As part of our SE Skills Improvement Program, we provide reinforcement of best practices in the form of regularly scheduled Technical Opportunity Plan (TOP) reviews. These reviews force practice of best practices and enable us as facilitators to evaluate the correctness of the team’s use of the Solution Sales Process.

A customer who has been using our program for several months did a review recently. The SEs in this review were the cream-of-the-crop in a humungous hi-tech company. One conversation in the review went like this: “What is the customer’s quantified pain?” A: “I’m not sure”. “How much have they allocated for this project?” A: “I’m not sure”. “When are they looking to make a decision on the solution?” A: “I’m not sure”. “What does the rep think?” A: “I haven’t talked to him”. Egads. No initiative, no ownership of solution closure, I just want to do proof of concepts.

There are three things that are scary about this story. One, it’s true, and probably not uncommon in the SE world; Two, sometimes even cream-of-the-crop SEs don’t get it; and Three, Line SE management lets it be that way.

We met with the SE Director after the review and talked about what’s going on. First and foremost, his line managers “let the SEs do what they want”. The SE Director now knows that hand-on remedial action is needed. Behavior changes do not happen because we hope they will — As Rick Page says, “Hope is not a strategy”.

If you perceive your SE team needs improvement, do not wait until it gets really bad. Fix the roof during good weather. And by the way, the roof won’t fix itself — you need to swing your own hammer.