We hear lots of stories of SE teams who are overworked, living on airplanes, and on the edge of burnout. Hiring more SEs is not always practical given how hard it is to justify and fund new headcount and recruit qualified candidates.

Another approach to offload SE resources is to leverage your partner’s SEs. The more self sufficient a partner SE is in selling your solutions, the less your own SE will need to do. Again, this is easier said than done, but here are some approaches to consider.

Give Them Your Training. Make your partner SE as smart as your own SE. Strive to have your company co-fund product and sales training for your partner SEs. It is in both your best interests. The smarter the partner SE, the less the partner will rely on your SE resources to make sales, and the faster they will be able make sales on their own.

Give Them Your Sales Intelligence. Proactively provide partner SEs with your internal field intelligence. Give them all your objection handling, value messaging, competitive knockoffs, product demos, proof-of-concept processes, etc. Regularly update this information — Even better, put it into a shared database accessible to both organizations.

Give Them a Mentoring Program. Mandate (perhaps thru quarterly MBOs) that each of your SEs mentor a set of partner SEs at all times. Have your SE walk the partner SE through all your training, marketing collateral, sales processes, etc. When one partner SE completes the program, your SE nominates another partner SE to take their place and begin the journey.

A goal in this controversial selling model is that direct customer contact is maximized through partner SEs and minimized with your own SEs! Yes, this flies in the face of a direct selling model, but the alternatives are either to hire more SEs, or leverage others. You may be familiar with the investment mantra, “leverage other people’s money” — Here we are leveraging other people’s SEs.

In this model, most of your SEs are a resource to leverage partner SEs, while a handful have direct customer contact. As partners become self-sufficient to drive business for your company, your SE workload is reduced.

To realize this model, change may needed in your working relationship with your partner, business policies, incentive plans, and selling culture. Despite these challenges, each SE Manager can implement a portion of these ideas and begin offloading their team’s heavy workload by leveraging the partner SE army.

In one of our role plays, the following conversation often occurs:

SE: What kinds of issues are you trying to address?
Customer (us): Well, we aren’t able to keep up with orders.
SE: How many orders do you need to process?
Customer: 5000 orders per day.
SE: Ok, What other issues do you have?

As facilitators, we have thrown the SE a “softball” and invariably they don’t take the lead. The SE assumes that’s all and stops short of finding lots of other pain points. Consider this conversation instead.

SE: What kinds of issues are you trying to address?
Customer (us): Well, we aren’t able to keep up with orders.
SE: How come?
Customer: We just received a large government order and we have to expand our order processing capacity.
SE: Where are you now and how much do you need?
Customer: We need to double capacity to 5000 orders per day.
SE: How soon?
Customer: In 120 days.
SE: Any other reasons why you can’t keep up with orders?
Customer: Yes, we have people falling off the line.
SE: Why is that happening?
Customer: Due to all the added work, people are getting carpel tunnel.
SE: Is that causing other problems?
Customer: As a matter of fact, OSHA is threaten us with fines.
SE: How much?

Now, the SE is “digging for pain”. Questions are open-ended and “short and sweet”.

Always assume there is more pain. More pain leads to more solution applied to the customer’s real business problems which leads to larger deals.

The SE digs until each pain point is quantified. This enables the SE to establish clear value downstream and connect the dots for the customer. Very often customers don’t see the pain or don’t realize its true impact on the business — we have to do that for them. The more quantified value you establish, the more you will differentiate yourself and the faster their decision will be.

Best SE practice: Dig for pain. Make value “painfully” clear for the customer.