Frequently Asked Questions
To help in your understanding of how the Solution Sales Process and SE Skills Improvement Program might apply to your pre-sales organization, below are a few questions we are asked fairly regularly.
If you have a question that is not addressed below, feel free to send us your own Question.
Why do SEs need specialized training? Why not just send SEs through standard sales methodology training? Won’t they get the same benefit?
We are reminded of a cartoon by Sidney Harris. A university professor has a blackboard full of esoteric equations, and right in the middle is the phrase, "Then a miracle occurs". That's how sales methodologies treat the notion of Solution Closure. They just assume miracles happen.
In fact, it takes specialized skills on the part of SEs to acquire the solution decision. Salesengineering.com's program is unique in showing SEs how to "project manage" achievement of solution closure. By contrast, sales methodologies show sales reps how to achieve business closure. Solution closure is almost never discussed -- it just happens... somehow.
Ask any SE who has been through sales methodology training how much of it applies to their job role. You'll typically hear answers in the 30-50% range. Most SEs resent being "flea dipped" through sales training, and most sales managers do not want to waste more than half of their skills investment money on something that does not resonate with their pre-sales team.
The pre-sales role is highly technical in nature. Sales methodology is not technical in nature. One thing that makes salesengineering.com unique is that our patent pending Solution Sales Process applies about a dozen engineering principles to the pre-sales roles -- And SEs love that! Within the first few minutes of training, most SEs are saying to themselves, "Ok, this is for me. I'm definitely going to get something out of this."
In addition to leveraging engineering principles, we apply a set of very specific sales best practices tailored to the SE's role to help further increase their effectiveness at shrinking sales cycles, better qualifying deals to improve the quality of the funnel, growing deal sizes, and increasing win rates.
What do you mean when you say your Solution Sales Process "plugs into" any sales methodology?
Every sales methodology is fundamentally the same (think about it) having a handful of high level phases: Identify, Qualify, Develop, and Close (refer to the diagram on the Pre-Sales Solutions page).
As sales reps and SEs work through their respective sales cycles, they each manage data specific to their roles. Along the way, there are about a dozen critical points where data (sales intelligence) needs to be shared -- We call these "Touch Points". It does not matter where in the respective sales cycles the Touch Point happens, but that it does.
For example, as prescribed by their respective sales cycles, the rep leverages their relationships to gather qualification from business constituents and the SE leverages their credibility to gather qualification from technical constituents, who are more forthright. In the Touch Point, they assess discrepancies in the stories they are hearing.
In this manner, at a data level, the Solution Sales Process plugs into any sales methodology cleanly and easily.
Does your Solution Sales Process have to be aligned with our existing sales methodology to be successful?
Believe it or not, the answer is a resounding "No!"
In fact, the outstanding results for the TechCo Case Study were achieved with very little alignment between their sales methodology and our Solution Sales Process (SSP). What is needed is a commitment that vital conversations to share sales intelligence will happen.
For optimal impact we do recommend that pre-sales and sales management promote and support proper alignment and engagement between the SEs and sales reps.
What benefits does the Solution Sales Process provide for sales reps?
There are many. Sales reps gain back time they had been spending on technical constituents, on technical activities, on unnecessary four-legged sales calls, and on follow-up activities with their SEs. With new best practices, SEs help grow the reps' deals, shorten the time to the solution decision, identify more better qualified deals, and increase the win rate. See the AcmeTech and TechCo Case Studies which document measured results.
Does sales management need to buy into the Solution Sales Process to be successful?
Absolutely! Sales management support is a critical success factor.
Positive reinforcement of behavior change is critical for a quick and successful adoption cycle. Learning best practices is one thing, applying them over the long-term requires behavioral change within the teams. We have found that when sales management is not bought into the program, the likelihood of a slow adoption cycle or even no adoption at all is increased. Cultural inertia is very difficult to defeat when there is no sales management support.
How long does it take to achieve benefit from the Solution Sales Process?
It depends on many factors. Some improvements, such as incremental better qualified deals, begin to take hold in the first month or two. Other improvements, such as time to solution closure, may take four to six months or even more depending on the length of your typical solution sales cycle.
We’re rolling out major products to the field and our SEs need lots of product training. Why should we spend money on soft skills?
This is a tradeoff between technical competency and potential long-term revenue benefit. Keep in mind, the SE's job is first to bring revenue in the door. To do so, they need two primary skill sets: Sales skills and technical competency. There must be a balance in these skills. Shoving SEs through a fire hose of technical training can be counter productive, as would a steady stream of soft skills training.
What we can say for sure is that improved solution sales skills will more likely bring more revenue in the door faster than product training alone. Contact Us so we can work with you to assess some key pre-sales metrics and provide a sense for the quarterly revenue improvement you might expect.
My team really needs objection handling / presentation skills / proof of concept skills. Can you help?
Yes we do offer tactical pre-sales skills improvement. Again, our advice is to strike a balance between tactical and strategic pre-sales skills. Tactical skills improvement do not, directly, contribute to accelerated revenue. We believe the value and return of new skills is greatly increased when tactical skills improvement is provided in the context of strategic skills improvement. For example, we teach objection handling as part of our core offering in the context of systematically resolving stakeholder decision criteria and solution issues.
What value do you provide senior SEs who have been at the role for 10, 15 years?
SEs who have been through standard sales methodology training will see similarities in some aspects of the Solution Sales Process (SSP). What is new and unique to SEs (and part of the pending patent) is the use of engineering principles as applied to best practices. They've never seen that before (because it's never existed before). SEs appreciate that the Solution Sales Process is specifically designed for SEs in SE's terms. The SSP talks about everything involved in achieving the solution decision, which is unique to the pre-sales role.
Who else does what you do?
The short answer is nobody. We are unique, and our IP is patent pending.
Having said that, there are vendors who do smatterings of tactical skills for SEs. There are several vendors who do technical presentation skills, demo skills, proof-of-concept skills, etc. But nobody shows pre-sales personnel how to project manage their way to Solution Closure using a Solution Sales Process that complements existing sales methodology.
As you evaluate other vendors who provide services to pre-sales, be sure you understand how they will gain sales management support, how they work to ensure best practices become operational for the long term, and how they intend to measure the success of the new skills being provided to the SEs.
Our SFA platform is Seibel / salesforce.com / Fill-in-the-blank. How do your products integrate with other SFA/CRM environments?
Our SEplanit Technical Opportunity Planner and Management Dashboard has been specifically designed to minimize functional and data overlap with common SFA/CRM products.
In fact, there is no functional overlap between SEplanit and both Seibel and SFDC, and there are only 4 fields of data duplication -- Contact name, title, account name, and opportunity name -- that's about it.
You might wonder, how can that be? Shouldn't Sales Reps and SEs be aligned in their approach to deals? Shouldn't they use the same SFA/CRM system?
Actually, these questions are independent of each other -- The answer to the alignment question is absolutely yes, and the answer to the tool question is absolutely they cannot. Here's why.
Traditional SFA/CRM products do not capture of the SE's view of deals, and do not enable SEs to analyze their deals to proactively determine how to get solution decisions faster, grow deals, and cleanse funnels. Doing so requires gathering pre-sales data never captured before by any SFA/CRM. SEplanit fills these long standing functional voids.
It is important for the team to be aligned in their approach to deals. Just because they are aligned does not mean they have the same view deals. In fact, they will always have very different views. Sales Reps are business oriented, SEs are technically oriented. They work with different customer constituents, perform different activities, and importantly, gather very different data.
As such, their views of the world will not agree. What the Sales Rep hears about business problems could be radically different from what the SE hears -- and it is very important to capture both views! If you force Sales Reps and SEs to use the same SFA/CRM, you may likely force them to artificially match, giving you an inaccurate picture of the SE's differing view.
SEplanit opportunities can be linked through a URL to popular SFA/CRM opportunities and vice versa. If you're willing to tolerate the possibility of 4 fields of data redundancy, you're all set.
This sounds intriguing, but we don’t have planned budget for pre-sales skills improvement. How can we proceed?
From an accounting perspective we can help you think outside the "expense bucket" box. Your skills investment can be addressed with minimal impact on quarterly income statements by capitalizing the investment and amortizing it over time, or deferring expenses into future quarters as a pre-paid expense asset.
The first step in the SE Skills Improvement Program is to take our optional complimentary web-based SE Skills Assessment. This will highlight possible areas of improvement and areas where you're in good shape. Then the next step is to arrange a Management Workshop where both sales and SE management hash out thorny issues, develop an SE Skills Improvement implementation plan, and gain support from both pre-sales and sales management.