BlogPresales posts to help you become a high performing team and achieve exceptional presales results.
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 Brian Lewis, Homerun Co-Founder and CRO, will join distinguished presales leaders Naz Irani and Vikram Gupta in a panel discussion on "What Constitutes a High Performance Presales Team?" Session Title: What Constitutes a High Performance Presales Team? Panelists:
Date: Tuesday, May 18, 2022 Time: 10:00 - 10:50am MDT This should be an amazing discussion for every presales leader looking to build a high performance presales team. Don't miss it! DEMOFEST 2022 is the premiere sales engineering (virtual) conference, hosted by Consensus, and runs May 17-19, 2022. Register for free! Want to learn more? Talk to one of our presales experts about how Homerun can help you build a high performance presales team. Click here to get started!
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 Peter Cohan, world-renowned presales thought-leader and author of the incredibly popular Great Demo! book, named Homerun Presales as a 'Cool New Tool'. Here is the except from the latest Great Demo! newsletter: From the Vendor: Homerun Presales is unified presales platform to track and optimize presales performance, deploy a structured presales process, and efficiently scale your presales team. Presales teams using Homerun increase win rates (up to 15%), decrease sales cycles (up to 16%), and save time (2-4 hours per SE per week). Homerun modernizes presales and connects it to the organization to help presales team show their extended corporate value through more revenues, more competitive products, more data-driven marketing, and easier pre-sales to post-sales transitions. Our Comments (aka, Peter's Comments): One of the biggest challenges for presales managers and practitioners is assessing and communicating the “fit” of a sales opportunity prior to investing substantial presales resources in demos, POCs, and other activities. Sadly, these communications often take place well after that investment has been sunk. Homerun includes a rich range of capabilities to support, manage and track presales activities on a day-to-day basis, plus the ability to enable presales input and comments regarding deal sentiment, including health, fit, and features, well before a QBR or similar deal review takes place. This is extremely useful and important, enabling presales teams to focus on the opportunities with the highest likelihood of success (for both vendor and customer). Check it out! If you are interested in great presales content from Peter and the Great Demo! team, subscribe to the Great Demo! newsletter! Want to learn more about Homerun? Talk to one of our presales experts about why Homerun is a 'Cool New Tool' and how Homerun can help your presales team achieve exceptional presales results! Click here to get started.
Before you begin a presales evaluation with a new prospect, make certain that you know why they are searching for a product. It is usually one of two reasons:
Companies looking to solve an immediate pain point are either dealing with a deficiency or an inefficiency, and companies looking to evolve their business are aspirational. Each of these variations requires a different approach to your evaluation plan. Learn how to design evaluation plans that win deals in our latest guide: Get Inside The Mind Of Your Prospect: Why Are They Searching For A Product?  Want to learn more? Talk to a presales expert about how to leverage Homerun to build, implement, track, and share Evaluation Plan Templates that get the 'technical win'. Click here to get started!
 SBI just released a new radar chart for the “2022 State of SalesTech: Driving Adoption of Critical Operational Tools”. They included several presales solution categories and packed a lot of information into a single graphic. SBI first unveiled this radar chart during their recent Webinar on “Five Reasons Your SalesTech Stack Isn’t Delivering and What to Do”, led by Nancy Nardin and Martha Mathers, and SBI just posted it here on the SBI website. The chart includes 5 dimensions:
We LOVE seeing Presales Management and Presales Enablement called out explicitly among 49 other SalesTech categories. Here are the stats and our thoughts about them. Presales Management
We are surprised at the high % of companies using Presales Management solutions. The Presales Management category is growing rapidly, at least based on our own customer growth. This was a smaller survey (89 B2B companies), which could skew the numbers of bit. And the bubble was placed towards the lower end of the range, so it’s closer to 50% than 75%. Even 50% feels high for where this category is at the moment. We are happy to see it of course, but surprised and little unsure about it. This category had a Low Level of Importance in this survey, but this is changing by the day, and it clearly is not a Low Level of Importance for our customers! We assume that the Level of Adoption indicates adoption by the intended user base within a company that has implemented a presales solution. If the respondents were all Homerun customers, this would be shockingly low, but we're not surprised by the Medium adoption given the broader set of Presales Management solutions in the market. Presales Enablement
The stats are not that different than the stats for Presales Management, so our reaction is essentially the same. We are happy to see a higher Level of Importance for this category! Overall Thoughts It will be adorable to look back on these stats in a year or two. We suspect that SBI will merge Presales Management and Presales Enablement into a single category, probably something generic like ‘Presales Platforms’. Presales Platforms, like Homerun, will be Must-Have's for every presales team just like the CRM is a Must-Have for every sales team. We will see High % of companies using them, High Levels of Importance, and High Levels of Adoption. We are making that a reality here at Homerun, and we cannot be more excited about the future of presales! Want to learn more? Talk to an experienced presales expert about how Homerun fits into the Presales Management and Presales Enablement categories of your SalesTech Stack. Click here to get started!
 Once upon a time, there was a sales engineering manager named Goldilocks. Her company had big goals for the year, so she went on a search for presales productivity and management tools to make her team more efficient and more effective. She soon came upon a few possibilities. Adopting a new tool can be challenging, and she knew that ease of use was critical. With that in mind, she looked the first tool. "This tool is too simple!" she said. “I don’t see how it provides any value over my existing CRM, spreadsheets, and note taking tools!” So, she looked at the next one. "This tool is too complex!" she exclaimed. “Lots of administrative burden on me and lots busy work for my team. When will we have any time to do real presales?!?” So, she looked at the last one. "Ahhh, this one is just right," she said happily. “Just enough presales functionality to be effective, but not so much that it gets in our way!” After thinking about ease of use, she decided to explore how flexible the tools were. The importance of her presales team was growing within the organization, and her presales process was rapidly evolving. She knew that her new presales platform would need to grow and evolve just as her presales process grew and evolved. So with that in mind, she went back to the first tool. "Hmmm… it’s quite limited in its capabilities,” she thought. “As my needs change over time, I’ll have to buy new tools from new vendors to get everything that we need." So she looked again at the second one. "This tool seems to have the presales features that I’m looking for, but it’s quite rigid!” she exclaimed sadly. “As my needs change over time, I’ll be stuck in the past. And I reeeeally don’t want to re-do a vendor search… it’s exhausting!" So she looked at the last one again. "Ahhh, this tool is just right," she sighed with relief. “All of the functionality that we need, clearly designed to work together, and loaded with flexibility. As we change our process, our metrics, our team… it’ll adapt right along with us.” Growing tired of looking at presales tools, Goldilocks still needed to understand if her sales engineers would use the tool. Her executive team wants high ROIs on every project that they fund, and so she thought to herself, “Will my SEs want to use it because it helps them be more efficient and effective, or will they avoid it because it just gets in their way? If they don't use it, my ROI will be negative!” So once again Goldilocks looked at the first tool. "You know... this one is really more of a project management tool versus a presales tool. A few of my SEs might find it useful for a few of their deals, but it doesn’t offer them much else. It also doesn’t do much for me as a presales manager," she complained. So she looked again at the second tool. “Ugh!” she cried out. “This one was clearly designed for presales managers, but not for my SEs. While that’s great for me, my team will rebel if we mandate yet another tool and have to force its adoption.” So she looked at the third one for the last time. "Ahhh, this tool is just right," she sighed with a smile. “It was clearly designed by SEs who have lived the hectic life of a sales engineer. They get it, and it shows. My team will LOVE this! And it helps me understand my presales pipeline, my team, how we are performing, how we can get better, and how we can scale. I LOVE this too!” Fortunately in this version of the fable, Goldilocks didn’t need to worry about three angry bears barging into her home office. Instead, she waited patiently for her CRO and CEO to come online so she could tell them about her research and the amazing presales solution that she had found. “I looked at all of our options. I found ‘too much of this’ and ‘not enough of that’ across the other solutions, but I did find one that was juuuust right!” she proudly explained. Her budget was approved, her team was onboarded, and her presales results were exceptional. The End. Want to learn more? Talk to one of our experienced presales experts about why Homerun might be 'juuuust right' for your presales organization. Click here to get started!
"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!
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!
 Scaling up your presales team? Here’s how to quickly onboard new sales engineers.
STEP 1: Define your presales SOPs and best practices. Type them out. Knowing them is not sufficient. New hires cannot read your mind! Do your SEs assist with Technical Discovery? Then what should they ask? Do your SEs give Demos? Then how should they prep? Which demo assets should they use? Do your SEs lead POCs/POVs? Which test cases highlight your competitive advantages? Your answers will depend on specific attributes about a deal. Different discovery questions for different customer types. Different demo assets for different use cases. Different POC/POV test cases for different products. Documenting all of this forces you to be specific and to refine your process. It’s all obvious until you have to write it down. That is when you realize all of the steps, complexities, IF/THEN rules, caveats, exceptions, and so on. STEP 2: Assemble your SOPs and best practices into Evaluation Plans (aka, templates, playbooks, action plans). Multiple options here… End-to-End Plans: Sales Engineers follow a complete, e2e plan with everything they should do from their first touch point with a prospect all the way through the post-sales hand-off. Build-As-You-Go Plans: Sales Engineers assemble their evaluation plans as they go. They get tapped to support Discovery. Add in the Discovery template. Then they need to spin up a POV environment? Add in the POV Setup template and the templates for the relevant Test Cases. Up against KeyCompetitorX? Add in the KeyCompetitorX template with special test cases that work well against them. And so on. STEP 3: Train your new hires on the Evaluation Plans. Make your new Evaluation Plans available to your presales team. Train them on when to use each Evaluation Plan. Coach them on how to tailor the Evaluation Plans for each prospect. Give them a way to track their progress through their Evaluation Plans. Give them a way to share their Evaluation Plans with their prospects (in whole or in part). STEP 4: Watch your new hires rack up the technical wins! Your new hires instantly follow the same SOPs and best practices that your top sales engineers took years to master. But they are doing it in days and weeks; not months and years. Want to Learn More? From documenting to assembling to tracking to sharing Evaluation Plans, Request a Demo to learn how Evaluation Plans improve your onboarding process, reduce new hire time-to-productivity, and empower your team to win.
 Story time…
A street near our office was a commuter route between downtown and the highway. It was short and straight. People drove fast. Over time the city council started worrying about the traffic. They reviewed potential solutions and decided to add more traffic lights and stop signs. A councilmember asked, “What about the drivers? How will this impact them?” “They will deal with whatever we implement. They’ll be fine.” said another. They approved the project budget as an ‘investment in a better future’. But… Traffic piled up at the new traffic lights and stop signs. Commute times went way up. Drivers became frustrated. They became motivated to find ways around the street. They started taking side streets. They started driving fast again. The main street was rarely used now. Lonely traffic light changing colors for no one. The city council started worrying about traffic on the new routes. And just like that... they were right back where they started. Still NO results, but now with LESS money to spend on new solutions. So… From street traffic to presales data? Yes! Presales management want presales data about:
Presales data is GOLD! Presales data is the KEY to:
To get the data… you need your presales teams to use their tooling. Sadly, many presales solutions are street lights and stop signs: Well intentioned IMPEDIMENTS. Your presales teams are SMART. Smart like the drivers in our story. They will find ways around your presales tools if it gets in their way. At that point you are getting PARTIAL data, at best. Partial Data -> Garbage Data Garbage In -> Garbage Out As a presales leader, you will be like the city council… having wasted money on a solution that didn’t work. Seeking new budget for new ways to solve the same problem. Don’t be THAT presales leader. Find a presales solution that was designed for the way your presales team actually works. SUMMARY We built the first version of Homerun as a tool for ourselves to make our daily lives more organized as sales engineers. That means that from Day 1 Homerun has been a tool, and now an end-to-end presales platform, that was built for how presales team actually work. Exactly what they need, without getting in the way. Request a demo to talk with a presales expert and see Homerun in action! |
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