#208 The Definitive Buyer’s Guide For Emerging Presales Solutions

Notes:

Want to get your message out to presales buyers clearly, and effectively and ensure vendors are putting the right solutions in front of them? Get in-depth insights from two of the top presales leaders on how to improve your presales buying (or selling) experience. Chris White and Kerry Sokalsky recently teamed up to create the Presales Buyer’s Guide, and we’ll have the pleasure of learning all about it today!

In this podcast, they share the reason behind their collaboration, observations in the presales buyers and vendors space, and the five key areas that came up while working on this guide together. After listening to this, you’ll have a clearer idea about presales market trends and gain a deeper understanding of the presales buyer space.

Chris White is an accomplished author, trainer, coach, teacher, and Sales Engineering leader. He penned “The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers”, an amalgamation of over a decade of experience in the field where Chris is able to articulate the importance of a number of key habits that will lead any SE to success.

Kerry Sokalsky is the President & Founder of Presales Mastery. He is also the Founder of Sales Engineers of Toronto (SETO), a Demo Performance Coach, and is passionate about all things presales.

Key Takeaways:

Why Chris and Kerry decided to collaborate with each other
What their partnership is trying to accomplish together in the presales world
Kerry’s observations over the last couple of years in terms of investment in and the launch of presales-focused solutions
Two things that were really prevalent in the presales buyers’ space
How Chris and Kerry thought to fill in those awareness and clarity gaps in the market
Helping the vendors get their message out to the market more effectively more clearly and also helping presales leaders and sales leaders make more informed buying decisions
Two things the Presales Buyer’s Guide aims to help vendors and buyers
Why Chris and Kerry are dedicated to spending more time working on this and wanting to help the SE community
Out of all the demos they’ve witnessed, how hard was it not to jump in and correct them on their way of doing things?
The five focus areas or five subcategories that sort of emerged as a result of meeting with these vendors
Why would people want to invest in this guide?
Uncovering a few disruptive truths as they were working on writing the report
How should people expect to use the guide?

Quotes:

“Buying software is a challenging exercise that most of us only probably do once or twice in our lifetimes, depending on what our role is, very infrequently do we do that.” – Kerry Sokalsky

“From the perspective of a true typical sales engineer, we saw a problem, we saw a need, let’s go, let’s go fill the gap. And I think that was really the driver.” – Chris White

“There’s been studies by a couple of vendors that as many as 30 to 50% of demos in some organizations are totally unqualified. So if we can eliminate all of those by sharing an automated demo experience, then that’s a huge bandwidth and crew increase and improvement for those, those esses that are already on the team and allows them to stretch themselves further.” – Kerry Sokalsky

“We have a unique set of activities. And we need a unique set of tools to both to help us and track what we’re doing so that it can be better reported on to management.” – Chris White

“Presales very often does not hold budget. We’re beholden to the sales team’s budget or enablement budget. And because of that, it’s really difficult for presales leaders to be able to effectively advocate and communicate the specific value that we bring to the table in order to justify the investment, whether it’s in a new tool like these, or even in headcount, or retention plan to save that SE who’s getting recruited out to a million different organizations.” – Kerry Sokalsky

“Demo automation is as much discovery automation as it is demo automation.” – Chris White

“The maturity of the company and the maturity of the product aren’t necessarily aligned.” – Chris White

“Don’t purchase a solution without thinking through your process.” – Chris White