Solutions Consulting Enablement plays a critical role in driving the success of pre-sales teams. Enablement ensuring every team member has the knowledge, skills, and tools to drive sales goals.
Solutions Consulting Enablement is likely to be highly cross-functional. It can include training and onboarding programmes, the creation of technical documents, and creating new processes to help every Solutions Consultant be successful in every interaction with prospects and customers.
In this article, I’ve detailed what I have seen as the six most effective ways of enabling Solutions Consultants.
1 Onboarding Bootcamp
As presales organisations grow, the most experienced Solutions Consultants build an increasing amount of ‘tribal knowledge’ that only comes with experience.
By creating an onboarding bootcamp, the aim is to document this knowledge in a way that is easily digestible for new-starters. This can range from where to find all the most useful information, documenting the sales process, important cross-functional contacts, to product training.
Some say it can take up to 24 months to fully mint a Solutions Consultant. By creating an effective onboarding bootcamp, will lead to a shorter time to value for new hires.
2 Demo Assets
To ensure your product is being presented and positioned consistently and effectively, it is essential to have centralised creation of demo assets. These can include demo scripts, demo environments containing good demonstrable examples, slides or even videos to show during the demonstration process.
These allow Solutions Consultants to present features consistently. It means configured examples or slides do not have to be created from scratch each time. Equally, when a client asks for a demonstration of a very specific use case, any assets created can be easily reused in the future. By building demo assets’ creation into the Go To Market process, it ensures every Solutions Consultant has the right materials to present new features or functions to clients.
3 Best Practice Demo Videos
Heavily linked to demo assets, internal best practice demo videos can be created to show the best way to demonstrate a new feature or product when it is released (or when a client asks for a very specific demonstration).
These can be used as part of the Go To Market process, as well as becoming part of your onboarding bootcamp, general team consistency and continuous improvement or partner enablement.
I recently wrote an article on how ‘Demo Battles’ can be utilised to pit Solutions Consultants against each other to establish the best way of demonstrating a feature.
4 Tools and Processes
Tools and technologies have been commonplace for enabling Sales for some time. Finally, the market for Solutions Consultants enablement tools is on the rise. There are now numerous areas where solutions can increase the efficiency or effectiveness of Solutions Consulting teams.
Whether it is demo automation software, tracking presales activities, or AI coaching for your team, there are various options out there.
Peter Cohen recently wrote a great article highlighting some of the best Presales tools right now. I’d recommend giving it a read.
5 Sales Cycle Videos
I have given Sales Cycle Videos its own section here as this is a topic that probably has had the greatest impact on my organisation. Videos can be sent out to clients during a sales cycle and can be used in a whole host of ways. Whether it is sending video voicemails as part of lead generation, tailored demonstrations, case studies or testimonials, or even frequently asked questions about your product.
These can deliver great value to the sales cycle by helping Account Executives and Solutions Consultants discover new stakeholders, spend more time on discovery and differentiators as well as reducing the number of wasted demos.
6 Win / Loss Analysis
Win / Loss analysis can be a critical part of continuous improvement for Presales teams. Rather than celebrating wins, it is important to analyse them to understand how they can be repeated. Equally, when a deal was lost, why?
Deals can be won or lost for any number of reasons; sales execution, positioning, perceived product differentiators (or deficiencies) or pricing to name a few. These can be communicated to Solutions Consultants so they can be part of their arsenal of winning sales tactics.
Final Thoughts on Solutions Consulting Enablement
Considering how critical solutions consultants are in turning a prospect into a customer, it’s surprising how often solutions consulting enablement can be overlooked. Presales organisations that are at least enabling Solutions Consultants in the above six ways can gain a competitive advantage by increasing sales cycle velocity and even increasing their win rate.
And this is just the start. Solutions consulting enablement is far-reaching and can touch many parts of your business. How are you enabling your solutions consultants? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
