What is the best way for Sales and Presales to work together?
A lively topic for the summer clubhouse call - how to partner and work better with your Account Executive.
For anyone in presales, your closest colleague is usually the account exec or sales reps that you work with. You partner with them on deals, sit near them in the office, travel together on customer visits, and win or lose deals at the same time.
In my opinion it is the most important factor to whether you are successful, is how well you work with your sales rep, so any practical advice to doing better is worth checking out.
On this Presales Talks we visited this topic well and here are the top notes:
Partnering
• Plan opportunities together
• Work on demos
• Give your AE some tasks to do while you are presenting - some questions, points, stories etc.
What is good?
• AEs who understand presales as a role, adapt to understand and work with presales.
• Preparation, research.
• People who have your back.
• Get people into the room, cold calling, finding stakeholders, encouraging them to get interested.
What do we expect from AEs
• Follow the sales process
• Expect certain things before your meetings, demos, proof of values.
• Not to contradict you in front of clients.
• Help us communicate well
• Educating customer on their process.
• Help with the research.
• Checkpoints outside of the meetings
What doesn't work?
• Just a meeting invite without extra information
• People who don't take feedback
• Super hands off
Pooled models and working with multiple reps
• Need to check in more before each meeting
• Get to know what is happening with this account & situation.
• Network with your reps.
• It’s a bit like dating
• Specialists, and people on management tracks also have a similar relationship to multiple reps.
• Bad reps will complain that they don't get the right level of support
How to work with them during a call.
• Want a demo plan before hand
• How flexible can you be mid-demo?
• Do you want to be connected on chat privately or not? Can backfire.
• Have a signal in the meeting for who wants to talk
• Stand up, Turn on camera, or go off mute
Any more tips you have? Join us again next week on clubhouse