Reconsider Pre-Sales at Scale
Startups transitioning to growth mode need to take a sober assessment of their sales motions as they lay the groundwork for a scaleable framework that will allow them to hit the revenue targets they promised their Series B investors. At this stage, there’s no longer room for organic instances of success. Instead, leaders of Sales and Solutions organizations need to perform a three-stage transformation that will create a professional sales machine capable of generating repeatable success akin to the sustained excellence of a top craft brewery:
Diagnose* - Identify what works well and what does not in these areas
Customers
Messaging
Methods
Mobilization - How should you take action to address your diagnoses?
What resignations exist?
What’s your offer?
Establishing conditions of satisfaction
Sustaining Success
Being accountable
Sharing results, good and bad
Being ready to do it all over again
In my experience scaling the Pre-Sales practices at CloudFactory, tooling assignments played an outsized role in Pre-Sales. So, I will focus on that area to provide a detailed example of the three stages of transformation.
Diagnoses
While my diagnosis had many facets, I’ll discuss the conventional wisdom adopted as “truth” when I joined the team: being “tooling agnostic” was a competitive advantage. In actuality, I found many disadvantages that I attributed to the tooling agnostic approach:
Each prospect was subjected to an exhaustive Discovery process that often stretched for 2, 3, or more meetings as Solutions tried to identify the “Perfect Tool” for each use case.
A perceived lack of expertise - working with so many tools robbed the team of the opportunity to build expertise in any one tool, leading to many instances of learning on the fly in full view of the customer.
Without standardized tooling, each engagement required customization. There were no standardized contracts, tooling configurations, data formats, or onboarding protocols. The company had to be ready for anything as a “Tooling Agnostic” service provider. My assessment: When a company must be ready for anything, it can prepare for nothing.
When a company must be ready for anything, it can prepare for nothing.
Mobilization
A significant change in approach was warranted. We would sunset the Tooling Agnostic approach and instead invest in developing expertise in a select group of tools. Over the next quarter, we would retire the old message and adopt a new one.
The Old Message: “We can work with any tool.”
Subtext: ”There’s really nothing special about the services we provide. So, we can deliver them using any old tool.”
The New Message: “We work only with best-in-class tools.”
Subtext: “We’re experts at what we do, and we’ve chosen the best tools to work with.”
I understood that the team was heavily invested in the Tooling Agnostic approach and decided to proceed carefully. Rather than roll this out as a significant initiative, I incorporated many aspects of our new approach into our daily course of business with little fanfare. I intended to allow the entire organization to become so familiar with the individual facets of the new approach that its eventual rollout would be greeted with a shoulder shrug rather than outrage. A few examples of these incrementation changes were as follows:
I spoke constantly of our in-house expertise and promoted the virtues of each of our chosen tooling solutions.
I negotiated discounted rates with our preferred tooling providers and championed the competitive advantages they brought to us.
My team shifted from a “Tooling Discovery” posture in Pre-Sales, where they searched for the right tool, to a “Use Case Optimization” posture, where pre-determined according to the use case and instead worked with the client to prepare them for a successful outcome.
Within the span of a quarter, we had increased our deal velocity and improved our close rate. We set a record that quarter for the number of AEs at quota. In post-sales, we experienced improved outcomes due to shortening our onboarding ramp and improved client satisfaction.
Sustaining Success
When creating a new Pre-Sales process, building your new program with sustainability in mind is essential. Your Pre-Sales organization needs to maintain its edge by constantly monitoring its performance while considering the impact of internal and external changes.
Our Solutions team instituted three practices that afforded us a regular chance to consider our past performance while sharing knowledge about business and technology;
Solutions Knowledge Sharing Sessions: Bi-weekly sessions that periodically included Product, Operations, and Client Success teams
Tooling Vendor QBRs: These two-way sessions emphasized feature development and operational performance.
Sales/Solutions Syncs: Monthly discussions with sales leaders to discuss trends and high-value deals.
My team of Solutions Professionals embraced their roles as tooling experts. Our new Pre-Sales practices put us in a position of sustainable strength, where we were constantly learning, adjusting, and improving our performance.
*My appropriation of the terms “Diagnosis” and “Mobilization” have been inspired by the writings of Chauncey Bell.