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.

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.

In my last post, I talked about the compelling value of providing sales skills training to SEs. In this post, I discuss how to shift the emphasis away from the need for so much product training.

To be certain, product training is necessary. But to what extent? Do SEs need to know every bit and byte, speed and feed, knob and dial?

To answer these questions, let’s take a step back for a moment. What do SEs get paid to do? Answer: Acquire solution closure and maintain customer referenceability. How do SEs achieve solution closure? By convincing the Solution Decision Maker ours is the “best” stuff. Realistically, this is a long process of persuading the SDM, and persuading the influencers of the SDM not to say “No”.

Notice this is about persuading people to make decisions and not about how smart the SE is about product. Here’s the key point — To pesuade people to choose our solution, an SE does not need to understand the bowels of a product. They need to understand how to minimize perceived risks and establish compelling value — at the end of the day, that’s how people make decisions.

Customers need to perceive SEs to be technically competent. So the trick is, how much product knowledge is enough? We believe that a moderate level of detail is sufficient. This implies that product training does not need to dive to 20000 leagues under the sea, perhaps 5000 leagues is enough.

So what happens when the analytic customer “needs” the deep detail. (The SE’s gut reaction should first be to ask more questions — “Why? How important is that? How will this impact your environment?”, etc). When detail is demanded, be ready with a handful of experts. Perhaps these SEs prefer to stay in the weeds, or do not care for the sales side of “sales engineering”. Every team needs some SWAT personnel. Roughly, for a team of 10 SEs, train up 2 or 3 product experts.

This implies that when a customer asks a deep detail question, you have a reason to get back in front of them — defer the question to an expert for a meeting later. This keeps the deal moving forward and gives you another reason for interaction with the customer.

And to the point of this posting, the amount of product training the team needs is now substantially reduced. Training’s focus is less on product details and more on how the solution solves business problems, the quantified business impact of solving those problems, positioning, value, objection handling, and the persuasive elements SEs need to convince customers yours is the right stuff. Maintaining a balance between hard product training and soft sales skills training is essential for the success of the SE team.

There is always a new product coming out, always a need to learn the latest bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, knobs and dials.

How much will revenue grow after SEs are flea dipped through a week of intense product training? Can you put a specific revenue number on it? Probably not.

It turns out that you can put a specific number on revenue growth for SE sales skills. The number is conservatively 48% revenue growth in 6 months and 224% in 4 quarters, and likely a lot larger.

Here’s why. Let’s say that SE sales skills training measurably improves their # of qualified deals, deal size, win rate, and time to solution closure each 10% per quarter. This is a very conservative performance target, and is easy to achieve assuming (big assumption) there is management commitment to the cause.

These modest improvements result in a 48% growth in revenue incrementally every quarter. As a result, if training and honing of skills is in Q1, then the improvement in Q2 is 48%, Q3 is 119%, and Q4 is 224%.

Again, this is a very conservative estimate. In fact, one of our clients improved the revenue growth of their pilot deals 425% in 2 quarters. It took executive and management commitment, it took reallocating budget from product training to sales training, it took pain and sweat for 6 months, but the results were compelling.

Can your product training generate those kinds of returns? Probably not.

The next time you hear somebody say we don’t have the time or budget for SE sales skills training, please send them this blog. In any business, lack of balance between hard and soft skills training is short-sighted and costly. Make the time — It’s a no-brainer.

In my next blog, I will suggest that instead of burying SEs in excessive product training, there is a way to restructure the use of SEs so less product training is needed.

I recently had the pleasure to watch our SE Skills Improvement classes being delivered in several countries around the world including European countries and Japan.

As we work with customers, they will sometimes tell us, “I understand what you are doing for SEs, but our business is different.” Certainly, some businesses have more focus on channels, or other businesses have more focus on top-down executive selling versus bottom-up proof-based selling. Despite the differences in business approaches, at the end of the day pre-sales is pre-sales is pre-sales. The core principles to enable pre-sales to reduce cost of sales and grow revenue are very much the same.

For pre-sales process improvement, we find that the issues surrounding use of pre-sales process has common threads across many dimensions of industry, georgraphy, and culture. Improvements can almost always be made toward better pre-sales consistency, repeatability, scalability, measurability, predictability, transferability, etc.

My recent travels helped confirm my belief that the need for pre-sales process improvement and the approach for achieving those improvements is nearly universal regardless of whether you are a huge hardware solutions company in China or a small software startup in San Jose or a chemical supplier in the Midwest US or a financial investment services company in London.

One anecdotal proof point of this phenomenon that rang true for me was during a class in Japan. We conduct an engaging exercise that has SEs discover for themselves the benefits of good process and engineering technique in the pre-sales role. Although the exercise was completely in Japanese and I understood little of what was being said, the reactions from participants as they encountered the “Aha! There is a better way to do my job!” were exactly the same reactions as classes in San Jose, Mexico City, Munich, and Melbourne.

The need for improvement in the use of pre-sales process is universal. And the need seems to be independent of industry, geography, and business strategy.

A sales rep was told by their customer that the decision would be made that quarter. Excitedly, the rep told their SE, “Hey, I’ve got a hot one for you”. The SE, in the course of conversation with the customer’s technical counterparts, discovered that the solution was dependent on the opening of a new building — there was no way the deal was happening that quarter, or even the next quarter.

It is common that the business folks have one view and the technical folks have another. Let’s face it — customer’s lie to sales reps to keep them on the hook. SEs can leverage their technical credibility to to uncover the truth in the situation. Techies tend to be straight with one another.

SEs can provide an invaluable service to the sales team validating the sales rep’s qualification. SEs can discover the true business pain, business requirements, decision timeframe, compelling event, etc. The sooner the better.

The worst thing that can happen is that the sales team spends months assuming what the sales rep heard was correct, only to find out the customer was blowing smoke to keep the sales team on the hook. SEs can help avoid wasting huge amounts of time by spending an hour or so with the customer to validate the qualification. Better to do that, than risk the consequences of months of wasted effort.

Good SElling!

I enjoy golfing. It’s a good thing too, because I’m not very good at it. I always feel like I could do better. The personal challenge to want to do better is motivating.

The other day I happen to see a highlight (actually a lowlight) of Tiger hitting a shot out of a 3 foot high rough onto the side of a hill for a raised green, into another 3 foot high rough. It was probably one of Tiger’s worst shots in his professional career. I’ll bet when Tiger hit that crappy shot, he didn’t say, oh darn this titanium shaft, or bugger-all my 100% leather shoes. He said, I’m going to practice that shot on the range tomorrow until I get it right.

There are a thousand different golf skills to master. As a rule, I practice 3 golf skills at a time, master those, and move onto the next 3. If I can get down a dozen skills in a year, that’s goodness. The same goes for being an SE. There are a thousand different skills to master. Master a few at a time, and then move onto the next few.

We as SEs spend 90% of our training time learning product features, tools, bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, knobs and dials. As SEs, do we need to be technically competent? You bet. Do we need to be obsessive about it in order to achieve fast and efficient solution decisions? Absolutely Not! Yet, the corporate powers that be continue to throw tons of technical training at us, and barely a lick of soft skills training.

Do you know who Hank Haney is? He is Tiger’s coach. Yes, Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer ever, relies heavily on his coach and tirelessly practices his technique to continually improve his game. He doesn’t obsess over the technical specifications of the equipment he uses. As an SE, why should we be any different?

Like Tiger, we should spend 90% of our time learning how to swing, how to hold the club, how to stand, how to pivot, how to, how to, how to — and practice the heck out of those skills so we hit 90% of our fairways and two-putt 90% of our greens.

Of course, let’s make sure we understand and use the right equipment, but much more importantly, let’s make sure we learn and study and practice how to be the best SE that we can be. For an SE, this means a) there is always room for improvement, and b) the large majority of our training time should be for soft skills improvement, not understanding equipment features.

Put in a word with the corporate powers that be — perhaps they should re-assess their training priorities for SEs.

Good SElling!

Back in the late 80’s, I came out of the engineering ranks and began my SE career at Sybase, a company that embraces sales engineering process. Having been an engineer, I thought at first I was supposed to show everybody how smart I was about relational database internals — those were the days of Codd’s Rules when “we’re more relational than you are”.

After I raised several objections on my own that came back to bite me, I began to realize the SE role was more than about being smart. It was about “restrained smartness”. It took years, but I realized being an SE was about helping customers make faster decisions, getting solution decisions faster, making good use of time, and working smart. “Sell while you teach”.

And I loved every minute as an SE. Every day was something different — New customers, new problems, new locations. I loved the diversity and knowing I was genuinely helping people solve tough business problems — In the early days Sybase ran circles around the other databases out there — it was a blast to never lose.

When I left Sybase, I had the SE thing down to a science. Boy was I shocked when I landed on the dark side of the moon. Chaos reigned. Fires burned out of control all the time. See lightning, hear thunder. Demo demons ruled the asylum. It was not fun, at all.

Bouncing around in several jobs, the pattern continued. There had to be a better way. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Good SElling!