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Evolving PreSales Models: Scaling SC Support to Customers
With customer retention and growth more important than ever, demands for PreSales expertise are increasing both earlier in deal cycles and well into the customer journey. Traditional PreSales models lack structure, bandwidth, and incentives for Post-Sales work.
In August, Jason McDonald, VP Global Specialty Consulting, joined the Xpert Community for a discussion on how his team adapted to this tug of war for PreSales expertise. Jason shared how to create a separate Solution Consulting team to provide formal technical support to Customer Success while minimizing disruption to existing organizational structures.
What prompted a formal change? PreSales leadership noticed increasing asks from post-sales. Customers needed more technical expertise to drive adoption on cloud offerings. They went to the CRO with a new structure proposed:
They subdivided existing Solutions Consulting headcount into 3 teams:
- SCs providing traditional PreSales support to Sales
- Specialty Consulting - pulled in at the executive level
- SCs providing support to Customer Success
An important point was to let SCs choose which team they wanted to be on and apply internally. Leadership noticed a natural delineation among SCs between “hunters,” those who thrive on the sale, and “gatherers,” those who want to follow customer outcomes long-term. This model allowed ICs to focus more on the type of the work they enjoy.
Initially, compensation remained based on team bookings by total team region. Eventually, compensation will factor in renewals/churn.
Benefits of this model:
- Minimal organizational disruption and quick to implement: no major changes to compensation or headcount
- Customer Success gets support without Sales having the rug ripped out from under them
- Customer outcomes improve from more focused technical support
- SC morale and performance improve
- Creates new paths to leadership for SCs
A major hurdle was enabling Customer Success to leverage SCs for the first time. To solve for this, SC leadership created two “plays” for which CSMs could request SCs:
- Strategic Play: Executive Alignment Workshop on Market Trends & Best Practices
- Tactical Play: Buyer Optimization Consulting
Anything else is out of scope, preserving SC bandwidth and allowing for gradual CSM enablement.
Top advice for anyone looking to implement a similar model:
- Let SCs opt in to changes
- Don’t try to make CSMs SCs. They are very different skillsets.
- Limit Post-Sales engagement of SCs to specific, limited, and clearly delineated “plays,” and don’t deviate from that.
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LATAM
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EMEA
- MRI Software: Sales Engineer (London, UK)
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- Northern Trust: Principal, Solutions Consulting (Hybrid, Limerick, County Limerick, Ireland)
- Workiva: Presales Solutions Consultant - GRC (Remote, London, UK and Amsterdam, Netherlands)
More opportunities and job search resources at: Simply SEand PreSales Collective Job Board
Upcoming Events 🗓
October 4: the first in-person, one-day conference dedicated to elevating the Presales profession is coming to San Francisco!
Join for discussions and actionable insights on how the below industry leaders execute on the following Future-of-PreSales initiatives:
🔢“The PreSales Metrics that Matter to Drive C-Suite Change”
- Brian Oehling, Global Head of PreSales, SMB, SAP Concur
📑”How Sales Engineers are Defining the Modern Go-to-Market”
- Tyler Marcoux, VP of Sales Engineering Strategy and Operations, Snowflake
🧬“Evolving Your Approach to Product-Field Alignment”
- Henry Sowell, VP Solutions Engineering Operations, Cloudera
🧠 “How to Launch an AI Product," a panel discussion with:
- Desanka Aleksov, Global Head of Solutions and Sales Enablement, Ironclad
- Brett Crane, VP Solutions, Vivun
- Arni Khanna, Head of Solutions Engineering, CaptivateIQ
🔑 “Scaling PreSales Impact and Unlocking Efficiency," a panel discussion with:
- Brian Christensen, SVP, Global Solution Engineering & Value Consulting, Talkdesk
- David Aldrich, Director - Sales Engineering, Zerto
- Nick DiIorio - Division VP, PreSales, ADP
- Chris Browne - Senior Director, Solutions Consulting, Lattice
Tickets are going fast – save your spot today! unxpctd.vivun.com
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