Brace yourself.

Prospects are going to cut way back on spending money, but they won’t stop entirely — they never do.  Traditional sales approaches as we know them will falter.  Making a sale will be as difficult as it has ever been in the past 30 years.

In the stiff competition for funding, what can you do as a sales organization to persuade the customer to give top priority for the expenditure for your solution?

Leverage your SEs.

Use your SEs to work with the customer’s technical constituents to dig deep for business pain.  Find lots of pain.  The more pain the better.  As an SE, when the customer explains their business problem to you, don’t take their word on face value.  Dig for more pain.  Good questions are, “What is the impact of this problem on the business / your group / your job?”, “Who else is affected?”, “To what extent?”, “How much?”,  “Why is that?”, “What would be the quantified impact if this problem could be resolved?”

Get numbers from them.  Numbers help the customer visualize the problem and solution.  Numbers help you, as the SE, establish compelling value, which helps you hold price.  The vendor who helps their customer visualize problems and solutions better, will get precedence over those who don’t.  Those vendors who help technical decision makers build a clear quantified business case for funding will more likely get priority for that funding.

Sales and SE Executives:  In this time of stress, rather that trying to squeeze more out of sales reps, consider leveraging the SE’s technical credibility to grow deals, shrink sales cycles, and cleanse funnels.  Leverage their technical credibility to help the customer give top priority to the expenditure for your solution.

Don’t think SEs can impact revenue?  Consider this:  A $2.5 billion dollar hi-tech company has a 2:1 ratio between SEs and sales reps.  That’s right.  Two to one SEs to sales reps.  Years ago the VP told us that they discovered that SEs could generate substantially more revenue than sales reps, so they switched the traditional ratio, and the strategy paid off handsomely.

A Fortune 500 company has a large pre-sales force.  Their normal sales cycle uses SE to drive the entire deal to the extent that sales reps only process orders.  Why?  Because customers prefer working with the “Technical Side of the Sale”.

Leverage your SEs, and brace yourSElf.

There once was a farmer whose daddy, and his daddy, and four more generations of daddies had farmed the same land. Their business grew handsomely over the years.

Now this farmer’s crop was failing. Being proud of his craft, it annoyed him that he couldn’t figure out why, and it pained him to see the crop fail on his watch.

Being a man of the millennium, the farmer Googled and read FarmersWeek.com. And then one day in a strong summer sun it came to him. “I know”, said the farmer, “I need to get the SheepBell-FarmForce weed removing, plant pruning, fertilizing, insecticiding, ethanol burning, satellite dish GPS tractor with an optional iPod connector”.

The sales rep paid a visit to the farmer, who gladly did a dazzling demo, and the farmer was in awe of the machine. They even let the farmer use the machine for a few days. The monthly leasing terms were the icing on the cake.

The farmer bought the new machine, reconfigured the dashboard to his liking, and taught his children how to use it. Now the children weren’t too crazy about the new machine. After all, in the past daddy had bought other machines that came and went. The children felt like they were already working hard and producing as much as possible. So they put up with it and did as their daddy asked.

The farmer was pleased. The machine performed exactly to spec, the report display had lots of cool colors, and the iPod sounded great. His neighbors were envious. He was the talk of the town. At first anyways.

Alas, time passed and there was no improvement to the crop. “How could this be?” the farmer puzzed, “The machine works beautifully. Why isn’t the crop getting any better?”

Though it pained him, the proud farmer called in the local agriculture expert as a last resort - After all, the farmer’s family had been farming the same land the same way for 150 years, what could a so-called “expert” tell him that he didn’t already know?

The expert listened intently to the farmer’s problem and was impressed with the farmer’s history and knowledge of farming. After assessing the situation, the expert explained that the farmer could leverage his proven farming approaches while updating some of his farming process techniques. Said the expert, “If you update your irrigation, fertilization, and crop rotation techniques, then you can still salvage your crop this year. You won’t be needing that new fangled machine for now.”

The moral of the story is: Focus on process first, tools second — Not the other way around.

The best CRM/SFA tools in the world are ineffective unless you have a good sales and pre-sales process foundation. Good sales and pre-sales process with mediocre tools are far more effective than great tools with a lousy process.

The hi-tech highway is littered with stories of companies who implemented CRM and SFA tools and failed. They fail largely in part because they do not change the core reason for their problems - Ineffective processes.

Large gains in sales performance are never achieved through tools du jour. Large gains are always achieved through successful sales process change management.

Just ask the farmer.

The following actually happened. I kid you not.

In response to the question, “How would you like to improve the behavior of your pre-sales team?”, an EVP of Sales of a multi-billion dollar company actually referred to his SE team as “his sales - - - - - - s”.

Did he really just say that? I couldn’t believe my ears. I don’t think I have ever been so offended in my 25+ year professional career.

As extreme as this opinion is, the fact is that some form of this cultural attitude and stigma lurks in the shadows everywhere we go. As a pre-sales community, we let this happen to ourselves. In many sales organizations we visit, sales reps treat SEs like subservient second class citizens. Do your demo, sit down, and shut up. Reps have no respect for the SE’s time or opinion. And worse, SEs just sit there and take it. SEs have no control and are controlled. In some cases, executives want to reduce SE headcount because they don’t add value. SEs are an expendable expense.

Fortunately, many other sales organizations have a healthier culture. SEs are given a say in what deals they will work on. SEs are deeply respected and their opinion regarding sales strategy is valued. SEs are given control of the technical decision. SEs are an equal partner to the rep, a strategic asset, and a sales weapon. Without SEs, reps would starve.

Recently a sales manager nearly screamed at me that SEs should NEVER talk about the value of the solution, that is the domain of the sales rep. Sigh.

That sales manager will never believe that his SEs could be making him filthy rich. When SEs are empowered to leverage their technical credibility, a value message from an SE is 10 times more powerful than anything a sales rep can say, and that SE will put more money faster in the rep’s pocket.

In a handful of organizations, executives are hiring more SEs than reps because they’ve learned that empowered SEs drive more business than reps. Case studies provide documented proof that one empowered SE can grow incremental revenue $500,000-$1M per year. Let them go. Let them help you make money. As Captain Picard said, “Make it so #1″.

The issue here is the dreaded C word — Control. The more sales reps and execs want to control their SEs, the less value SEs will provide. Through a change management program, SEs can drive more revenue faster and reduce their cost of sales by giving them more control.

For reps and Sales EVPs who demand control of SE resources, that’s a real - - - - - .

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.

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.