Scaling up your Presales Team? Here’s How to Quickly Onboard New Sales Engineers.
Scaling up your presales team? Here’s how to quickly onboard new sales engineers.
STEP 1: Define your presales SOPs and best practices.
Type them out.
Knowing them is not sufficient.
New hires cannot read your mind!
Do your SEs assist with Technical Discovery? Then what should they ask?
Do your SEs give Demos? Then how should they prep? Which demo assets should they use?
Do your SEs lead POCs/POVs? Which test cases highlight your competitive advantages?
Your answers will depend on specific attributes about a deal.
Different discovery questions for different customer types.
Different demo assets for different use cases.
Different POC/POV test cases for different products.
Documenting all of this forces you to be specific and to refine your process.
It’s all obvious until you have to write it down.
That is when you realize all of the steps, complexities, IF/THEN rules, caveats, exceptions, and so on.
STEP 2: Assemble your SOPs and best practices into Evaluation Plans (aka, templates, playbooks, action plans).
Multiple options here…
End-to-End Plans:
Sales Engineers follow a complete, e2e plan with everything they should do from their first touch point with a prospect all the way through the post-sales hand-off.
Build-As-You-Go Plans:
Sales Engineers assemble their evaluation plans as they go. They get tapped to support Discovery. Add in the Discovery template. Then they need to spin up a POV environment? Add in the POV Setup template and the templates for the relevant Test Cases. Up against KeyCompetitorX? Add in the KeyCompetitorX template with special test cases that work well against them. And so on.
STEP 3: Train your new hires on the Evaluation Plans.
Make your new Evaluation Plans available to your presales team.
Train them on when to use each Evaluation Plan.
Coach them on how to tailor the Evaluation Plans for each prospect.
Give them a way to track their progress through their Evaluation Plans.
Give them a way to share their Evaluation Plans with their prospects (in whole or in part).
STEP 4: Watch your new hires rack up the technical wins!
Your new hires instantly follow the same SOPs and best practices that your top sales engineers took years to master.
But they are doing it in days and weeks; not months and years.
Want to learn more? Talk to one of experienced presales experts about everything from documenting to assembling to tracking to sharing Evaluation Plans and how they improve your onboarding process, reduce new hire time-to-productivity, and empower your team to win. Click here to get started!
