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.