Empowering Solution Architects and Sales Engineers: Strategies for Enhancing Value Selling Skills in Presales
As a presales leader, your role isn't limited to exploiting the technical brilliance of your Solution Architects and Sales Engineers. You have to go beyond that and help them to hone their skills in the art of value selling. If you read my previous article, this is where Technical Sales Enablement comes into play. By asserting their technical knowledge along with a deep comprehension of the value that your product or service provides, your SAs and SEs can excel in value-based selling that will turn the tide for your team's overall performance. This means understanding what your product or service is and does, and more importantly, what it can mean to a prospect.
To make this happen, let's delve into some strategies:
Initially, aim for a diverse skill set within your team. SAs and SEs are traditionally perceived as the defining technical force in the sales process. Nurture them to cultivate these competencies and guide them towards a consultative selling style. In a previous article I called out that we're looking to develop a team of trusted advisors, not just product experts. These skills are what differentiate one from the other.
Building Relationships With Technical Champions
There's an old saying in software sales, "To sell software you need two things: pain and a champion." More specifically, you need to solve the right pain and find someone who cares about solving that pain. Identifying and establishing solid relationships with your technical champion is imperative. It goes beyond merely selling a product or service and dwells more in understanding their needs and offering solutions catering to their unique problems. Creating such meaningful connections calls for empathetic understanding and active listening.
Start by instilling in SAs and SEs the importance of identifying potential champions within a client organization. Champions are individuals who understand and appreciate the value of the proposed solution and are willing to advocate for it within their organization. SAs and SEs can be trained to identify these champions by looking for individuals who show a keen interest in the solution, ask insightful questions, and have influence within their organization.
Technical Sales Enablement can help enhance SAs and SEs' interpersonal and communication skills. These programs can include role-playing exercises, case studies, and workshops. This will help them build the skills and muscle memory to effectively communicate with potential champions, understand their needs and concerns, and build strong relationships with them.
Empathy, a Key Ingredient
Empathy is the cornerstone of solution selling. By revealing genuine interest in your client's pain, you're positioned to offer solutions that resolve their technical constraints and strike an emotional chord. Encourage your SAs and SEs to explore thoughtful questioning, displaying their intent to serve beyond mere sales. Find out what your champion's personal wins are. Sure, you can make process ABC easier, or make their app faster, or help them pay back some technical debt but what does that actually mean for your champion? Will it help them get a promotion? Maybe it will reduce the amount of time they have to spend troubleshooting problems with their app so they can spend time with their family. Find that personal win and you've found a way to develop an enduring champion who will sell for you, even when you're not there.
Active Listening
Talking is just one side of sales; listening forms the other half (and many would argue it's the more important half). When genuinely listening and comprehending your prospect's needs, you make them feel valued and heard. Active listening encapsulates more than hearing your client's words; it involves understanding the full message being transmitted. Instill in your SAs and SEs an appreciation for careful listening and its potential for cultivating lasting ties.
Technical Sales Enablement can help presales leaders train SAs and SEs to improve their listening skills by incorporating active listening exercises in their regular training programs. Active listening involves fully concentrating, understanding, responding, and then remembering what is being said. This can be practiced through role-playing exercises where SAs and SEs are required to paraphrase what the other person has said, ensuring they have fully understood the message, then mapping the pain they uncovered to the appropriate solution, and finally articulating the value (personal and/or business) that the prospect will receive by solving that pain with your solution. This is so critical I will say it again in another way. Great SAs and SEs are masters at listening, asking questions, and identifying the pain that matters. What's more they excel at helping a prospect understand how they'll get from their current pain-filled state to a pain-free future state. That process starts with a custom demo.
Make Every Demo a Custom Demo
For your SAs and SEs to excel in technical selling, they must transcend the mere presentation of the features of your products or services. They must find ways to render their interactions with clients more personal. Enter the custom demo. Custom demos should involve using the clients' jargon, adapting communication style, and specifically addressing the prospect's pain points to demonstrate that the customer was heard. Such nuances can significantly enhance the prospect's perceived value of your solutions. Indeed, these specialized engagement methods can nurture in-depth rapport, trust, and collaboration with your clients. As the saying goes, don't just "show up and throw up." There are entire books written on how to give an effective software demonstration, so I won't go into that here (and that will be a future article). Suffice to say the secret to success lies in not boring the prospect with the fifty thousand things your solution can do but instead showing them only the things your solution does that solves the problem they have and must solve right now. A successful custom demo starts with the ability to contextually understand and present what appears to be a unique solution.
Contextual Understanding and Solutions
The ability to perceive and adapt solutions to a client's unique needs is indispensable. This step calls for deep technical understanding and proactive quesioning to identify key pain points (i.e., the pain worth solving) , business scenarios, and strategic targets. This process culminates in solutions that offer palpable value, aligning strongly with the client's unique pain. Role-playing exercises are probably the most effective way to develop these skills. These exercises can and should simulate real-life customer interactions (preferably drawn from real-life examples), allowing SAs and SEs to practice identifying customer pain points and designing appropriate solutions. Feedback from these sessions can be used to improve their approach. The outcome of these sessions is the ability for SAs and SEs to consistently build what many (including myself) call Bridge Demos. The concept is simple: start with the prospect's current state and build a bridge with your solutions to a desired future state. Great SAs and SEs are masters at building those bridges and walking their prospects over them.
Providing Value Insights
Effectively conveying your solution's worth is critical. SAs and SEs who are great value sellers explain what your solution technically does and the resulting business advantages. They respond to what the prospect is likely thinking: "What benefits does this offer me?" Put more bluntly, it answers the dreaded, "So what?" Affirm that your team possesses the skills necessary to demystify technical complexities into engaging value propositions that captivate clients. This is one of the hardest habits to instill in SAs and SEs. A great presales leader once taught me not to put anything on the screen, a slide, or a whiteboard without answering three questions: "What is it?" "What does it do?" And, most importantly, "What does it mean to the person I'm presenting to?" Put another way, what would you think if you were in their shoes? Would this make sense? Would this motivate you?
Creating and Leveraging Success Stories
Everyone loves a good story, right? And, everyone wants to feel like they're making a smart decision. Think about the last time you researched a potential purchase and searched for reviews. You want to know what others think and about their experience beyond the marketing promises. Promoting success stories from past engagements is a potent strategy. These narratives provide evidence of your solution's efficacy and potential value addition to the client's business. Besides, they offer concrete examples of your solution in action. Inspire your team to constantly create and exploit these success stories to construct credibility and illustrate the prospect of success.
Technical Sales Enablement can help SAs and SEs sell more by providing them with concrete examples of how their products or services have solved problems for other clients in the form of Case Studies, round table discussions, best practice sharing, etc. What's more, Success Stories can also be used as a tool for teaching SAs and SEs how to articulate the value of their offerings. By studying these stories, they can learn how to frame their products or services in terms of their benefits, rather than just their features. This shift in perspective can help them engage more effectively with potential customers, who are often more interested in how a product or service can help them than in its technical details.
Adapting Communication Style
Every prospect has a distinct style and preference for communication. Adapting to these differences can significantly impact engagement with a prospect. Whether the client leans towards dense technical discussions or strategic-level exchanges, practicing versatile communication styles enables your team to align better with clients and communicate the value more effectively. This requires SAs and SEs to understand and echo the client's non-verbal signals, voice tones, and conversation pace. By doing so, they can better predict their needs and present solutions that the client perceives as engaging and substantial. Again, role play scenarios are an effective way to develop this skill. Mirroring is a great way to establish rapport with a prospect and get into meaningful dialogue.
Technical and Business Savvy
Beyond mastering technology, SAs and SEs must have sound business knowledge. This means understanding the larger industry, competitors, and the overall business landscape their prospects operate in. This complementary proficiency empowers them to comprehend a client's challenges, propose solutions dealing with technical issues, and add business value.
Strategic Consulting and Advisory
Offering strategic counsel extends beyond peddling a product or service. It involves thoroughly grasping the client's business operations and targets. This level of dedication places them as trusted advisors and not just mop-up sales staff or someone who's only seen during the sales process and then never again. As a presales leader, one of the things that told me my SAs and SEs were truly successful was when a customer would say something like, "We don't make a move without calling <insert name here> first. We value their input and trust them that much." True story, by the way.
To conclude, it's crucial to remember that a successful SA or SE is more than just a technical expert. By helping them adopt a consultative and value-based approach to technical sales, you can help them elevate their role to that of a trusted advisor. Understand their client's business, their challenges, and their goals. Great SAs and SEs provide tailored solutions that solve their prospect's problems and deliver meaningful value. This transformation from a purely technical role to a trusted, value-based SA or SE will set them and their customers up for success and foster more fruitful, enduring partnerships.