rather, they only need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program, which will now support viewing of all your embedded multi-media content, if you decide to include it.
In addition to using Acrobat to lock down price quotes and proposals, I’ve also found it to be very useful for protecting intellectual property. For example, I can use Acrobat to show samples of proprietary training program materials. It doesn’t completely prevent dedicated thieves from stealing my content, of course, but it makes it lot more difficult to copy than if I’d sent it in editable form, such as in Microsoft PowerPoint format.
Prepare to pay a lot for Acrobat 9
Adobe Acrobat 9 isn’t inexpensive: the Standard edition costs US$299, Pro costs $449, and Pro Extended costs $699. Also, Adobe’s tiered support plans are not cheap, ranging from US$175 to $1,200.
Sales Pro Value Score
Despite all of its new features, Acrobat 9 is still relatively easy to use. It includes very well documented help and tutorial videos to guide you if you get lost. But make no mistake, there is a lot of functionality here, and a lot of details as you get deeper into some of the more esoteric capabilities. To truly master Acrobat 9, you will need to study it and use it for several weeks, at least. But if all you want to do is produce protected PDF documents that look great, you can get good results in about 20 minutes after you first install the product.
So, although it is certainly not cheap, and has a long learning curve, Adobe Acrobat 9 is a valuable tool for sales pros who produce important documents. For its ability to embed multi-media content, excellent security, ease of use, and support for online collaborative document editing, Selling Geek gives Adobe Acrobat 9 a Sales Pro Value Score of 3.5 out of a possible 5.
Additional resources
- Even if you don’t buy the full Acrobat 9 product, everyone should at least download the free Acrobat Reader — see this review from CNET for more information.
- This list of PDF-related software applications provides some useful file converters, managers, creators and viewers.
UPDATE: Adobe Systems’ portable document format (PDF) has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard.
Links to resources mentioned in the show:
In this special episode of the Selling Geek podcast, we interview 
Michael Arrington at 
It’s time for sales professionals to recognize that a shift in behavior is taking place today. Just as the introduction of voicemail in the 80’s changed how businesses operate, so too are text-based alternatives now affecting how people interact. Continuing to bang one’s head against the insurmountable voicemail wall makes as much sense as trying to sell “riding on a smile and a shoeshine” - and that wasn’t effective in Death of a Salesman either.
