Now and then, it never hurts to ask ourselves if we are doing the basics, and doing them well. Here are a few reminders of basic SE behaviors.

Be Early. Plan to arrive 10-15 minutes early for customer calls. Give yourself time to walk to the meeting room, get a drink, arrange the room to your liking, etc. And finish early. Don’t eat up all your time with the formal meeting. Finish 10-15 minutes early so there is time for an “after meeting”. The best selling happens during the informal discussions afterwards.

Be Prepared. Know who you are presenting to. Adapt your presentation to the participants, their personality and level of tolerance for risk. Know their business. Adapt your presentation to their business challenges suitable for their job title. Presentations and demos are not “one size fits all”.

Be Pro-active. Don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. Take the initiative to make deals move forward. Contact the customer to get a status. Chase your sales rep. Do what it takes to make technical decisions happen.

Be Salesy. As much as some of us hate it, our job is to sell something. We like to say, “Sell while you teach”. Leverage your technical credibility to explain the quantified value of your solution. Explain how it maximizes the customer’s value and minimizes their risk better than the other alternatives they are considering.

Be Strategic. Get pre-sales strategic skills training. Sharpen your pre-sales skills at least once a year. Use strategic skills to manage your time, get technical decisions faster, grow deals, and improve customer satisfaction. Pre-sales strategic training programs are hard to find, but they are out there.

Be Happy. Are you happy being an SE? Is your time at the whim of your customers and/or sales reps? How is your quality of life? Are you a road warrior, or putting in 80 hour weeks? If your professional life is spiraling out of control, do something about it. It is important to set boundaries (based on strategic training). Don’t be afraid to set priorities for your time. Don’t be afraid to say “No” based on those priorities. People will take advantage of your time and push you until you do say “No”.

With the U.S. Independence Day holiday weekend, it is appropriate to reflect on freedoms from a pre-sales perspective and why these freedoms have a large impact on driving revenue.

1) Freedom of Schedule: The SE’s time is theirs. The SE’s time is not at the whim of their masters: Sales reps, SE managers, or customers. Only the SE has a sense for their priorities in the context of many masters. With proper coaching and training, SEs can determine their priorities based on revenue potential, importance, and urgency — what is best for the business. Failure to respect the SE’s time degrades their satisfaction, which degrades their productivity and quality of life. Attrition becomes a real possibility. The good SEs are the first to go because they are the most marketable. Losing an SE is a blow to the business — It takes over a year to bring new SEs on board and get them productive. Respect your SE’s time.

2) Freedom to Own the Technical Sales Cycle: SEs own acquisition of the Technical Sales Cycle — Not sales reps, and not their managers. Sales reps who micro manage the sales cycle actually elongate the sales cycle. Think about a NASCAR pit crew — The car is not most efficiently serviced by one person giving orders, but rather by a unified team who each know their role in alignment with a common goal. Empower SEs to own all aspects of the technical decision including qualifying technical constituents, resolving their decision criteria through technical tactics, establishing the quantified value of your solution, and acquiring the technical close. Let your SEs go.

3) Freedom to Discover the Truth: Never assume customers are telling sales reps the truth. Like it or not, customers do not trust sales reps — “They want to take my money.” On the other hand, customers trust SEs — “They want to help me”. Leverage this dynamic. The truth is more likely to be more accurate technician-to-SE than it is business-person-to-sales-rep. Empower SEs to leverage their technical credibility “trusted advisor” status to have forthright, frank, and up-front conversations with their technical constituents to get closer to the truth regarding business pain, needs, drivers, decision timeframes, owners, and yes, even budget availability! SEs will provide significant insight into the true dynamics of the opportunity. The discrepancies that they uncover will be highly valuable in determining next steps in the deal. Let your SEs go.

4) Freedom to Drive Revenue: One of the most ironic aspects of being an SE is that most are bonused based on revenue in the door, yet SEs have no control over what that revenue will be — that, of course, is the sales rep’s job. SEs, at the very least, can and should have control over the size of the configured solution. To grow deals, SEs need the ability to discover lots of quantified business pain that they can apply more solution to. Quantifying the pain enables the SE to establish a compelling quantified value argument, which helps the SE hold the sales rep’s price. Since it is the SE who possesses technical credibility, who better to establish value? Feature, function, quantified value. Feature, function, quantified value. The customer sees the SE as a “trusted advisor” and so will be far more likely to believe the SE’s story than the sale rep’s story. Let your SEs go.

Let your SEs go. Empower your SEs to be free to drive your business and grow your revenue. Keeping them on a leash is counter productive and leaves lots of money on the table. The best SE / sales rep relationship is when the sales rep, like Picard to Riker in Star Trek, says, “Make it so #1″.