How Can Presales Generate Sales Leads (and still stay "technical?")

This was the "Ask John" question from the April MTS Edge newsletter.

Hi John,

As part of a new sales initiative, my SE team has been asked to generate a set number of leads to “feed the sales pipeline”. We are a very technical team, with a very technical product, and are very hesitant about getting into cold calling prospects. In fact, my team is rather resentful of the request and I hear comments like “we don’t ask sales to do complex installs and demos, why should we do their job?” I believe some of my staff would rather quit and find a new job instead of being co-opted into direct sales.

What can we do to help the process along and be good corporate citizens without stepping too far outside of our collective comfort zone?

Thanks – “Steve” – SE Director, Europe, Middle East & Africa 

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the question. That is certainly a difficult and highly emotive situation to face. You can tell the team that it is everyone’s duty to help the company thrive, point out the ”Sales” in Sales Engineer and talk about teamwork and learning new skills .. but .. many SE’s either cannot (because they lack the skills) or will not (because they lack the belief) directly “sell”. When an SE’s sense of self, professional pride and credibility is wrapped around the technology they know and the application of that technology you are asking them to change a central set of their beliefs by explicitly selling that technology instead.

There is a middle ground. If you look at a classic land and expand strategy in accounts. Where land is driven by the rep getting an initial opportunity, and expand is driven by the SE encouraging utilization across the customer. Since the average tenure (length of service) of an SE team is typically 2-3 times that of sales – most customer knowledge and many relationships lie within the SE team anyway. It’s time to utilize that knowledge to your collective advantage.

Sit down with sales, and categorize your install base into three buckets – A,B and C. A means a likely opportunity to expand or a targeted account, B has some opportunity and C not so much. Make contact with your technical (and executive) contacts and go visit the customers without a sales presence. Position it as a courtesy visit, a health check (my favorite) or an “I’d love to see what you do with our stuff” type visit. Learn as much as you can, talk to as many people as you can, and get an idea of plans and actually ask your user base “is there anyone else you know that I should be talking to?” – you’d be surprised how often you (being the SE) get a positive response that sales would never get.

Also conduct Discovery in reverse and look at the business outcomes or results the customer gets from using your solutions. That’s your opportunity for an up or cross sell. Position that as a “have you considered..” or “you know, many of my other customers…”. Try very, very hard NOT to sell, but to inform and advise. You may get some CYJ’s (Can You Justs) as a result of these calls (to get a support ticket pushed or an enhancement lodged) but they are usually worth the time. Plus you’ll build an excellent set of personal technical “go-to” references.  As an added bonus be a little more aggressive at trade shows and user group meetings. Asking that same “is there anyone else you know?” question over breakfast, lunch or a cup of tea can be done in a very low-key techie way yet can provide amazing results.

Postscript: Steve asked this question back in October, and I’ve held back the question and answer so I could report specific results. Here is what happened. One SE quit anyway. No tears were shed over his loss. The remaining eight SE’s found five new large opportunities and about a dozen smaller ones during calendar 4Q2015. Three of those large opportunities and eight of the smaller ones closed by the end of calendar 1Q2016 resulting in a 22% increase in quota achievement for the EMEA region.

Mission accomplished and the outreach program continues.