In my last post, I talked about the compelling value of providing sales skills training to SEs. In this post, I discuss how to shift the emphasis away from the need for so much product training.

To be certain, product training is necessary. But to what extent? Do SEs need to know every bit and byte, speed and feed, knob and dial?

To answer these questions, let’s take a step back for a moment. What do SEs get paid to do? Answer: Acquire solution closure and maintain customer referenceability. How do SEs achieve solution closure? By convincing the Solution Decision Maker ours is the “best” stuff. Realistically, this is a long process of persuading the SDM, and persuading the influencers of the SDM not to say “No”.

Notice this is about persuading people to make decisions and not about how smart the SE is about product. Here’s the key point — To pesuade people to choose our solution, an SE does not need to understand the bowels of a product. They need to understand how to minimize perceived risks and establish compelling value — at the end of the day, that’s how people make decisions.

Customers need to perceive SEs to be technically competent. So the trick is, how much product knowledge is enough? We believe that a moderate level of detail is sufficient. This implies that product training does not need to dive to 20000 leagues under the sea, perhaps 5000 leagues is enough.

So what happens when the analytic customer “needs” the deep detail. (The SE’s gut reaction should first be to ask more questions — “Why? How important is that? How will this impact your environment?”, etc). When detail is demanded, be ready with a handful of experts. Perhaps these SEs prefer to stay in the weeds, or do not care for the sales side of “sales engineering”. Every team needs some SWAT personnel. Roughly, for a team of 10 SEs, train up 2 or 3 product experts.

This implies that when a customer asks a deep detail question, you have a reason to get back in front of them — defer the question to an expert for a meeting later. This keeps the deal moving forward and gives you another reason for interaction with the customer.

And to the point of this posting, the amount of product training the team needs is now substantially reduced. Training’s focus is less on product details and more on how the solution solves business problems, the quantified business impact of solving those problems, positioning, value, objection handling, and the persuasive elements SEs need to convince customers yours is the right stuff. Maintaining a balance between hard product training and soft sales skills training is essential for the success of the SE team.

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 224% 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 10% 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 result in a 48% growth in revenue incrementally every quarter. As a result, if training and honing of skills is in Q1, then the improvement in Q2 is 48%, Q3 is 119%, and Q4 is 224%.

Again, this is a very conservative estimate. In fact, one of our clients improved the revenue growth of their pilot deals 425% in 2 quarters. It took executive and management commitment, it took reallocating budget from product training to sales training, it took pain and sweat for 6 months, 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 blog. In any business, lack of balance between hard and soft skills training is short-sighted and costly. Make the time — It’s a no-brainer.

In my next blog, I will suggest that instead of burying SEs in excessive product training, there is a way to restructure the use of SEs so less product training is needed.

I recently had the pleasure to watch our SE Skills Improvement classes being delivered in several countries around the world including European countries and Japan.

As we work with customers, they will sometimes tell us, “I understand what you are doing for SEs, but our business is different.” Certainly, some businesses have more focus on channels, or other businesses have more focus on top-down executive selling versus bottom-up proof-based selling. Despite the differences in business approaches, at the end of the day pre-sales is pre-sales is pre-sales. The core principles to enable pre-sales to reduce cost of sales and grow revenue are very much the same.

For pre-sales process improvement, we find that the issues surrounding use of pre-sales process has common threads across many dimensions of industry, georgraphy, and culture. Improvements can almost always be made toward better pre-sales consistency, repeatability, scalability, measurability, predictability, transferability, etc.

My recent travels helped confirm my belief that the need for pre-sales process improvement and the approach for achieving those improvements is nearly universal regardless of whether you are a huge hardware solutions company in China or a small software startup in San Jose or a chemical supplier in the Midwest US or a financial investment services company in London.

One anecdotal proof point of this phenomenon that rang true for me was during a class in Japan. We conduct an engaging exercise that has SEs discover for themselves the benefits of good process and engineering technique in the pre-sales role. Although the exercise was completely in Japanese and I understood little of what was being said, the reactions from participants as they encountered the “Aha! There is a better way to do my job!” were exactly the same reactions as classes in San Jose, Mexico City, Munich, and Melbourne.

The need for improvement in the use of pre-sales process is universal. And the need seems to be independent of industry, geography, and business strategy.