Not long ago, I had a sales manager nearly scream at me, “Establishing value is my job, not the SE’s”. In this posting, I will explain why that sales manager is losing revenue and bonus.

In their “trusted advisor” role, SEs have technical credibility stamped on their forehead. As SEs work with their customer’s technical constituents, they are in a perfect position to uncover additional business problems and statements of quantified pain. Techie-to-techie conversations can yield a wealth of G2 regarding business reality. Suppose SEs asked questions like the following:
“What is driving that requirement?”
“What impact does that have on the business?”
“What affect would that have on you / your group / your company?”
“Why then?”
“What will happen if you don’t do anything?”
“What resource, time, and budgetary constraints are there as I configure this solution?”
“What do you mean by _____ ?”

SEs take their conversation to a whole new level. SEs uncover the business requirements driving the technical requirements. The more pain SEs uncover, the more solution they can apply, and the larger deals grows. The more quantified pain SEs uncover, the larger the business problem to be addressed, then the larger a deal can grow, and the easier it is to hold price.

Relegating SEs to give “feature, function, benefit” presentations and demos does not make the best use of the SE’s abilities. The problem is that benefit is often intangible and difficult for customers to envision, leaving customers often asking themselves, “So What?”.

Note several of the questions above are designed to be answered numerically. Associating numbers with benefit converts benefit statements into value statements. The SE’s presentation of the solution then becomes a more compelling “feature, function, quantified value” discussion.

If the SE is already wowing the audience about features and functions, who better then to “Wow” your customer with powerful quantified value statements. Feature, function, quantified value. Feature, function, quantified value. The solution presentation becomes compelling, easy to visualize, and comes from the most credible and believable person on the sales team.

Leverage the SE’s credibility to sell more effectively, hold price, grow deals, and put more money on your pocket.

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.

The SE’s role is to efficiently acquire solution decisions and grow and drive revenue. You “sell while you teach”. We sometimes say you sell in stealth mode.

There are many occasions when you have contact with a customer — Phone calls, meetings, demos, proof-of-concepts, time in the lab, or casual settings like lunch. Take these opportunities and pick your spots to ask “Killer SE Questions”.

Such questions are designed to surface crucial sales intelligence that will help you grow deals and get decisions faster. In no particular order…

“How does that impact your business/job?”. We want the customer to quantify their pain. The more personal, the better. Numbers help us establish the value for our solution downstream. The more value we establish, the more compelling the solution will be, and the faster the decision will be.

“What will it cost the business if you don’t do anything? What will it mean to you?”. The “cost of doing nothing” is often lost on customers — help them visualize this cost. This gets added into your value proposition. Again, the more compelling value you can establish, the faster the decision will be. The best costs/impacts of pain are those that affect somebody’s bonus.

“Why are you doing this project now?”. We’re trying to validate that they won’t do nothing, that they must do something. Alternatives: “Why not wait?”. “Why haven’t you done something in the past?”. “Do you think they’re really going to do this project?”. “What is driving your timeframe?”.

“What else concerns you about…?”. Dig for pain (see the Digging for Pain blog posting). The more pain, the more solution you can apply, and therefore grow your deals. When a customer gives any indication there is a problem, dive into it, dig deep, and dig for more. And yes, it is the SE’s job to dig for business pain — given your Trusted Advisor status, technical constituents will be more likely to be up-front with you than your sales counterpart. “Why is that?” “How long has this been happening?” See the first question.

“As you evaluate your options, how will the decision process work?”. This is a very powerful question. It will surface Who, Why, What, How, and When. It leads to discussions of who is involved, who talks to who, hopefully who the technical decision maker is (the final technical yes), what this person’s decision criteria are, their business requirements, technical requirements, and when the decision will happen.

“What constraints am I under as I configure your solution?”. This is a backdoorsy way of asking about, among other things, their budget!

“What is……. and why?”. Take a closed-ended question and open it up. Get the customer talking. Example: “What are your performance requirements, and why?”. Alternative: “What do you mean by…?”.

Good SElling!

We hear lots of stories of SE teams who are overworked, living on airplanes, and on the edge of burnout. Hiring more SEs is not always practical given how hard it is to justify and fund new headcount and recruit qualified candidates.

Another approach to offload SE resources is to leverage your partner’s SEs. The more self sufficient a partner SE is in selling your solutions, the less your own SE will need to do. Again, this is easier said than done, but here are some approaches to consider.

Give Them Your Training. Make your partner SE as smart as your own SE. Strive to have your company co-fund product and sales training for your partner SEs. It is in both your best interests. The smarter the partner SE, the less the partner will rely on your SE resources to make sales, and the faster they will be able make sales on their own.

Give Them Your Sales Intelligence. Proactively provide partner SEs with your internal field intelligence. Give them all your objection handling, value messaging, competitive knockoffs, product demos, proof-of-concept processes, etc. Regularly update this information — Even better, put it into a shared database accessible to both organizations.

Give Them a Mentoring Program. Mandate (perhaps thru quarterly MBOs) that each of your SEs mentor a set of partner SEs at all times. Have your SE walk the partner SE through all your training, marketing collateral, sales processes, etc. When one partner SE completes the program, your SE nominates another partner SE to take their place and begin the journey.

A goal in this controversial selling model is that direct customer contact is maximized through partner SEs and minimized with your own SEs! Yes, this flies in the face of a direct selling model, but the alternatives are either to hire more SEs, or leverage others. You may be familiar with the investment mantra, “leverage other people’s money” — Here we are leveraging other people’s SEs.

In this model, most of your SEs are a resource to leverage partner SEs, while a handful have direct customer contact. As partners become self-sufficient to drive business for your company, your SE workload is reduced.

To realize this model, change may needed in your working relationship with your partner, business policies, incentive plans, and selling culture. Despite these challenges, each SE Manager can implement a portion of these ideas and begin offloading their team’s heavy workload by leveraging the partner SE army.

What’s out there to help you out with demos, proofs of concepts, time tracking, etc. What tools can’t you live without? What would you really like to have if it existed?

What best practices work for you? What gets you to a solution decision faster? How do you grow deals?

What practices have not been effective for you? Help your colleagues avoid the same traps and pitfalls.