The number one request we get for improving the pre-sales role is helping SEs manage their time better. We hear inumerable complaints involving the constant chaos and time crunch SEs find themselves in.

It’s no wonder. For many professional fields, you go to school for formal training. Not so for a Sales Engineer. SEs figure out how to be an SE through on the job trial and error. We then become Senior SEs who are creatures of bad habits without realizing it. With lack of formal training, the SE role is fraught with inefficiency and ineffectiveness.* And so, time becomes our #1 enemy.

Here are some helpful hints for SEs to better manage time:

• Envision the Goal, and Have a Plan: These are tightly intertwined. “In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” “If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s a lot harder to get there.” In fact, in our program, we teach an engineering technique for defining a least-cost path to achieve a technical decision, and key to that technique is first envisioning the end goal, and then planning from there.  Always ask yourself, “How can I win faster?”
• Just Say No: As an SE, you get demands for time from sales reps, customers, your manager, tech support, engineering, product management, family — all over the place. You cannot possibly keep everybody happy all the time.  Prioritize activities based on revenue potential, customer satisfaction, funnel cleanliness, reclamation of time, etc. When a new demand for your time arises, prioritize it accordingly, and if you have to say “No”, explain your case that you have other higher priorities.  Always ask yourself, “Is this a good use of my time?”
• Know What You Must Know: Some inefficiency is the result of not having all the information necessary to make an informed decision. To save time, filter which deals to work on. What information do you need to prioritize the deals that deserve your time?  As a team, develop a qualification checklist that everybody will use for every deal. The consistency and completeness will go a long way in improving effectiveness and team alignment on prioritizing time and deals.  Always ask yourself, “Do I know what I must know?”

 
Control what you can control.
Get SE specific training through a program like salesengineering.com’s.
This will go a long way toward reducing the continual chaos and lack of time.

* We are aware of two relatively new college programs in the U.S. that now have a Sales Engineering minor — the University of Florida, and the University of Iowa.

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″.

On several occasions lately we have been asked to provide a management skills improvement program for pre-sales managers. This begs the question, why are people asking?

It is common to find pre-sales managers who have been promoted from within the SE ranks. There is a right reason and a wrong reason for doing this.

The wrong reason is because the SE is due for a promotion. All kinds of problems can arise from promoting a person who doesn’t know how to manage - they will be prone to be ineffective managers. We have had experience where weak pre-sales managers try to remain buddies with their buddies, so it becomes problematic for them to implement the necessary procedures, policies, and measurement to facilitate changes in pre-sales process.

The right reason to promote a manager-wanna-be is because they have demonstrated a clear ability to manage in the true sense of the word. A reasonable checklist of managerial abilities includes:
- Communicating the “big picture”
- SMART goal setting
- Cultivating initiative, responsibility, accountability, and commitment
- Development of business strategy
- Using measurement as a motivator
- Implementing reward / consequence systems
- Varying management style as the situation warrants
- Making use of structured risk/reward decision making technique
- Assessing behavior, aptitude, and attitude
- Coaching and mentoring
- Recruiting
- Time and priority management
- Conflict management
- Relationship building with sales reps, sales management, and other staff

If you are a manager, do you see the need for improving your managerial skills? If you are an executive, does your manager-wanna-be have what it takes to “manage”? Can your manager manage? If you perceive a need for managerial improvement, we recommend the American Management Association (amanet.org) who offers excellent management effectiveness courses.

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!

We are in the business of providing impact-the-bottom-line skills to teams of SEs. Operationalizing a new skill is one of the hardest things for a manager to implement.

We worked with an SE organization awhile ago whose managers had been promoted from within. Many had not received formal how-to-manage training. The culture for these managers was to still want to be buddies with their teams, “If the SEs like it, they’ll use it”. They were Laissez Faire managers — hands off, let the SEs do what they want to do. Heed my warning — This is a recipe for failure.

When new skills are presented to any individual, their first reaction is often, “Gee I hope this goes away. I’m too busy to do this new stuff. I’ve been doing fine as an SE for 10 years, leave me alone.” Despite all the explanations of benefit to the organization and themselves, SEs will often resist change. Change is viewed as a waste of time.

Change will only happen through routine, persistent, repetitive practice. Especially for a new soft skill, this can take 3 to 6 months before the practice begins to become accepted and routine. Change will not and cannot happen with a hands-off management style.

My fellow SE Managers, to operationalize a new soft skill, we must put the “manage” back into “manager”. New procedures and policies must be defined and rigorously implemented. Executive management needs to strongly and vocally support the change. Contests and rewards are needed to motivate behavior. Those of you who believe in MBOs, leverage the heck out of them for at least two quarters.

Executive managers, you will need to lean on your line managers. Consider weekly or bi-weekly reviews of team behavior through technical opportunity reviews of critical deals. Insist that your managers have the quick crisp answers to questions like “can this deal come in any faster?” “How will we overcome the risks in moving forward?” “Show me the performance measurements for the new skills since the last time we met.” Insisting managers have crisp answers will ensure they are staying on top of their people for the answers, and that their SEs are involved in similar regular reviews and practice.

So, when operationalizing new skills, it is important to put the “manage” back into “Manager”.

Good SElling!

What’s on your mind regarding career path or skills development? What could you use in the way of soft skills development? What vendors are out there who you’ve had success with?