Read All About It!
First Ever Blog for the SE Community
Harvard Business Review Letter to the Editor
On Dec 7, 2007 SEplanit, the first Pre-Sales Force Automation (PSFA) product, became generally available.
SEplanit is a web-based Technical Opportunity Planner (TOP) and Management Dashboard specifically designed to assist pre-sales staff in the analysis of their opportunities toward reducing their cost of sales and driving incremental revenue.
SEplanit adds value and complements SFA products -- Unlike traditional SFAs that passively collect data, SEplanit is the first “Smart PSFA” product that actively analyzes data to make suggestions that impact crucial SE performance metrics. "Alerts" are reported to SEs and managers for deals that demand attention due to issues of effort vs. payback, time to closure, data impurities, etc.
SEplanit structures the ability to improve Pre-Sales Engineering performance by:
- Increasing the number of qualified deals to improve the funnel quality
- Growing deals
- Reducing the time to solution closure
- Increasing the win rate
SEplanit helps SEs manage their critical deals by:
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Through a highly visible and configurable dashboard, SE Managers monitor SE performance metrics such as solution sales funnel revenue and quality, time to solution closure, and solution win rate.
Introductory pricing is available through Feb 15, 2008. Click here to see a demo of SEplanit.
SEskills V4 now leverages well-established project management and engineering techniques structure which resonate with the SE to enable an efficient, consistent, scalable, and predictable solution sales process. Within the project, many engineering techniques are employed such as structured qualification, checklists, modeling, divide and conquer, reverse engineering and peer reviews.
Through a patent pending Solution Sales Process, SEskills V4 empoweres SEs to reduce their cost of sales and grow revenue. 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 example, a 10% improvement every quarter in each of the four key metrics can result in a 48% improvement in bottom line revenue. One sales district of a $1.8B client measured 425% revenue growth after 6 months of pre-sales skills improvement.
The Solution Sales Process in SEskills V4 complements any sales methodology in use by the sales organization. This unique design ensures that the SE and sales executive are aligned in their sales strategies and tactics. |
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The Key Steps of the SEskills V4 Improvement Program – A program of best practice adoption and reinforcement:
- Evaluate – Assess the SE’s skills and behaviors
- Endorse – Gain management support and develop an SEskills Management Implementation Plan
- Educate – Process, project management, and engineering best practices are applied to the SE role
- Embed – Management operationalizes the procedures, policies, adoption incentives, reinforcement programs, and SE productivity tools defined in the Implementation Plan
- Enumerate – SE management monitors, assesses and measures improvement
To operationalize best practices toward achieving measured benefits, the SEskills V4 Improvement Program immerses the SE into process use. Training applies best practices to live opportunities on the spot where it is common for strategies to be developed that meaningfully move deals forward. Using the Implementation Plan developed during the pre-training Executive Implementation Planning Workshop, management and SEDC implement a program of post-training reviews and reinforcement that fosters regular use of new skills.
Reinforcement of best practices is supported by unique SE productivity products, called SE Applications, designed specifically for the pre-sales role. SE Applications includes SEplanit, a Technical Opportunity Planner (TOP) and Management Dashboard. See the related news story.
First Ever Blog for the SE Community
We are pleased to announce that salesengineering.com now supports the first ever blog specifically dedicated to the interests of the pre-sales community. The blog is moderated by salesengineering.com staff including Phil Janus, Founder and CTO. Initial topics include:
- Solution Sales Process
- Sales methodologies and the pre-sales role
- Tools for pre-sales – All shapes and sizes
- The SE / sales rep relationship
- Tricks of the trade for demos and/or proofs of concepts
- War stories: Glorious successes and failures
- Pre-sales career paths
Other topics will be added as they are identified by our fellow bloggers.
Harvard Business Review Letter to the Editor
Click here to see our Letter to the Editor for the Harvard Business Review’s November 2006 issue, “Sales”. We note the issue’s effectiveness in discussing the challenges in improving sales performance, yet there is no mention at all of pre-sales performance.
We believe that the most dramatic improvements in revenue generation can be achieved through pre-sales performance improvement since generally most organizations have never done anything in the way of pre-sales performance interventions.