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Leveraging The Partner SE Army |
We hear lots of stories of Sales Engineering (SE) teams who are overworked, living on airplanes, and on the edge of burnout. Hiring more SEs is not always practical given how hard it is to justify and fund new head-count and recruit qualified candidates.
Another approach to offload SE resources is to leverage your partner's SEs. The more self sufficient a partner SE is in selling your solutions, the less your own SE will need to do. Again, this is easier said than done, but here are some approaches to consider.
Give Partners the Same Training: Make your partner SE as smart as your own SE. Strive to have your company co-fund product and sales training for your partner SEs. It is in both your best interests. The smarter the partner SE, the less the partner will rely on your SE resources to make sales, and the faster they will be able make sales on their own.
Give Partners the Same Sales Intelligence: Proactively provide partner SEs with your internal field intelligence. Give them all your objection handling, value messaging, competitive knock-offs, product demos, proof-of-concept processes, etc. Regularly update this information -- Even better, put it into a shared database accessible to both organizations.
Give Partners a Mentoring Program: Mandate that each of your SEs mentor a set of partner SEs at all times. Have your SE walk the partner SE through all your training, marketing collateral, sales processes, etc. When one partner SE completes the program, your SE nominates another partner SE to take their place and begin the journey.
A goal in this controversial selling model is that direct customer contact is maximized through partner SEs and minimized with your own SEs! Yes, this flies in the face of a direct selling model, but the alternatives are either to hire more SEs, or leverage others. You may be familiar with the investment mantra, "leverage other people's money" -- Here we are leveraging other people's SEs.
To realize this model, change may be needed in your working relationship with your partner, business policies, incentive plans, and selling culture. Despite these challenges, each SE Manager can implement a portion of these ideas and begin off-loading their team's heavy workload by leveraging the partner SE army.
In our next newsletter, we will look at specific approaches to empowering SEs to improve their impact on driving revenue. |
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Official Launch of SEplanit |
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SEplanit will enter general release on December 7, 2007. It is a pre-sales force  automation tool designed to drive technical sales productivity, reduce pre-sales costs, increase visibility into pre-sales performance, and expand revenues.
SEplanit's beta period was a complete success. Beta customers are reporting excellent results.
Traditional sales force automation tools focus on achieving business closure, ignoring the activities of the pre-sales technical team even though their role directly impacts deal size and cost of sales. SEplanit complements existing sales force automation tools by helping the sales team achieve efficient and repeatable solution closure.
By default, SEplanit's configurable dashboard for Managers and SEs includes many "alert views" into SE opportunities that demand immediate attention, such as deals that are taking too long, deals that are predicted to close soon but are still unqualified, and deals that do not have a good effort-payback potential. SEplanit's Technical Opportunity Planner helps SEs know what they don't know about their opportunities, get to "No" quickly, and make optimal use of their valuable time.
You can see a flash demo of SEplanit at www.salesengineering.com |
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Sincerely,
Philip Janus
Founder & CTO salesengineering.com | |
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