collaborate with your AE. Some excellent ideas here, and glad to see it didn't descend into a rep bashing affair.
We'll be back next week with more to talk about focusing on Time Management for Presales
How to work with your Account Executive
• AEs - spend too much time on the wrong slides (NASCAR)
• Bad behaviour: Keep interrupt the SE
• Align before the event
• AEs usually like to talk.
• Give your AE some things to do in the demo
• "Don't tell me to show something specifically"
• Don't let chat messages chime or turn up on screen
• Act as a sounding board between the roles.
• Collaborate on the qualification of a customer
• Help sellers in their outreach demos
Train together
• Organize practices - regional or monthly session to do practice together
• Need to make it appealing to the whole team - images, graphs, visuals
Private equity
• How much customization do we do per demo?
• Try to understand the customer & their need. If you need to alter the product to address their particular need this makes a lot of sense. Sometimes just cosmetically.
• Should you go too far into the customer's expertise? It could turn into them being the expert
• Do you make everything an option?
Enterprise vs SMB
• Getting respect for the presales team
• Presales team is probably outnumbered by sales people
Starting a presales organization
• When to do it?
• Could be based on how hard the technical sell is
• Could be also when the services organization can't cope with presales needs
• Startups - tend to borrow people from other teams
• Some startups do without sales people
• Founders do demos well!
Pioneering new wins
• High margin vs low margin
• Do you have good references in that market
• Do you need to show a tailored demo to show relevant answers.
Next week's topic
• Time management for Presales!
• Request management