The 3 Presales Metrics That Matter: Part 2

In Part 1, we introduced “The 3 Presales Metrics That Matter”:

1. Presales Opportunity Outcome
2. Presales Activity Distribution
3. Presales Support Ratio

In this article, we’re going to focus on Metric 2: Presales Activity Distribution; how to use the metric to make the right organizational decisions, and how to measure it over time. 

Few roles have work activity as diverse as presales. Team members are frequently called upon to configure software, integrate with third party partners, and customize demonstrations to tell a desired story. An hour later they may be in front of a Fortune 500 client on the whiteboard, describing system architecture or business process transformation. Later in the day they’re creating presentations to help close a deal or act as leave behinds. On the side, they’re squeezing in ROI analysis to justify the solution cost against a customers internal rate of return or net present value. Only to be handed an RFP the next morning with an inordinate amount of use case questions specific to a prospects industry.

With such an assortment of required skills and competencies it’s hard to believe that companies continue to associate presales with a single role: “Sales Engineer,” “Solution Consultant,” etc. An individual extremely difficult to hire who is adept at handling a diverse workload. As companies expand, acquire new products, begin to specialize in different vertical markets, and seek to win large deals, the effectiveness of the presales team begins to diminish.   

This is why Presales Activity Distribution is the most important metric to track to understand: ideal presales team roles, headcount required to support the business, and common patterns that lead to closed/won opportunities. Here is what it will look like over time:

It is important to highlight that the “Type” of activities may be dependent on a particular business. In the illustration above we’re looking at an array of typical activities that range from customer facing, to internal, to unrelated to any opportunity at all.

The activity distribution is the cumulative contribution of each activity type out of 100%, trended over time -- weeks, months, quarters, etc. Activities are specific to an individual team member. They have a start date, duration, and may be associated with opportunities, accounts, or nothing at all. Grouping duration of activity type across all individuals in the data set will yield the visual above.

For companies with a generalist “Sales Engineer” or “Solution Consultant” role you will now be in a position to start driving a conversation around how the presales team should begin to evolve into multiple roles under a single team umbrella.

• Large percentage of activity spent on building demonstrations? Potential solutions are hiring a Demo Officer with supporting team to manage all environments while providing resources necessary to aid in complex customization. Product enhancement requests may also make it easier to demonstrate the product. Without a reference back to time spent on demonstration build activity it is nearly impossible to make the case internally. 
• Increasing percentage of activity spent on business value modeling? A straightforward solution may be to propose a “Value Engineering” role under presales which acts as an overlay across multiple geographies. An alternative strategy would be to begin collecting anonymous, system generated, data from your user base to quantify value. This will allow the business to bring the value discussion into the sales process earlier without the need for complex financial analysis later in the opportunity.
• Inordinate amount of non-opportunity activity? Depending on your solution set, presales may be requested to support account management activities from the Customer Success team or to engage with Professional Services teams during deployments to ensure the customer realizes the value sold during the sales process. The above activities may be necessary for your business to succeed, but the current team structures at the company may not be optimized to deliver the desired outcome by solely leaning on presales.

Prior to tracking any activity, it is important to spend time selecting the appropriate activity types in order to draw meaningful conclusions around optimal presales team makeup and responsibility. A few of our favorites include:

• Demo Build - Helps make the case for a demo build team or product enhancements
• Enablement - Helps make the case for effective sales enablement
• Meeting Preparation - Helps make the case for focused product marketing assets
• Presentation - This is what a field presales team should seek to maximize
• Value Analysis - Helps make the case for a Value Engineering team or product enhancements
• Internal Meeting - Helps make the case for a culture change around team collaboration
• Learning - Helps make the case for dedicated presales enablement

Many more activity types are out there and interesting to trend as part of the Presales Activity Distribution metric. Helping the team and business understand the importance of the data and how it will drive changes across the company is critical to get buy in and internal support.

METRIC VARIANTS

Further constraining and slicing the Presales Activity Distribution metric will illustrate additional compelling trends for the business:

VARIANT 1:

If you group the individual activity data against the context in which they were completed, you will get the following:

This is a critical picture as certain activities such as delivering presentations, building demonstrations, etc. may not always occur in the context of a sales opportunity. Presales team members may be supporting Account Managers or Customer Success Managers. Presales team members may also be working to enable partners or resellers which are not directly tied to any customer or sales opportunity. 

Aside from aiding presales, this data will alert the company to areas of opportunity in other parts of the business. If presales is working to support implementations or account management activities post sale, the business may need to enable or restructure those groups or expand the responsibilities of the presales function with appropriate headcount and compensation structures.

VARIANT 2:

If you group the individual activity data by opportunity and filter only for closed/won or closed/lost, you will get the following:

Now you are in a position to understand how much effort is being expended to win or subsequently lose opportunities. This insight can be used in a variety of ways. First, the business may wish to investigate the activities related to won deals vs. lost deals to identify patterns which may highlight the best presales selling tactics. The opportunities under investigation can be further sliced by geography or market segment as the steps required to consistently win may vary across international boundaries or size of company.

Second, presales leadership gets a much better picture into the effort it takes to support and win deals in each segment -- information which will directly impact the proposed presales support ratio and headcount allocation. If the business can validate that a more involved presales process leads to larger deals, more consistently, then you may wind up investing in more than one presales headcount to support a sales rep if the economics make sense.

DATA CAPTURE

While the insight into the business using the Presales Activity Distribution metric is extremely valuable, the ability to capture this data remains the biggest challenge. Inputting activity into a system after it has occurred can be a massive time sink. It is difficult to remember what happened, when, on what opportunity, and for how long. The act of entering the data manually further exacerbates the issue. 

Tool sets which synchronize calendar invites are fraught with the same difficulties as many important activities to track such as building a demo, prepping for a meeting, and building an ROI model are not calendar events and would be a burden to create them. The only solution which leads to user adoption and can produce this critical metric is one which can capture activity and duration in the flow of the activity in which it occurs.

Providing a seamless way to collect activity as the work occurs, coupled with detailed explanations to the team regarding the reasons the data is being collected, is critical to get the widespread adoption necessary to populate this critical metric. When the presales team begins to split into multiple purpose built functions with greater work-life balance and success within the company, every team member will be glad they did.

Metric 3: Presales Support Ratio, will be covered in the next article.     

Taking The First Step

We built Hero by Vivun based on our experience working with and building sales, presales, and product teams at companies of all stages of maturity. Hero by Vivun was designed to help presales teams operationalize the strategies outlined above and more. Specific to this article, Vivun has created the only solution for presales which enables activity capture during the flow of the job. Contact sales at vivun.co to learn more or watch a demo on the Salesforce AppExchange below: