Spent last night watching the movie Moneyball and got thinking about applying it to presales teams. While you don’t have the ability to trade players like a baseball team you can consider how to add the right levels of support and resilience to the team whenever you can alter the composition.
What are the main plays we want to manage?
Getting clients from an initial demo to a qualified opportunity
Winning POVs / Trials
Covering each product / domain area needed.
Length of POVs
How often do we measure these things?
How often do we try to get one person to be able to do everything? (and keeping them)
How much do we value breadth over depth of knowledge?
What are your options for team composition?
A presales team might not have a limit like a league baseball team, and sometimes you might be able to have 2 people instead of 1 if it makes filling the roles easier. You also could have some really narrow roles (like a Pitcher or Designated Hitter) or broad and general roles.
What I believe you should do is consider the roles your team needs in order to be successful. How many spots are on the team, and can you segregate some of the tasks and roles to make them more effective?
If you have some tasks that happen a lot and would benefit from specialisation, do you want to hire people to focus on these things. Domain knowledge area, ROI/business cases, bid management, system building and maintenance, and leadership could all fit into this category.
What are your tricks for planning a strong presales team? How do you make the best of your available resources of people, money, locations and roles? Can you beat the NY Yankees with a much smaller budget?
Let me know your thoughts!