BlogPresales posts to help you become a high performing team and achieve exceptional presales results.
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"The quicker I can get to a qualification or not, the quicker I can get to another opportunity that might be a better fit.” – Paul Urfi, Director of Solutions Engineering, Armory (Technical) Fit Analysis for the (Technical) Win! If you are working on your sales discovery process and how and when to involve your sales engineers, listen to episode #197 of the We The Sales Engineers podcast on “Changing the World for the Right People”. Paul Urfi and Ramzi Marjaba have a great discussion about the purpose of discovery and how to do great discovery (along with a lot of other great topics). A particular part of their discussion struck a chord with us. It has to do with deal qualification and technical fit.
Paul and Ramzi talk about how new SEs often are worried about ‘ruining’ a deal for the sales rep, while experienced SEs understand that they are not ruining a deal, but rather avoiding a bad deal. They are saving everyone time, effort, and money. They are avoiding costly POCs. And so on. STORY TIME… The AE and SE do a discovery call together with a new prospect. At some point the SE realizes that the deal isn’t a good technical fit. The SEs tells the prospect, “We’re not the right fit for you.” After the call, the sales rep is upset and tells the sales engineer, "You just LOST me this deal!". The SE responds back, “No, I just SAVED us from that deal.” QUESTION: How do you enable your SEs to identify bad deals early on and save you from them? ANSWER: Use your historical presales pipeline data to define profiles for ‘bad technical fits’. HOW? 1) Capture technical attributes about your deals in a structured way in your presales solution. For example, an AI software provider might track the type of database that prospects use. 2) Track your track technical wins and losses (which are separate from your deal wins and losses; you can get the technical win and still lose the deal!). 3) Leverage your presales solution to analyze your historical presales pipeline data (technical attributes against technical wins/losses) to develop profiles for bad technical fits. To keep it simple with our AI software provider: Do they tend to lose when the prospect uses database X or when they use database Y? 4) As an SE starts working a new deal, and the SE captures technical details about that deal, the SE can match up the deal against your bad technical fit profiles. Armed with these technical fit profiles, SEs can make informed recommendations to their AEs and presales leadership on how to proceed (or if to proceed) with any given deal. (And yes… profiles for ‘good technical fits’ are also valuable for the same reason!) BONUS: Your marketing team is desperate for these technical fit profiles. They do not want to spend their time nor their budget on leads that are bad technical fits. However, marketing rarely gets this feedback from the sales and presales teams. Share your presales data, share your technical fit profiles, or just give marketing access to your presales solution. With marketing dialed in, you get more of the right types of leads and that means more sales. Everyone wins! Want to learn more? Talk to one of our experienced presales experts about how Homerun can help you define the right technical attributes for your Technical Fit Analysis. Click here to get started!
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We had a FUN moment yesterday with a sales engineering leader. Why was it fun? Because he felt SEEN as an SE. Story time…  A few years ago, before Homerun was Homerun, we were full-time sales engineers (and former software developers). Each of us was juggling multiple deals at any given time, sometimes over 20 deals! Like every SE, we were jumping from customer calls to demos to POCs and back. We were using multiple ‘productivity’ tools to get through the day. We had our CRM, which we all know was NOT designed for presales teams. We had various spreadsheets, which we used to track technical details about our prospects. We had other spreadsheets, which we used to plan and track use cases and test scenarios for POCs. And we had physical Post-it notes decorating our monitors for our important follow-ups and To-Do’s (teaser: this is the source of the fun moment!) It was CHAOS. We knew there had to be a better way. We looked for a tool to SAVE US. Save us from the chaos. Save us from massive inefficiency. Save us from things slipping through the cracks. Save us from daily headaches. We found the usual DIY SaaS tools. The DIY tools offered a slightly better process than what we had with our current mishmash of tools. But DIY is still a ‘duct tape and string’ approach to getting a ‘barely held together’ presales process. We didn’t just want to trade one type of chaos for another. So… as any good, former software developers do… we coded the first version of Homerun. We coded for ourselves. We coded for ourselves, specifically as SEs. We coded to save ourselves from the chaos. This first version of Homerun was... AWESOME! It was the tool of our SE dreams. And it was a snowball effect of internal adoption. A snowball of increasing win rates. A snowball of faster closes. Years later, that snowball has become Homerun Presales as we know it today. So what was the FUN moment on yesterday’s call? When this SE leader said “I love what I'm seeing… I literally have Post-it notes on my monitor right now for all of my To Do’s!” This was a laugh out loud funny moment. He recognized the same pain that we once felt. Literally the same Post-it notes! He lives the same chaos that we once lived. He wants a better way, just like we did. And then... he found Homerun. It doesn’t get any more fun than laughing together with a fellow presales leader on a sales call about shared pain points and how we make them go away. Want to learn more? Talk to one of experienced presales experts about your presales challenges, and we’ll show you how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
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