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The Return on Product vs. Skills Training |
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There is always a new product coming out, always a need to learn the latest bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, knobs and dials. How much will revenue grow after SEs are flea dipped through a week of intense product training? Can you put a specific revenue number on it? Probably not.
It turns out that you can put a specific number on revenue growth for SE sales skills. The number is conservatively 48% revenue growth in 6 months and 122% in 4 quarters, and likely a lot larger.
Here's why. Let's say that SE sales skills training measurably improves their # of qualified deals, deal size, win rate, and time to solution closure each 5% per quarter. This is a very conservative performance target, and is easy to achieve assuming (big assumption) there is management commitment to the cause.
These modest improvements can result in a 22% growth in revenue incrementally every quarter. As a result, if training and honing of skills is in Q1, then the improvement from the start through Q2 is 48%, Q3 is 81%, and Q4 is 122%.
One of our clients improved the revenue growth of their pilot deals 425% in 2 quarters. It took hands-on executive and management commitment, it took reallocating budget from product training to sales training, but the results were compelling.
Can your product training generate those kinds of returns? Probably not.
The next time you hear somebody say we don't have the time or budget for SE sales skills training, please send them this newsletter. In any business, lack of balance between hard and soft skills training is short-sighted and costly. Make the time - It's worth the investment. |
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We've Launched SEskills Version 4 Improvement Program
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We are pleased to announce the launch of SEskills Version 4, "Project Managing the Solution Sale". SEskills V4 uses proven project management techniques to reduce cost of sales and grow revenue through pre-sales performance improvements The project management phases in SEskills Version 4 are requirements analysis, planning, execution, and solution closure. Engineering techniques are employed such as structured qualification, checklists, modeling, divide and conquer, reverse engineering, project planning, and peer reviews.
Through a patent pending Solution Sales Process, SEskills V4 provides best pre-sales practices to promote faster, repeatable, and predictable solution closures. Pre-sales engineers measurably improve the quality of their funnel, increase their revenue configuration sizes, increase their solution win rate, and decrease their time to solution closure. Even modest improvements in these key pre-sales performance metrics can result in compelling long-term meaningful growth to bottom line sales.
For additional information about SEskills please visit www.salesengineering.com |
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SEplanit -- The First Pre-Sales Force Automation Tool |
Soon we will launch SEplanit, 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 has been remarkably successful and stable. Already, beta customers are reporting excellent results and manageability from SEplanit. One SE team, with the help of SEplanit for several months, closed an 8 figure, multi-year deal and predicted solution decision closure to within 3 weeks of accuracy. Says the SE Director, "I can't imagine not using SEplanit."
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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