A
customer recently asked, prior to a Great Demo! Workshop, for some ideas regarding
implementation. Her starting point was
an assessment form to document her team’s current level of
practice/performance. Here is a version
of my note back to her with a set of general suggestions…
The
assessment form is a terrific starting point… I would strongly recommend
a few (well, several) additional ideas to track progress:
- Have your front-line managers
assess their presales staff at least once before our Great Demo!
training so that you can establish an initial “baseline”.
- Have your managers (who join the
training) then assess their presales staff again immediately after
the training to establish a normalized baseline (see below for
discussion). It is also good to have discussion sessions about the
differences in perspective pre- and post- training.
- Establish certain metrics to track
for individuals and teams before and after training as well (again, see
below).
- Collect and use Situation Slides
as a measurement of executing sufficient Discovery prior to demo delivery.
- Track “No Decision” rates prior to
and post training.
For
Number 1, I put “baseline” in quotes, because prior to the training, managers
and individual contributors often rank their performance better than
immediately after a Workshop – they “don’t know what they don’t know” prior to
the training. You should then establish a second, post-Workshop baseline
(Number 2 above) from which forward progress can be measured.
Regarding
Number 3, I recommend tracking sensitive ratios such as:
- ($’s of) Revenue/Demo Overall
- ($’s of) Revenue/Demo by geography
and/or by team
- ($’s of) Revenue/Demo for
individual presales people
- ($’s of) Revenue/Demo for
individual sales people
Over
the period of a few quarters, you will most likely uncover a number of
potentially surprising trends (some of which will also confirm certain gut
suspicions).
For
example, overall performance of the team is shown by an increase over time of
the first metric. Similarly, you will likely find that certain teams or
geographies are doing better or struggling, comparatively, yielding
opportunities to coach/refresh skills, as will the metric for individual
presales team members.
Tracking
sales people with this metric will show which sales people are using presales
resources most effectively vs. those needing coaching (or to be moved
along…).
[Background
story: The use of this metric was established by a colleague of mine who
was then managing a presales team. There was one sales person who always
had a “huge opportunity” and consumed a relatively overlarge amount of presales
resources, but never seemed to close near the business his colleagues
did. However, without hard data to present to the sales person’s manager,
the problem simply continued (as did the perception that presales resource/time
was somehow “unlimited”…). By collecting this data, my colleague was able
to show conclusively that the sales person was an anomaly, compared to his
peers – and my colleague was able to convince sales management to make the
necessary change… My colleague is currently the very successful head of
sales at a very major laboratory informatics company, enjoying very strong
growth in his business!]
With
respect to Number 4, we’ll be focusing a fair amount of attention in the
Workshop on understanding and the use of Situation Slides. These are very
simple 6 element tools that enable several key deliverables:
- You will know that sufficient
Discovery was done – that you have sufficient information to prepare and
deliver a credible, focused demo.
- You will know that you have
significantly reduced the risk of a “No decision”.
- You have uncovered and can then
recommunicate the business value of the solution to the customer (using
the customer’s numbers, best of all).
- You will be able to generate a
library of successful sales/demo scenarios that can be used to bring new
sales and presales hires up-to-speed via a set of high-probability
“templates”.
- You will enable clear
communications from sales/presales to your professional services team
regarding expectations and specific success criteria for customer
implementations.
Additionally,
I can provide an “Assessment” spreadsheet as a starting point for drafting your
own (two, actually – an “Individual” version and a “Team” version) that
describe some additional attributes you might want to track – send me an email
at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com
if you’d like them.
Next,
there are a number of other post-training follow-up activities that can be
implemented to support and reinforce the training:
- I believe you already know about
the Great Demo! LinkedIn Group and my blog – everyone is welcome to join
the Group (it is designed to serve as an online Users’ Community).
- I’ll send periodic follow-up
messages post-Workshop to the teams (partly to support the training and
partly to help uncover success stories to rebroadcast internally – this is
a separate, key topic for driving implementation…).
- I’m happy to join a team call or
two a month or two post-Workshop, for each team. These have proven
to be very helpful in driving implementation.
- One-on-one coaching for
individuals is also available.
- You should also look into using
Refract.tv to enable your managers to coach internally – this is a really
great tool, already aligned with Great Demo!
Finally,
we should plan to do one or more presales managers debrief sessions – both as a
“debrief” and to discuss about how to guide them to coach their teams with the
methodology…
My
apologies for the length of this – it is, however, an area of great
importance! (I’ll likely do more posts on this soon – let me know if you
have any specific topics or questions you’d like addressed).
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