https://presalesbuyersguide.com
Kerry Sokalsky: https://presalesmastery.com
Chris White: The 6 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers, https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-Sales-Engineers/dp/0578521903
https://www.omedym.com , https://www.linkedin.com/company/omedym
TRANSCRIPT:
Greg Dickinson: Here we go guys, welcome to convenience Factor podcast today I got two very special guests on here. We're gonna focus specifically on something that I think wouldn't have happened five, 10 years ago and the idea of solution engineering, pre sales and the need for this great gracious donation they gave to the community. So before we get into that title and everything, let me start with Kerry, Kerry, introduce yourself and what you got what you do. Sure.
Kerry Sakolski: Hey Greg, thanks for for having us on today Kerry Sakolski and the president, founder of Presales Mastery. We do one on one demo call coaching to really significantly uplift each individual S. E. S ability to deliver demos super effectively. We use a scorecard that has 103 different metrics on it to really track at a very granular level How people are improving and how much and uh it's um, it's done over a three-month period so we can really reinforce feedback and get it to be sales, muscle memory but tends to be very effective. We see massive improvements, usually about 20, improvements empirically on double delivery going through the program.
GD: That's a follow up conversation we're going to have for sure. So before we go there chris go ahead and what's going with you? Yeah.
Chris White: Hey Greg, thanks for having us on chris white. Many folks or at least some people know me for a book. I published a few years ago called the six habits of highly effective sales engineers and and frankly that was after years of being in the field myself as a sales engineer, recognizing some of the mistakes that I made and had to correct and then taking over a team of sales engineers, recognizing that they had been made many or were making many of the same mistakes that I had made for many years. And At the time there wasn't a lot of training out there. So I created, this is actually in 2010, I created some training for them and that turned into the book I published and then I launched the business, believe it or not, in March of 2020, I launched tech sales advisors full time and we run training workshops for sales engineers and actually for ES and s s together to do team selling. And the one thing that makes our program unique is I'd like to say sales training doesn't work for sales engineers because it falls on deaf ears, but demo training doesn't necessarily either, because that's just one small part of what we do. So, so our training is a is a little bit, you know, it's, it covers the broader role of the sales engineer and frankly I work closely with Carrie and our our two programs fit very closely together, so that's a little bit about me and my my business and happy to be here.
GD: Fantastic. And that's kind of why, you know, we are here because I think what you both have done is, you know, I started my career at Arriba in 1997 presales proud of that. I was a pre sales engineer, didn't even know it, right. I was in charge of a God where we got this product go out and show people too because we're really not the software business, but we needed to grow our business. And that led me to e commerce, which led me to Ariba, but you know, I think what's interesting is as, as, as any organization, right? You have the A players B players and then you have perhaps C and D. right? And and there was really no way to, you know, gosh, it was impossible to say to someone who I'm gonna spend an hour or two with you watch your demo because if you don't, you know, how do you watch a demo right back then you, it was a face to face meeting, I go to every meeting with your team and that's just hard. So I think what you guys have done is said, hey, there's a way to improve people and now I think with video and, and, and, and in those aspects you can review what they did and you know, kind of like what gong and chorus are doing in the sales side, injection handling etcetera. So hats off to you what I think, right? I'm making assumptions, but I think when we talk about the presales solution engineer buying guide right of technology, you guys were so close to industry, you came up with this idea. So you know, rather than, I'll let you two, I'm sure you do this quite a bit, you know how to not speak over each other, but let's talk about that for a second. So for my audience, Kerry and Chris produced a document, a guide, if you will, um that clearly wasn't needed 10 years ago because there was absolutely, you know, maybe one piece of technology for social engineering. I'll let them tell you how many quote unquote vendors or suppliers or you know, technologists etcetera are in the guide. So whichever one you want to start, Let's talk about the buying guide what it is first. Let's talk about what it is.
CW: Yeah, sure. So the guide is for people familiar with like Gardner market scopes and things like that. It's meant to be a, it's meant to really solve two problems, right? It was for the pre sales buying community that was out there. We chris and I recognized pretty early on that despite the fact that this space was really exploding over the last two years, there was a gap in terms of awareness. There wasn't a universal awareness in terms of all the vendors that were out there. Uh some of them focus on marketing and do a great job of that. They've raised lots of money, they've they've gotten their names out there really well, a lot of them focus on the product and they haven't really necessarily made themselves as well known as they could be. And so we wanted to help the vendors or you get, you know, close that awareness gap, but there was also a clarity gap and that was, it was really confusing to a lot of buyers out there in terms of what each of the vendors actually did and what problems they solve, what use cases they addressed. And so chris and I got to chatting and felt that the market had sort of hit a critical mass in terms of there were enough vendors in the space now, they were getting enough traction that it justified some sort of clarity around what was going on in the market and there really wasn't much out there. Uh there wasn't really a report like this. In fact, the G2 pre sales category didn't exist until about a month ago. And so we decided last august to approach a bunch of the vendors and see if there was an appetite to participate in this type of exercise. And we decided very early on that this was not going to be a pay to play type of exercise. We didn't want to artificially restrict who was involved because we wanted to be as inclusive as possible to make the report as useful as possible. And we got a really, really warm reception from the community That this was something that the vendors really wanted to participate in. So that was kind of nice and of the 24 vendors that we originally invited to participate, 21 agreed to to join our little fledgling survey slash report. Uh and we went through this Long sort of six month engagement where we did a ton of research. We interviewed the vendors in terms of where do they position themselves in the market? How do they see themselves compared to the competition? What use cases are they solving? We did deep demos with each of them, we sent out pretty detailed R. F. I. S and R. P. S, which, you know, the presales audience obviously very familiar with and capture a lot of information and you know, we, we came out with what we think is a really interesting report and one of the the sort of benefits of going through this exercise was that chris and I came up with a way to look at the marketplace in a logical manner. There's a lot of different types of vendors that are out there and we came up with five sort of focus areas that we're calling them kind of like subcategories that really we think hell will help pre sales leaders identify a where their biggest problems are and then prioritize based on that where they should be focusing their investment.
GD: Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I'm a, I'm an afterthought in your book because we were one of those that focused on product and not marketing and and listen, shame on us, right? But at the end of the day, we've got huge successful customers and now we'll go and spend money on marketing. But but more importantly, when I, when I listen to your first webinar about that and when I kind of got the book, I think overall helped write, you know, who are we, who, you know, and from a buying perspective and understanding that, hey, you know, solution engineering, pre sales automation. Right, Okay. Well it's an RFP category. There's the demo category. There's the, and then within the demo category. Right? I mean, I think it helps when I talk to people. Now, I can clearly say, hey, yeah, there's some, there's some great products out there, great companies. Listen to me, there's really no competition because the market is not that mature yet. You add them all together. We have x number of customers and it's not measured in the thousands, Right? I don't care how big people are and what they've done. It's just that the money hasn't been there yet. Right. So I think what you guys are doing is saying, hey, let's help that industry grow. My hat's off to you because you look at, you know, a good friend of mine that started a kind of start off as a blog called spend matters and he became the resident expert in e procurement, Right? Because he did what you did. He just went out and started gathering data and information and then, you know, he made into a business eventually where you know, where people would buyers would pay for the research he did, right? Because it was extensive. You know, listen, partner charged a lot of money, right? For what, for what you get from them and and they're typically, I think, I think what I really um what people need to kind of think about what you guys went ahead and did is someday Gartner will have some information about the space, but it's been such a afterthought in the industry, right of o solution engineering, grab the projector, get plug it in, get the screen ready and when the sales guy stops talking 48 minutes into a 60 minute call, it's your turn to show everything we have to do, right? I mean listen, I'm not being sarcastic, I was in that role. Right? Um so you know, I think what I think what you've done is it, you know, hats off to you. So chris walk a little bit more into that a little bit. Right? So we got we got um buying community was a goal. Clearly, clearly there was a gap 24 vendors, you're not gonna talk about each vendor, but overall, what did you guys learn that you went holy crap, I never thought of that. Like give me some of that, they have seen stuff.
CW: Right. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really good and you know, some of the key observations that we made Greg first. It's it's really impressive. I mean, you you said five years ago, I'll say three years ago there wasn't the market for this, I would say the majority of the vendors in the study were founded three years or less. So, you know, and one of the observations is what they've built, I'm going to say collectively is really impressive. There are some really impressive capabilities out on the market. So, so that was sort of the first observation and things are the products are changing very rapidly, expectations are changing very rapidly. So, and and it's, you know, to your point, one of the things that we've said is if you're thinking about these solutions, you really need to consider the product and the company and the people behind the company and the maturity of the product doesn't necessarily and versus the maturity of the company aren't necessarily, you know, a good indicator, right? So there's some organizations that have been around for, You know, 10 years or at least the product's been around, but they're not a very mature company or vice versa. So that was that was one the other thing is, or another thing is the taxonomy or the terminology is very different in this space across the board from different vendors, think about Crm, if if if you if you if you open and and by the way, studies have shown that there's something like 400 Crm tools or more more than 400 crm tools, what would you expect to see in a crm account, contact lead opportunity, right. I mean there's there's some basic fundamental data you would expect to see. You look across the tools and even within the different focus areas they use very different terminology. Even even terms like demo, the word demo or the object, demo is different in in you know the tools in in the demo automation space.
GD: Um one other observation that will make and then I'll then I'll invite Kerry to share is and this should this should come to no surprise to anyone who sells software before you invest in one of these solutions. You really need to think about your process and your methodology just buying a tool is not going to solve problems right? You really have to think about how are we going to operate differently? And and so there's more to it than just automating or buying software. Yeah. And I think that I think that leads to the curve, right? I mean at the end of the day we were in the bottom of the first, maybe there's only one out of the top of the first for heaven's sakes right? And and the role. Right? I think there's some head there's some winds right? Product centric is now no longer you know an article written by nobody. It's it's real right, buyers want their hands on the product, there's more P. O. C. S than ever before. I can, you know, 15 years ago people would say no, I'm not doing it right too bad, we're not doing it. But we were in control back then today, the buyer has a lot more control. So I think the, I think the role of presales has been elevated. I think the the number of jobs that were responsible for right has has increased. We have a bigger seat at the table. Um and so I think what you're, what you're hitting on is that, you know, as these things change vendors like myself are trying to hit that, you know, that that that market perhaps is a moving target. Um, and and philosophically you gotta find the company that believes in the values of ahmidam right in my case, right? We gotta we gotta find the ones that are saying, hey, the buyer needs to be able to buy in an easier way and there are others that say no no no no don't do that. What we want to do is give the tool to a to a solution engineer to make their job easier, right? Because there's a scale problem. Well, those are two different conversations, right? So I think that's what your, what you guys have highlighted is hey, You know, there's more than one way to add value to the solution engineer, right? And you produced it wasn't, it wasn't to vendors, it was 24 you said plus there's a handful of afters right? You added to the mix. Hey, just out of curiosity. So it started 24. If you don't write it today, how many would there be? I just want to know How many. Okay. Yeah. So it's because because you know, the analogy you use is when I joined a Reba in 1997, there were three players in the procurement by 1999 it was 47. It's crazy. Listen, 10 years later there was four. Yeah, yeah. Well if it will and if I, if I might I have one more thought and then kick it over Kerry is companies are going, I believe that companies are going to be investing in more than one tool in this space. Right? There really is a pre sales technology staff, right? There's, there's pre sales operations and oversight and management. There's what we call pre sales opportunity execution, there's, there's demo automation and within demo automation, there's different solutions that can be paired together. So I think one important point, I think for the listeners to take away from this is that don't think in terms of what's the one tool that I need in precincts. There isn't one, I think, I think, you know, in five years, the more sophisticated pre sales teams are probably gonna have three or four tools that are explicitly, you know, purchased for their use. There's a, there's a provider right now we're not gonna mention my name or there's that, that that that you are on the surface, you would say Greg you compete. We're actually in conversations right now to take their technology what they do because it's different than ours and embedded in our, in our strategy, right? Because it helps the solution if you do X, y and Z. That therefore can be married to what we're doing no different than, you know, we got customers that own sales enablement platforms and we become a, you know, we're not replace, we're augmenting that, right? Like Crm Holy Mackerel, Right? How many add ons are that? So I think it's a very valid point. Is that the, it's in the early stages, I think you're correcting me, you're right three years ago. I don't know. When I started coming to him, there was like, I'm looking around like, who else is doing anything in here? There was one player that I found, right? And then now, right, you know, when I talked to investors, like, we'll give you the page, there's, you know, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know, Kerry, go ahead. What was your kind of, we were on the topic of, you know, kind of, you know, observations, learned things. You're like, Holy Mackerel. I didn't, I didn't expect.
KS:Yeah, lots of great points brought up by chris and yourself Greg. I mean, I think it's, it was really interesting. I was talking to just to your last point around the some of these vendors being very complimentary. I I think the other thing to realize is that each of these vendors also thinks they're fairly unique in a lot of ways they are, even if they are in the same space. I was talking to a V. P. At one of the vendors the other day and their response in terms I was asking them, who are they seeing in their competes and they mentioned one of the other top companies in this space and they said ultimately though we don't think we compete with them and frankly I agree with them. The use cases for both of those two vendors are so different that one of those vendors is in the wrong compete. Right. And I think that's one of the key learnings that chris and I found that's really critical to point out is buyers really need to understand what their use cases are and be able to prioritize them because they're they're not going to solve everything with one tool as chris just mentioned. Right. And so you really understand, Okay, what are my biggest issues and how do I want to actually leverage these particular technologies to get the most games? We think about them automation as a subcategory, there are a lot of different uses for this. It could be used, top of funnel that marketing might ultimately own, it could be used as a post sale tool for helping educate our customers reel right now, pre sales doesn't have to be involved in demo into your existing customers anymore, but who necessarily owns it and what their, their influences over the purchase and the use of it and who's gonna, who's gonna fund it. These are all considerations that by organizations need to think about that. If they don't think about that, they're gonna run in a little bit of circles and spend their gears a little bit in their evaluation cycles, because they're not gonna know if they're evaluating tools.
GD: You know, I couldn't agree more. I mean, there are, listen, I mean, at the end of the day, when one of the biggest challenges of my previous startup, that that that we had X. It was the, you know, customer success person was always saying, I need pre sales resources to demo to these customers and and the pre sales leader was like, I don't get paid on that. You know, Greg either fix the comp plan or we're not doing it right? And it was always this bad, no matter what I did, it was never enough comp or just whatever, because listen, I'm never gonna I'm never going to stack the deck on customers more than new logos, right? And that's what the team was being paid. So, it was always this confrontation until I find someone your own person for heaven's sakes, like, like, what are you doing? Right? Well then then the quality wasn't as good because you didn't, you? I'm a really big believer and like I watch these companies that go and say, oh well, you know, top of funnel off the website will put the lead. The junior pre sales person of the SDR BDR make me throw up. Right? Because that's not the SDR BDR. Their job is to prospect. They weren't ever that, that just is more insulting than ever that the demo is not really valuable. Right? Anyone can go do it anyway. I, I digress because it's one of my pet peeves. But let me talk to you a little bit about the guides out. I'm sure there is going to be, you know, updates. But, but have you, have you been asked or what's your thoughts on a service ecosystem around this? Right. I mean, you know, well, every one of us that sell software in this space will say, oh yeah, deployments to our exercising, you're up and running blah blah, blah blah. But listen, let's be real, right, What you guys highlighted on is different use cases, different people. They may not have bought software before they deployed software before. They may not have those resources that are available. So have you guys, I'd love to just get your thoughts on what are you seeing there? Right. Um, and you're pointing to me.
CW:No, I'm not.
GD: No, you're pointing to Kerry, go ahead Kerry. I mean seriously? I mean that is that Chapter two, is that what you see in there?
KS:I think it's going to eventually have to come into play. I don't think we're seeing it yet, but I think we're starting to see anecdotal evidence that needs to be there. And what I mean by that is I've talked to more than a few companies that have tried to roll these particular solutions that enterprise wide and failed pretty miserably and I think there's a lot of variables that go into play there. I think some of these companies are newer and they haven't necessarily, you know, built their implementation methodologies out as quite as mature as would be expected in a very large enterprise organization. I think there's the other challenge and we sort of alluded to it earlier, is that because there's so many different, you know, cooks in the kitchen that are potentially users of these tools that there's conflicting objectives and goals for how they should be used, how they should be deployed internally. Right. And if they don't get resolved beforehand, then it's not gonna work. And that's where we're hearing some interesting anecdotal evidence there as well. Um, so I think that's another thing that I think organizations should really start to think about getting the quick win right. Take a specific division or unit or geography, roll out there, get that success story and then use that as a way to sort of successfully roll it out enterprise wide from that perspective. I you know, I think as these, a lot of these companies start to raise lots of money and build their organizations and, and, and, and become more mature. They're able to, to create better customer success and professional organizations. We're not seeing that as a focus for a lot of these companies yet. It's a chicken in the egg. Right. I mean there is no that I know of a solution engineer on the bench waiting for the next project and if you bought something new, who's going to deploy it like and you end up with, well, yeah, I'll do it next week because this week I got a whole bunch of opportunities to manage and if you don't figure out a way to engage that person and the not, I can't do it as a vendor, you have to do it to set hey Kerry or chris are going to deploy this and by the way they're gonna be taken off the line for a little bit and compensated fairly for doing so because otherwise it's the, I'll get to it next week. I'll get to it next week cause nothing is more important than the opportunity is gonna close quote unquote this quarter. Right. And that's what we're, you know, we kind of a peeling back the onion on that problem. Right? Because tomorrow our customers are deploying in 2000 and it doesn't happen overnight and it takes like anything else in life. It takes a focus and someone's gonna have to step up and say, yeah, I own that deployment, it can't be that Gregor carrier chris on the on the ground that's, you know, daytime is the, you know, only you guys can do a day job and a night job with a buyer guy. Well, but you know, it's an important point Greg, I mean, you know, 11 of the place for certainly a number of the vendors in the, you know, again, what we called up the presales oversight and management space is that and and they say that one of their biggest competitors is, well, we'll just do it in Salesforce right? Or we'll we'll just do it in. But if it's going to be a customization, Salesforce and the pre sales Leaders of pre sales team is in essence held hostage by the rev ops team or the Sales Ops team and the Salesforce Admin groups, right? And it takes 6 to 9 months to get anything done there. Right. So teams, pre sales leaders really need to think through how are we going to implement? Who's going to be responsible? And and I do think that there's I see the sort of the emergence of sort of a cottage industry, if I can use that term of consulting services, supporting organizations, implementing and rolling out these tools right? From a methodology perspective from an implementation perspective, even from a care and feeding perspective and if I may in terms of services that we've thought about, we even envision an advisory type service to frankly the vendors at some point and to buying organizations particularly as this market gets broader and the decision process gets more complicated. We actually see ourselves sort of filling that need as well.
GD: So listen, I would think stage one for you guys at a minimum. Right? And this is what is, hey, some of these, let's, let's focus on demo automation. Right? What you guys call that, right, is that, you know, you're automating something, right? Whether it's a walk through or a video, right? However you've done it well, you know, there's training there too, just because you're, you know, you're doing it on video doesn't mean I do it right. And I've listened to myself, oh my gosh, what were you doing? Right. Like, you know, you really got to think so. I think, I think the cottage industry or the training can start there as well, Right. Is that as you have this absentee buyer that's on their own self learning And, and is that, is it, is it different than a face to face? Well, heck, yeah, it is. Right. But how does that all work? And, and so forth? And I think you're, I think you're right. And I think that then right? You guys as, as creating the guide need to also kind of, you know, figure out how you're gonna go about. I think there is a add on service or add on, you know, kind of junk here that says, hey, you know, advisory service around deployment, even if you don't pick a vendor of choice, you just said, listen, I don't care what you're doing, whether it's whatever category it is, right? I like your analogy of Salesforce, if you're, hey, we wanna use Salesforce. Oh, by the way, you know, the CFO just said, listen, our forecasting is bringing in accurately make a bunch of changes in salesforce. Guess who's gonna win? Right? The CFO's gonna get whatever they want and guess what, as soon as you get that done, they're gonna ask for 17 other things that quote unquote help, pipeline analysis. So you're kind of, You know, rolling uphill. So I think that's a great place to end it. I think, you know, that, that, that, that we will see, um, you know, six months from now or so a version two. Is that your, is that your plan?
CW:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reason we published it as a website and for everybody's benefit, it's, it's not a downloadable report, even though it's called, you know, the presales buyer's guide, it's a website and, and if I may, it's, it's pretty meaty there, there's a lot of information out there, we want to, we want to encourage people to take a look at it. We're actually working on something called a demo Excellence framework and, and, you know, the pillars of, of this framework are skills, process assets and what's the fourth stories, so, and stories and messaging. So there's a lot coming Greg. We, this is in the very early stages and we're excited to see where this goes next. Well, so are we?
GD: So are we, um, listen so in in um and wrapping this thing up, right, please repeat your company's again. And also the where they, where they can find the buyer's guide, um, and there any channels for, you know, anyone that's listening today that may not have been included in version one. How do they, what's the best way to reach you? All website, whatever. Just kind of, let's put a little plug in for this, you know, for everyone on the, on this podcast listening, these two people took it upon themselves full time jobs and they said, hey, it would be helpful to go do this. Hat's off to them. It go look at it please, when they give you the address, it's not a one paragraph per 21 24 minutes. A lot of research in there and had a lot of categories, how long they've been in business, How big they are. What about their funding? What about this? What about that? You know, kind of ballpark revenue numbers, accepted what, what people would be willing to share. So it's a professional document. It's not a two peas in a pod, decided just throw this together and see if we can call it something. So I'm a user. So I my comment, So go ahead and Kerry, go ahead, take it away and introduce everyone to that and then we'll end today
KS: Awesome appreciate that Greg. So the easiest way to find it is presalesbuyer'sguide. com And it is 100% free. We not only do not charge the vendors to participate, we do not charge for access. You have to register an account just so we know who you are, but that's literally the only gate uh and then you get immediate access to it. Um so again, presales buyer's guide dot com. It is and and just to play on chris's idea is that the reason why we did it as a website is It allows us to update the information whenever we want. One of the vendors just this week had a huge series C raise. That news was their profile was updated on the website. 15 minutes later, we felt that the problem with these downloadable reports is there immediately out of date as soon as you read them and and we wanted people to have a recurring and more up to date information. So please do check it out. Me personally. Presales mastery where you can reach me on linkedin or pre sales mastery dot com
CW: I'm at tech sales advisors dot com. All one word and Greg. You said something about the the other vendors we want to invite any of the other vendors who have not participated to to reach out to us. If for some reason we haven't discovered you're found you yet reach out to us. We're excited to include, you know, we would love to hit the number 40 in in the next release. I don't know if we'll get
GD: Yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm testament. They reached out to me, they didn't know about us. And you know, we were we were given an opportunity at least say who we are in the in the in the guy, which is fair right? We weren't in the in the early throws. But you know that that that that was not something he said, oh no, you didn't make the cut, You're out. You guys were accommodating. So hats off to you. Thank you both very, very much. And I think it's a great, it's a great podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and again. What a great job with the, with the, with the buying. I appreciate it. Thank you. Great to have you
