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As you may have seen on our home page, a $2B client of ours drives 70% of their revenue through their channel. The average deal size is $20k. Huge volume. Amazingly, they only have 100 SCs. Without the channel, this company might need four times that many SCs.

The secret sauce is this: Make your partner SEs as smart as your own SCs. Your SCs can be responsible for technically recruiting and enabling partners. They also get involved in critical, large partner deals as requested, but the beauty is there aren’t many of those kinds of deals.

Your SCs are responsible not only for teaching partners all about your solutions, but also competitive intelligence, positioning, value messaging, best sales practices — anything to do with the pre-sales role.

As you might imagine, the results of cloning partner SEs to be like your SCs are compelling. The effect is to offload SC workload, reduce cost of sales, and grow revenue. For every SC, it would not be unreasonable to have 10 or 20 partner SE clones. It scales, it’s repeatable, and it works incredibly well.

Bottom Line: There is enormous value in empowering your SCs to technically recruit and enable partner SEs to be as smart as they are.

Those of you who use an SFA/CRM product like Siebel or Saleforce.com may have noticed something. Actually, you may not have noticed something. SFA products completely ignore the SE’s perspective on deals.

Referencing the formal pre-sales workflow analysis we did years ago, it turns out there are exactly four fields of SE specific information that is captured by an SFA product. (I’ll send a copy of “Sun Tzu Art of War / Art of Sales” to the first person who can tell me what the four fields are.)

SFA products, by and large, are glorified sales rep oriented contact management systems. They usually also include some opportunity management and capture next steps — for the sales rep. Surprisingly, SFA products are passive data collectors — they do not analyze data to proactively suggest how to grow deals or close deals faster. Not for Sales Reps, and certainly not for SEs.

I like the cartoon at Sidney Harris Cartoon. A professor has complex formulas sprawled all over his blackboard, as another professor points to a step and says, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two”, the step says, “Then a miracle occurs”. That is how SFA products treat the SE’s mission to acquire the solution decision. It’s a ton of technically oriented work, work that every SFA and sales methodology takes for granted and ignores.

So what are SEs to do? What tools can SEs use to help grow deals and reduce the time it takes to acquire a solution decision? Most organizations, if they have any SE specific tools, roll their own. Some folks hack away at their SFA product — a square peg in a round hole. We’ve seen some good home-grown tools out there. Building your own is a lot of work to develop, maintain, and mature to where they complement the SFA product well, and SEs will use them. It’s not what SEs or Field Development get paid to do.

The SE community does not have a lot of options. Build or do nothing. We at salesengineering.com are the first to commercially introduce SE specific productivity products that complement SFA products — SE Applications: See for example SEplanit. We think it’s a step in the right direction.

We are increasingly seeing a trend where companies provide their SEs product training at the *exclusion* of SE sales skills training. Sadly, it is likely that these companies will not achieve gains in revenue over the next several quarters.

SE product training enables sales but does not drive revenue.

Suppose your SEs have been selling Cars for 30 years. Now you introduce Jets. Time for the typical training by a fire hose — Bury the SEs in specs, bells and whistles, speeds and feeds. Off the SEs go into the wild blue yonder. Then comes the classic let down — Jet sales slow because SEs don’t know how to persuade people to choose Jet solutions, and, Car sales slow because, well, SEs are trying to persuade people to choose Jet solutions. The result: You lose revenue.

Ever ask yourself how much incremental revenue product training can generate? The answer is — Zero. Again, product training is necessary to enable sales, but it cannot impact sales performance metrics.

We have many examples of SE sales skills training measurably reducing the cost of sales and growing incremental revenue (independent of product training). These are compelling results driven by SEs — Deals growing 200+%. Time to solution decisions shrinking 50+%. Technical win rates growing 100+%.

SE technical competency must be accompanied by SE sales competency. Enabling sales and driving sales requires two different skills sets and therefore two different training paths.

Don’t waste your training money on product training alone.

For the financially minded, skills training can be considered an investment in Intellectual Property (IP). The CFO can declare some training as an IP asset (not an expense) which is amortized over many quarters, reducing its impact on income statements. Also consider this recent client quote, “We spent $40k on your program and got $250k back in 6 weeks.” Net net, CFOs can overcome expense or budget issues related to SE sales skills training.