This blog is the first ever dedicated to the pre-sales community. Bond with your fellow SEs, commiserate, collaborate, and share your passion as an SE.

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As you may have seen on our home page, a $2B client of ours drives 70% of their revenue through their channel. The average deal size is $20k. Huge volume. Amazingly, they only have 100 SCs. Without the channel, this company might need four times that many SCs.

The secret sauce is this: Make your partner SEs as smart as your own SCs. Your SCs can be responsible for technically recruiting and enabling partners. They also get involved in critical, large partner deals as requested, but the beauty is there aren’t many of those kinds of deals.

Your SCs are responsible not only for teaching partners all about your solutions, but also competitive intelligence, positioning, value messaging, best sales practices — anything to do with the pre-sales role.

As you might imagine, the results of cloning partner SEs to be like your SCs are compelling. The effect is to offload SC workload, reduce cost of sales, and grow revenue. For every SC, it would not be unreasonable to have 10 or 20 partner SE clones. It scales, it’s repeatable, and it works incredibly well.

Bottom Line: There is enormous value in empowering your SCs to technically recruit and enable partner SEs to be as smart as they are.

Those of you who use an SFA/CRM product like Siebel or Saleforce.com may have noticed something. Actually, you may not have noticed something. SFA products completely ignore the SE’s perspective on deals.

Referencing the formal pre-sales workflow analysis we did years ago, it turns out there are exactly four fields of SE specific information that is captured by an SFA product. (I’ll send a copy of “Sun Tzu Art of War / Art of Sales” to the first person who can tell me what the four fields are.)

SFA products, by and large, are glorified sales rep oriented contact management systems. They usually also include some opportunity management and capture next steps — for the sales rep. Surprisingly, SFA products are passive data collectors — they do not analyze data to proactively suggest how to grow deals or close deals faster. Not for Sales Reps, and certainly not for SEs.

I like the cartoon at Sidney Harris Cartoon. A professor has complex formulas sprawled all over his blackboard, as another professor points to a step and says, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two”, the step says, “Then a miracle occurs”. That is how SFA products treat the SE’s mission to acquire the solution decision. It’s a ton of technically oriented work, work that every SFA and sales methodology takes for granted and ignores.

So what are SEs to do? What tools can SEs use to help grow deals and reduce the time it takes to acquire a solution decision? Most organizations, if they have any SE specific tools, roll their own. Some folks hack away at their SFA product — a square peg in a round hole. We’ve seen some good home-grown tools out there. Building your own is a lot of work to develop, maintain, and mature to where they complement the SFA product well, and SEs will use them. It’s not what SEs or Field Development get paid to do.

The SE community does not have a lot of options. Build or do nothing. We at salesengineering.com are the first to commercially introduce SE specific productivity products that complement SFA products — SE Applications: See for example SEplanit. We think it’s a step in the right direction.

We are increasingly seeing a trend where companies provide their SEs product training at the *exclusion* of SE sales skills training. Sadly, it is likely that these companies will not achieve gains in revenue over the next several quarters.

SE product training enables sales but does not drive revenue.

Suppose your SEs have been selling Cars for 30 years. Now you introduce Jets. Time for the typical training by a fire hose — Bury the SEs in specs, bells and whistles, speeds and feeds. Off the SEs go into the wild blue yonder. Then comes the classic let down — Jet sales slow because SEs don’t know how to persuade people to choose Jet solutions, and, Car sales slow because, well, SEs are trying to persuade people to choose Jet solutions. The result: You lose revenue.

Ever ask yourself how much incremental revenue product training can generate? The answer is — Zero. Again, product training is necessary to enable sales, but it cannot impact sales performance metrics.

We have many examples of SE sales skills training measurably reducing the cost of sales and growing incremental revenue (independent of product training). These are compelling results driven by SEs — Deals growing 200+%. Time to solution decisions shrinking 50+%. Technical win rates growing 100+%.

SE technical competency must be accompanied by SE sales competency. Enabling sales and driving sales requires two different skills sets and therefore two different training paths.

Don’t waste your training money on product training alone.

For the financially minded, skills training can be considered an investment in Intellectual Property (IP). The CFO can declare some training as an IP asset (not an expense) which is amortized over many quarters, reducing its impact on income statements. Also consider this recent client quote, “We spent $40k on your program and got $250k back in 6 weeks.” Net net, CFOs can overcome expense or budget issues related to SE sales skills training.

“If X said it, it must be true”. X could be a Customer, Sales Rep, your manager, etc. An SE should never assume what they hear is the whole story. Always assume there is more to a story than meets the eye. Dig below the surface.

Suppose a customer says, “Here is the problem I am trying to solve…”. Do you tend to jump in and quickly begin suggesting solutions for that problem? Who is to say the customer is giving you the complete story, or that there is more to their problems below the surface?

What if instead of launching into solutions, the SE asked questions like, “What is the impact on your business from these problems?” “What is causing these problems to occur?” “Why do you need to address these problems now?”. As a rule of thumb, ask at least 3 “Why” questions about the business problem before thinking about solutions.

Asking these kinds of questions that dig beneath the skin often dredge up more business problems, more pain, more underlying issues — and these often lead to more solution and bigger deals.

Suppose a sales rep says, “Here is what the customer told me…”. Don’t take what the rep says at face value. Leverage your technical credibility to dig deeper. What is motivating the customer? What is driving their business problems? Ask why.

Which brings us to an intriguing thought. If you have been following this series of blogs, have you been assuming there are only SEven SE sins? Are more to follow? and why?

This is the sixth in a series. As an SE, if you read any of the blogs in this series and wince, ask yourself if maybe there is room for improvement. Are you wasting your time, or worse, are you wasting time and you don’t realize it! Do your teammates do the same thing? If so, perhaps your team should consider acquiring professional guidance to improve your skills.

SE Sin #6: Can’t Say No. Some SEs have a real hard time saying “No”. “No” to their sales rep. “No” to their customer. “No” to their channel partner. “No” to their manager (just kidding). They try to please everybody, and in the process, their calendar fills with tons of pointless activities. But the SE’s job isn’t to submit to everybody’s whim, their job is to sell something. Saying “No” is an important skill for an SE in prioritizing and managing control over their valuable time.

Of course, they should say “No” in a diplomatic manner. “No, and here’s why”. Invariably conflicts will arise. Attempts will be made to overrule the SE’s attempt to prioritize their time. Management should have a well-defined escalation procedure in place to address such conflicts. Both sales and SE management should trust the SE’s judgment in managing their time.

At the end of the day, the SE has to learn to just say “No”.

SE Sin #5: The Mystery SDM. Sometimes in a large meeting sales call, a stranger joins midway through. Sometimes, the SE (or sales rep) keeps right on going instead of stopping and asking, “Who is that masked man?”. Sometimes, the mystery person is our Solution Decision Maker (SDM).

One of the worst things that can happen to an SE at the critical moment of solution closure is to ask our the assumed SDM, “Do you have all the information you need to choose our solution?”, and the SDM says (in effect), “Oh, Fred needs to make that decision.” Oh No! If Fred really is the SDM and has a killer issue we didn’t know about, months of effort may have been wasted.

Be absolutely certain you know who the Solution Decision Maker is. Make no assumptions. Ask yourself two key questions: “Who does the alleged SDM take their recommendation to?” and “Can that person say ‘No’ for technical reasons?”. If the answer is “Yes” or “I don’t know”, you don’t know who the SDM is. Time to go find out, do the due diligence, and make absolutely certain.

Avoid unpleasant surprises. Know who you don’t know.

SE Sin #4: Failed Demos. During a product demo, managers hate it when an SE says “oops”. Demos should be rehearsed and bulletproof. Avoid ad hoc demos to the extent that you avoid features you’ve never tried at least once in a row. Only show the feature if you are 100% certain it will not fail.

When a customer asks, “Can it do X Y Z?”, the SE should first respond, “Why will you need that feature?” or “How will you be using that?”. Is the customer just asking out of curiousity or do they have a real need? Knowing the answer helps you determine how much time you give to the answer and to what extent you dive into the functionality, if at all.

Use demos as a closing tool, not an interest builder. Do not offer a demo until you completely understand the customer’s business problem and requirements. You can position it that you need to understand their requirements so you can provide a demo specific to their needs. Use the demo as a way to explain the quantified benefit for the customer. The pace of the demo is feature-function-quantified_value, feature-function-quantified_value. The demo is a sales tool, not a feature-blab (see sin #1).

Don’t be a demo daemon. Your job is to “sell while you teach”, so use demos as a tool of persuasion.

SE Sin #3: Automatic Proof-of-Concepts. Customer: “We’d like to bring this in for a test drive.” Sales rep: “No problem, when do you need it?”. And the poor SE is thinking, “Oh great, there goes another two months of my life”.

Knee-jerk POCs are a huge waste of time considering how many of them do not lead to revenue. To help ensure a high success rate, sales teams should routinely qualify POCs and consider alternatives to POCs.

If a POC is unavoidable, work out a test plan with the customer and get them to commit people and resources to its success. Get some skin in the game — if they don’t commit people and resources, they’re not serious.

Use POCs as a closing tool. Ask the customer to commit that if the POC is successful, they will choose your solution. If they are unwilling to make such a commitment, red flags should go up.

Avoid automatic POCs — They can be a huge waste of time.

SE Sin #2: Blind Sales Calls. Every SE has been in a sales call where they ask themselves, “What am I doing here?”. That should never ever happen. Instead, before they commit their time, the SE should ask the sales rep or channel partner a series of basic sales-worthiness questions.

For example, “What’s the business problem the customer is trying to solve?” “Why do they have to do something now?” “When do they need to make a decision?” “Who is driving the project?” “How much budget do they have to solve the whole problem?” “Who owns the budget?”. If you rep or partner can’t answer some basic questions about the deal, then you should second guess spending your time on it.

The questions assure the SE that the opportunity will be a good use of their time. There is nothing wrong in asking yourself, “Is this a good use of my time?”. Don’t get caught asking yourself, “What am I doing here?”.