Sales transformation consultant, Art Fromm, explains the importance of a seamless sales and pre-sales team in influencing customers within the sales process. Art highlights that sales and pre-sales teams working together seamlessly can lead to more deals won, repeat customers, and persuade customers. The session delves into the challenges faced by sales and pre-sales teams to achieve a perfect synergy, including facing the same direction and understanding the customer’s needs, which can be as low as 3% of value seen in salespersons. Art recommends building trust and properly utilizing pre-sales resources through communication and effectively showcasing their training and abilities. Ultimately, the goal is to create a shared sales success culture where both sides use the “Help me help you” approach and turn sales into a buy.
- 00:00:00 The moderator, Robin Mercado, introduces the event, DEMOFEST, and its sponsor, Consensus, an intelligent demo automation software provider. She invites attendees to donate to humanitarian organizations and join the DemoFest community on Discord. Art Fromm, a sales transformation consultant, is introduced as the speaker for the session. He provides a brief background of his experience as a customer, in pre-sales and sales management roles, and as an internal sales enablement consultant. Attendees are encouraged to use the chat function, participate in polls, and ask questions during the session.
- 00:05:00 Art Fromm introduces the topic of working together as a sales and pre-sales team and their relationship with customers. A poll is conducted to determine the roles of the attendees, with options including sales, pre-sales, sales management, pre-sales management, enablement, post-sales, and other. The importance of working seamlessly together to win more deals, have repeat customers, and influence and persuade customers is emphasized. The role of the SE or pre-sales is to move the deal forward and increase the probability of a win, while the sales team’s goal is to work together more seamlessly.
- 00:10:00 Art Fromm, an expert in sales enablement, discusses the three main challenges faced by sales and pre-sales teams and presents an overview of his upcoming book on seamless sales. The first challenge identified is the perceived value of pre-sales versus sales from the buyer’s perspective. According to Fromm, pre-sales is often seen as having more value than sales, even though this is just a perception. He notes that it can be as low as 3% of value seen in sales persons, despite their essential functions in the sales process.
- 00:15:00 Art Fromm discusses the challenges of the sales and pre-sales relationship and the importance of building trust between the two teams. Fromm recounts his experience transitioning from an engineering role to a sales role and the initial distrust he faced from clients. He emphasizes that pre-sales should not squander the trust they have built with clients, while sales should work to gain that trust. Fromm also acknowledges the internal challenges between sales and pre-sales, as they may not inherently trust each other. He suggests that both teams work together to build trust with clients and equip pre-sales for success. Fromm then asks pre-sales to honestly assess the percentage of time they feel adequately prepared for success and shares the results of the poll, indicating a bell curve weighted towards the bottom.
- 00:20:00 Art Fromm discusses the perception of pre-sales resources being underutilized or improperly utilized, as well as the disconnect between sales and pre-sales teams. He suggests that by leveraging pre-sales’ ability to gain the trust of the client and gather more information, the utilization of pre-sales resources can be improved. He also encourages pre-sales to showcase their training and knowledge to help their sales counterparts. Fromm acknowledges that frustration can arise for both teams and invites viewers to share their own perspectives on the matter.
- 00:25:00 Art Fromm encourages the sales and pre-sales team members to list their frustrations using the chat function. These frustrations include inconsistent messaging, poor discovery by the account executive, and limited involvement from pre-sales. Fromm acknowledges that there is room for improvement for both sales and pre-sales, and mentions that proper discovery and mastering technical sales and business value discovery is critical to overcome the customers’ frustrations of feeling unheard and experiencing pushy sales tactics.
- 00:30:00 Art Fromm discusses the challenges of working as a sales and pre-sales team, including frustration from the customers and the inherent differences between the two departments. Fromm explains that many sales methods and organizations focus on only one or the other, leaving it up to everyone else to figure out how to make sales happen. To improve teamwork and collaboration, Fromm suggests aligning on the sales process and the buyer’s journey, leveraging each department’s strengths, and communicating and sharing information more effectively. Ultimately, the goal is to create a culture of team sales and shared success.
- 00:35:00 Art Fromm discusses where pre-sales and sales roles typically get engaged in the buying process. As the pre-sales team shares their engagement points, there is a large grouping for discovery and solution, while sales roles tend to spend most of their time on discovery, qualification, negotiating, and purchasing. Fromm notes that this is significant because almost never does anybody answer on the buying process diagram, indicating a need to shift mindset to what the buyer is doing as well as focus on the client’s buying process.
- 00:40:00 Art Fromm discusses the importance of understanding the buyer’s process and where they are in it. He suggests that sales professionals need to be proactively involved with decision makers to understand what’s happening. Fromm outlines a schematic of the buying process, focusing on two main stakeholders: business stakeholders and technical stakeholders. Business stakeholders are heavily involved at the beginning of the buying cycle when they’re trying to decide what needs to change. These stakeholders drop off in the middle of the process and become involved again at the end for end-user validation and measuring results. The technical stakeholder is the person who takes over the implementation phase after the business stakeholder delegates the decision to them.
- 00:45:00 Art Fromm explains the involvement of sales and pre-sales teams in the buying process. Salespeople should be heavily involved in the beginning stages of qualification and discovery and focus on developing relationships during the middle stage, while at the end their focus should be on business close and getting the PO signed off. Pre-sales or SE involvement mirrors the technical stakeholder’s involvement, but they should get involved even during the discovery phase, which may occur before the technical stakeholder gets involved. Fromm emphasizes the importance of working together to maximize the chances of achieving technical and business closures for a higher probability of getting the solution selected while excluding other alternatives.
- 00:50:00 Art Fromm discusses the roles of sales and pre-sales teams in enticing buying and how they can become more synchronized with buyers. The speaker proposes a pyramid with different factors representing the roles of each team beginning at the top where sales and account managers need to own the account and opportunity strategy, deep business understanding, and relationship with stakeholders. Meanwhile, pre-sales roles should focus on the deep technical knowledge, relationship with the technical decision-maker, as well as understanding the business needs and value of business solutions. Fromm also mentions the need for both teams to effectively communicate with each other in order to provide the appropriate support needed to win customers. The section ends with solutions to help achieve this synchronization between teams which include Sales trusting Pre-Sales more and involving them more effectively, sharing qualification and discovery information, and understanding business needs, critical issues, competitive landscapes, stakeholders, and influence engineering.
- 00:55:00 Art Fromm discusses how sales and pre-sales can work together seamlessly to create a better sales culture where everyone is on the same team. He suggests that sales and pre-sales teams should use the “Help me help you” approach, plan questions together, and focus on the BDM and TDM. He also recommends that pre-sales teams review their trainings and ask their sales counterparts for their information. Finally, he highlights the importance of using the driving reason for change or a compelling event to compel action, optimizing interactions, and turning sales from a push to a buy.
