From Home Brewer to Craft Brewery
Scaling a company’s solutions strategy requires a hard look at the Pre-Sales journey. Taking my inspiration from The Lean Startup, I wanted to examine the existing process and make the adaptations necessary to progress the Pre-Sales journey from an uneven series of hits and misses toward a continuously improving process with repeatable success. As anyone who has choked on a glass of skunky home brew knows, your experience at the local microbrewery is much more likely to deliver a pleasurable pour, visit after visit.
During my first 90 days at CloudFactory, I conducted a listening tour around the company to orient myself as the leader of the new Solutions team. When talking with leaders from Go-to-Market and Delivery, I identified three areas in the Pre-Sales journey with drastic inconsistencies that created complexity and raised churn risk.
These three areas offered a fantastic opportunity to improve the Pre-Sales experience for our clients and a smoother operational flow for our teams in Pre-Sales, Post-Sales, and Delivery:
Demos - Existing sales practices discouraged any demos until the AE had validated the opportunity. Further, sales would only offer a demo once we had received a sample of client data and our team had analyzed the data.
Impact: Clients experienced a weeks-long validation process without being afforded an opportunity to learn about our methodologies or experience our expertise.
Discovery - There was no step in Pre-Sales where our inconsistent utilization of Solutions Consultants was more consequential than in Client Discovery. Incomplete exploration of client opportunities left our team struggling to catch up with the necessary for defining the use case, business case, and conditions of client satisfaction. Such details were gathered much later in Pre-Sales, if at all.
Impact: Insufficient client discovery reduced our close rate. For deals we were fortunate enough to close, the missing details led to extended onboarding, poor Delivery performance, and palpable client frustration.
Tooling Assignments - The company had embraced its “Tooling Agnostic” approach quite literally. In practice, every Opportunity started from Square One. Any tooling option was on the table. We conducted a Tooling Discovery for each and every Opportunity that involved additional meetings and detailed Q&A in search of “The Perfect Tool.”
Impact: Unlike our competitors, we subjected prospective clients to an exhaustive search process. The added discovery steps slowed down our deal velocity and reflected poorly on our sales teams, as clients interpreted our tooling exploration as an indication of our inexperience.
In my next three posts, I will detail my approach to overhauling our approach to Demos, Discovery, and Tooling Assignments.