The best way to leverage your sales team is to put a strong presales process in place. The presales process helps organizations qualify incoming leads. So, the sales team can focus their limited resources on prospects with the most potential.
In this article, we’ll discuss which metrics you should be tracking during the sales cycle so you can improve your qualification process.
How can we improve the presales process?
To effectively allocate resources, you'll need to evaluate an account’s potential during presales. That’s why we, at Demostack, built this google sheet calculator.
In this calculator, you’ll see how valuable each SE session is to your process and to each segment on its own. With this information in hand, you’ll be able to see where your SEs are making the most impact.
To use this calculator, you’re simply going to fill in the green boxes with your own figures. So, for each segment, you’ll need to add your average ACV, opps per quarter, win rate, and the number of SE sessions per deal.
As you can see in this example, even though the total winnings for healthcare deals were $200,000, each deal required just two SE sessions. Since 8 sessions influenced the win, each individual SE session gave rise to $25,000 if the session was a win. Each SE session in retail deals was worth $10,000 regardless of whether the deal won or not.
In financial services, the team needed 5 SE sessions per deal. Since 20 sessions influenced the win, each individual SE session gave rise to $10,000 if the session was a win. Each SE session in financial services deals was worth $4,000 regardless of whether the deal won or not.
Finally, in retail, the team needed 15 SE sessions per deal. Since 60 sessions influenced the win, each individual SE session gave rise to $3,333 if the session was a win. Each SE session in retail deals was worth $1,333 regardless of whether the deal won or not.
So, an SE lead would want to allocate more of his team members to healthcare deals. Ideally, there would be enough SEs to attend every call for every industry, but if there’s limited availability, the team should prioritize healthcare opportunities because their presence is more valuable.
While every lead is important, some are more valuable to the organization than others. With this information, you can ensure SEs and AEs alike are as efficient with their time as possible.
Repeat and scale the process with Salesforce
You can take this process to the next level by adding more filters. Analyze data by company size, job function, and pain point. That way, you can define exactly which accounts are most profitable. Then you can decide how much support they need.
HR professionals might, for example, need more face-time. Or, you might find that finance executives need less 1:1 time. If they're already aware of the solutions available, they might only need to see how a few key features function before delving into prices, rates, and fees. The possibilities are endless.
With a demo template dedicated to each use case, you’ll be able to uncover insights about your market at a whole new level of granularity.
Demostack makes this process very easy. You can create different product demo templates based on job function, industry, and pain point by cloning or using Overlays. Then, you can track the time spent on each demo template. In fact, you can even go into Salesforce directly through our integration to see where team members are allocating their resources so you can redistribute resources in real-time.
Accelerate your deal cycle with sandboxes
A sandbox can serve as a POC for customers that don’t need a fully customized POC. With Demostack’s sandbox solution, for instance, you can show the prospect exactly what their life would look like with your product, but with half the prep work. And you can use a tool like Homerun to track POC hours.
When SE resources are tight, this is a great alternative!
Final thoughts
In 2023, efficiency is the name of the game. This calculator will help your team decide how much effort to put into each deal, how to distribute SEs, and how to prioritize incoming leads during presales. And you can import all that data into Salesforce so that you can make changes to your workflow in real-time.
That’s where Demostack can help. With Demostack, you’ll be able to track the number of demos by job function, industry, pain point, and company size. So you can maximize your use of resources and work more efficiently than ever.
