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.

“If X said it, it must be true”. X could be a Customer, Sales Rep, your manager, etc. An SE should never assume what they hear is the whole story. Always assume there is more to a story than meets the eye. Dig below the surface.

Suppose a customer says, “Here is the problem I am trying to solve…”. Do you tend to jump in and quickly begin suggesting solutions for that problem? Who is to say the customer is giving you the complete story, or that there is more to their problems below the surface?

What if instead of launching into solutions, the SE asked questions like, “What is the impact on your business from these problems?” “What is causing these problems to occur?” “Why do you need to address these problems now?”. As a rule of thumb, ask at least 3 “Why” questions about the business problem before thinking about solutions.

Asking these kinds of questions that dig beneath the skin often dredge up more business problems, more pain, more underlying issues — and these often lead to more solution and bigger deals.

Suppose a sales rep says, “Here is what the customer told me…”. Don’t take what the rep says at face value. Leverage your technical credibility to dig deeper. What is motivating the customer? What is driving their business problems? Ask why.

Which brings us to an intriguing thought. If you have been following this series of blogs, have you been assuming there are only SEven SE sins? Are more to follow? and why?

This is the sixth in a series. As an SE, if you read any of the blogs in this series and wince, ask yourself if maybe there is room for improvement. Are you wasting your time, or worse, are you wasting time and you don’t realize it! Do your teammates do the same thing? If so, perhaps your team should consider acquiring professional guidance to improve your skills.

SE Sin #6: Can’t Say No. Some SEs have a real hard time saying “No”. “No” to their sales rep. “No” to their customer. “No” to their channel partner. “No” to their manager (just kidding). They try to please everybody, and in the process, their calendar fills with tons of pointless activities. But the SE’s job isn’t to submit to everybody’s whim, their job is to sell something. Saying “No” is an important skill for an SE in prioritizing and managing control over their valuable time.

Of course, they should say “No” in a diplomatic manner. “No, and here’s why”. Invariably conflicts will arise. Attempts will be made to overrule the SE’s attempt to prioritize their time. Management should have a well-defined escalation procedure in place to address such conflicts. Both sales and SE management should trust the SE’s judgment in managing their time.

At the end of the day, the SE has to learn to just say “No”.

SE Sin #5: The Mystery SDM. Sometimes in a large meeting sales call, a stranger joins midway through. Sometimes, the SE (or sales rep) keeps right on going instead of stopping and asking, “Who is that masked man?”. Sometimes, the mystery person is our Solution Decision Maker (SDM).

One of the worst things that can happen to an SE at the critical moment of solution closure is to ask our the assumed SDM, “Do you have all the information you need to choose our solution?”, and the SDM says (in effect), “Oh, Fred needs to make that decision.” Oh No! If Fred really is the SDM and has a killer issue we didn’t know about, months of effort may have been wasted.

Be absolutely certain you know who the Solution Decision Maker is. Make no assumptions. Ask yourself two key questions: “Who does the alleged SDM take their recommendation to?” and “Can that person say ‘No’ for technical reasons?”. If the answer is “Yes” or “I don’t know”, you don’t know who the SDM is. Time to go find out, do the due diligence, and make absolutely certain.

Avoid unpleasant surprises. Know who you don’t know.

SE Sin #4: Failed Demos. During a product demo, managers hate it when an SE says “oops”. Demos should be rehearsed and bulletproof. Avoid ad hoc demos to the extent that you avoid features you’ve never tried at least once in a row. Only show the feature if you are 100% certain it will not fail.

When a customer asks, “Can it do X Y Z?”, the SE should first respond, “Why will you need that feature?” or “How will you be using that?”. Is the customer just asking out of curiousity or do they have a real need? Knowing the answer helps you determine how much time you give to the answer and to what extent you dive into the functionality, if at all.

Use demos as a closing tool, not an interest builder. Do not offer a demo until you completely understand the customer’s business problem and requirements. You can position it that you need to understand their requirements so you can provide a demo specific to their needs. Use the demo as a way to explain the quantified benefit for the customer. The pace of the demo is feature-function-quantified_value, feature-function-quantified_value. The demo is a sales tool, not a feature-blab (see sin #1).

Don’t be a demo daemon. Your job is to “sell while you teach”, so use demos as a tool of persuasion.

SE Sin #3: Automatic Proof-of-Concepts. Customer: “We’d like to bring this in for a test drive.” Sales rep: “No problem, when do you need it?”. And the poor SE is thinking, “Oh great, there goes another two months of my life”.

Knee-jerk POCs are a huge waste of time considering how many of them do not lead to revenue. To help ensure a high success rate, sales teams should routinely qualify POCs and consider alternatives to POCs.

If a POC is unavoidable, work out a test plan with the customer and get them to commit people and resources to its success. Get some skin in the game — if they don’t commit people and resources, they’re not serious.

Use POCs as a closing tool. Ask the customer to commit that if the POC is successful, they will choose your solution. If they are unwilling to make such a commitment, red flags should go up.

Avoid automatic POCs — They can be a huge waste of time.

SE Sin #2: Blind Sales Calls. Every SE has been in a sales call where they ask themselves, “What am I doing here?”. That should never ever happen. Instead, before they commit their time, the SE should ask the sales rep or channel partner a series of basic sales-worthiness questions.

For example, “What’s the business problem the customer is trying to solve?” “Why do they have to do something now?” “When do they need to make a decision?” “Who is driving the project?” “How much budget do they have to solve the whole problem?” “Who owns the budget?”. If you rep or partner can’t answer some basic questions about the deal, then you should second guess spending your time on it.

The questions assure the SE that the opportunity will be a good use of their time. There is nothing wrong in asking yourself, “Is this a good use of my time?”. Don’t get caught asking yourself, “What am I doing here?”.

SE Sin #1: Feature Blabbing. Aka: Spill your candy in the lobby, spray and pray, show up and throw up, demo daemon… Some SEs try to prove how smart they are instead of “selling while they teach”.

Think about telling a doctor, “Doc, my chest hurts”, and the first thing the doctor says is, “Let me show you my rib spreader! It’s tungsten reinforced with fast electric powered trigger action like a jaws of life so we can perform several retractions and rib spreadings in just seconds…”. Yikes! As a patient, you’d run for the hills.

A good SE is like a good doctor: “Where does it hurt?” “How much does it hurt?” “How did this happen?” “Why do you need to fix this?” “How does it affect your job?” This approach is consultative and strives to understand the cause of the pain so a complete and proper solution can be identified.

In summary, SEs often commit serious sales sins, sometimes because they don’t know any better. Many SEs are guilty of feature blabbing at some point in their career. Acquiring regular soft skills training can promote good habits and avoid ugly surprises.

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.