Making Solutions a Habit
Making Solutions a Habit for the Sales Team
When I first accepted the role to build and lead a new Solutions team at CloudFactory, I knew I was joining an organization that had experienced significant success. I also knew the selling process that had taken them thus far would not scale to support the following growth milestones they hoped to achieve.
My early assessments were as follows:
Solutions involvement was uneven across the sales team. The single determining factor for a Solutions Consultant’s participation in a deal was their relationship with the Account Executive rather than the Solutions requirements of the given Opportunity.
Sales had grown accustomed to following an “Organic” sales process, with only one common thread: close inbound leads as quickly as possible, which induced a behavior that I like to call a “Rush to Sign” (RTS).
The consequences of RTS included incomplete client Discovery, incomplete success criteria, and inconsistent Solutions Architecture from deal to deal.
My approach to address the assessed condition and put us on a scalable path was to pursue three main objectives.
Normalize the Sales-Solutions Relationship - i.e., Make Solutions a Habit
Define the roles and responsibilities within the PreSales Journey
Apply targeted standardization within the Pre-sales process.
Making Solutions a Habit
There were three different levels of experience among the AE team, and each of these groups approached their relationship with the Solutions team in their own way.
The Grizzled Veterans had been around the company for a while and had each figured out a formula for sales success. To this group, Solutions Consultants added complexity and friction to their deals. They would avoid working with an SC whenever possible.
The Noobs had a year or two of experience in the AE role and relied heavily on the guidance of their manager and the Grizzled Veterans. Noobs had no idea who SCs were or what they did. Their interpretation was that SCs were a threat that they should avoid.
The New Seniors were recent hires who had been around the block a while and knew the benefits of working with SCs from past companies. The New Seniors worked with SCs whenever possible.
My goal for normalization was to eclipse the prevailing thought that Solutions Consultant involvement was a matter of choice with a new concept: SCs were copilots for the Account Executives' deals.
I employed a carrot-and-stick approach to achieve this normalization.
Carrot: Document wins from the New Seniors, then use their testimonials to highlight the benefits of working with SCs.
Stick: Actively monitor the Opportunity Pipeline for high-value opportunities without SC involvement. Engage the AEs manager to “encourage” SC engagement. Note: None of these steps are possible without Sales Leadership's full partnership and involvement.
Carrot: I became a fixture at Sales team meetings to share lessons learned, invite questions, and address concerns in the open for all to hear.
Stick: Working with RevOps, we set a rule in Salesforce that prevented qualifying Opportunities from advancing past validation without an SC assigned to the Opportunity. Note: Some AEs would game this rule (SHOCKER!), so continued vigilance in pipeline monitoring was necessary.
Carrot: Dealwire announcements were updated to include recognition of the SC involved in all wins. I would actively monitor and comment on these wins, pointing out value added or obstacles addressed contributing to the ultimate success.
Stick: This stick was for my team. We promised to do no harm; i.e., we would not slow things down. Working with RevOps, we started tracking various aspects of “Close Velocity”(e.g., Time for Validation) to hold ourselves accountable to our promise.
The results from these changes were phenomenal. Within a single quarter, the SC utilization quadrupled (as measured in both the Number of Opportunities and Pipeline MRR$), setting the stage for a record sales performance in the following quarter.