Hey all - as I sit here on paternity leave, during one the most trying events of our lives, I've constantly been thinking about "what's important". WE (Ops and Pre-Sales) support the revenue generating teams and 95% of the time are aligning priorities to them. So my question is...what's important now?
Obviously things like communication, enablement/training, motivation and retention are key - but what specific initiatives are you focused on and prioritizing (or plan to prioritize) through the end of this year (and hopefully the end of the corona virus)?
Just some general ideas/topics on my side:
- How can we simplify pricing/packaging to streamline external and internal selling
- What campaigns and/or promotions can we run to incentivize customers and prospects to bite given the current world environment?
- What systems can we kill to save money and which can we optimize to make reps more productive
- Do our reps have the right metrics readily available to know what they are expected to do and how they are performing against those expectations?
- What refresher training and we do? (pricing/packaging, product, systems...etc)
Still need to translate these into actual projects...but some initial thoughts
This is an interesting topic and a pretty tricky one.
For other departments it's more straightforward (CS team needs to be more empathetic, Sales team change their pitch to adjust it to COVID etc..), but for SEs there isn't a clear and direct priority as far as I see.
What I've been doing is working with our product team on ways we can potentially tier the product and be able to offer a lite version for free. I think that is both relevant and something we have an advantage with since we know which parts of the platform provide which value by being so close to the field
@Jason to your point, emphasis right now is on communication, supporting teams remotely, and maintaining morale (in a remote + recession environment).
In addition, two big focus areas for my team are:
Improving effectiveness/conversion because there will be less opportunity volume so we need make sure we close the Opps that we have, and ideally make the TCVs larger. Some of the projects we've put a lot of energy into include revamping our demo framework and POC/Pilot playbooks.
While trying to improve conversion, also trying to take on more risk because there may be more SC/SE capacity available (e.g. potentially taking on a less qualified opportunity or POC that you typically wouldn't). This could mean offering a "trial" to a customer that we normally wouldn't to help them out when they need it most with the aim of building a relationship for the long term.
@Jason Westerberg I would echo @Yuji Higashi's second point, its definitely worth considering "lowering the gates" a little and having the SE team work on more speculative opportunities than they otherwise might. Interestingly we've had several prospects come to us and say that given the slowdown in their business they have more time to dedicate to a POC/Trial, even if they don't have clear visibility on a budget. Without a solid budget or business case built you might usually not take that on, but in this environment maybe you can consider it. I think the goodwill and trust generated by doing so will reap rewards in the long term, not to mention keeping your SE team sharp when they might otherwise be slowing down.