Small Businesses
Simple customers may start off by having one of their SEs upload demos. They may even have multiple SEs upload multiple demos. Whilst this can work, it has no Quality Assessment stage and it’s harder to understand the overall content strategy.
My recommendation is this is only acceptable for very small customers, who have a strong handle on the demo guidelines and policy, and these are followed closely by the SEs.
Mid-market and Enterprise Customers
Should all the SEs upload demos? Sure – that can work. But it doesn’t for every size of company; some are more complex, have more products on different release cadences and may have hundreds of SEs. There needs to be a way to organize recording your best demos and scale that.
“If you scale the mediocre, you only ever achieve a LOT of mediocrity. Scale your best, and succeed.”
Why doesn’t Jane upload the video? Well, she could, and in many companies, it’s the Sales Engineers that do this task. But for larger organizations, it’s far better to have one or more Consensus admins that plan which content is required and allocate recordings to specific people (these could be non-presales too, like experienced implementation consultants onsite, or legal or technical folks).
Also, demos take time to plan and record – so when a new product feature, update or brand refresh happens, you’ll want to create all the content first, then when launch day comes set it all live!
Presales leaders will have a range of skills in their teams, so there’s little point in getting every person to create their own demo. Instead, have the best people record the best, most effective and authentic demo, and have everyone use it. Each person will have specific skills in a number of areas, so everyone will still get the opportunity to record demos.
How to NOT Scale Your SE Team – DO NOT DO THIS! –
SEs are asked to record demos, trained in how to use the Consensus platform, but the requirement for each demo type, style and purpose is not strategically planned. The result is each SE has to work hard, and only 1/5 demos are worth sharing. What’s worse is that demos appear in the demo library that are bad or incorrect so could end up scaling inaccuracy!
How You SHOULD Scale Your SE Team – DO THIS! –
The content requirement is identified and allocated to the best SE at that specific function or task, depending on requirements. In this example, that expert is Jane Seymour, but there may also be an IT-focused demo that’s needed which would be better to allocate to Tim Reynolds. This way you scale the best parts of your team.
