Getting What You Need Internally - Start with Partnering with Sales

In a lot of ways, it is harder to get what you need internally than to manage a client effectively, particularly in a growth business with a separate sales team. First, with a separate sales team, you have less control over what is sold. It is not unheard of to be handed an SOW with a custom scope that is not supported by your product (in an embedded services organization) or your domain experience and consulting expertise (in either an embedded services organization or stand-alone services business). Even when the situation isn’t that egregious, you still may end up with a project budget that will not cover your margin needs or, potentially, even your costs,  or commitments to the client for start dates you are not prepared to support. Worst case - all of the above!

Second, I have often said that the better problem to have is one when I have more work than I have people compared to more people than I have work. Neither feels good, but at least in the former, I can make an argument to expand my team and not be pressured to reduce the size of my team. The reality is, though, that not having the resources when you need them can cause a lot of stress in the system. Clients typically want to start when they are ready to start - not when you are. Sales professionals feel a strong commitment to the clients and will push for things that feel unnatural to you to ensure they can save face and be the hero. In some cases, the client may decide that waiting isn’t an option and go with another provider. Still, the argument to get more resources or get access to those you need is not easily made leaving you holding the bag.

So, how do you ensure that you have what you need when you need it. Man, that’s a hard question. Let’s start with the sales side of the equation this week. We will talk about other internal pressures next week.

There will always be some kind of tension between sales and services. Sales wants to sell as much as they can as quickly as they can. Its how they are compensated; its what’s expected of them. Services, on the other hand, needs to control scope and expectations, deliver on-time and on-budget, and ensure the client realizes the value they expected when they signed the contract. While it is possible to meet the needs of sales and services (and the client), tension will always be there.

In my attempt to reduce that tension, I have started with forging strong relationships with the sales executives and directors. It is important that they know that you support their mission to close business, but it is also important that they understand the implications to them, their clients, and the business overall if they don’t work in partnership with you to ensure that what is being sold can be delivered. It helps to give a little, but I firmly believe that there needs to be a “give get.” “I can give in on this point for you to help you close the deal, but it is really critical that I get this other point to go my way if we are to have a happy client in the end.”

Individual sales reps will push the boundary set by you and your sales-leadership counterparts, for sure. One Sales VP with whom I recently worked referred to Sales Reps as “children” and the Sales and Services Leadership as the “adults.” As children, sales reps will behave badly: They will exclude you from key calls, they will agree to things they do not have authority to agree, and they will leave you to work miracles to hide the challenges from the client.

Now, I am not saying I agree with the “Sales as Children” philosophy. I have worked with some amazing sales people who, while driven to close business quickly, do not want to close bad business and know it takes a team to satisfy the needs of the client. With that said, even the best sales reps will push the boundaries from time to time. Having relationships with Sales Leadership will be key to having the right checks and balances when it occurs.

Once I have formed the right partnership with sales leadership, I do all that I can to have strong relationships with the reps themselves. This happens in a variety of ways:

1. All those “dumb sales meetings” you have to attend - use them to your advantage. Don’t run off between sessions to call home, check emails, or schedule meetings with your own team. Use that time to meet each and every sales rep. Show an interest in what they are doing. Ask about their business (what’s working and not working). Ask about their families and interests - make it personal. Find out what you can specifically do to help them meet quota faster and then go do that.
2. Educate the sales team on the offerings: The value they provide and the best way for them to engage with services. A few years ago, I was building a services practice from scratch within a software company. Initially, there were two of us - I worked with sales to sell services and co-delivered those services with my one and only consultant. For the first two years, as I built the practice and hired the team, I touched every services sales deal. It was not scalable, and it caused a lot of frustration when people had to wait a couple of days to get on my calendar. As I grew the team, the offerings, and the tools that supported the offerings, I educated the sales team to, first and foremost, carry the ball down the field on their own a little farther. I gave them the case studies and anecdotes they needed to position the value. I gave them the questionnaires and checklists they needed to qualify the customer. Giving them more information about success and failures and the tools to optimize the former and minimize the latter helped to both build deeper relationships, but also empower them to do the right thing.
3. Next, I worked with Sales and Finance leadership to ensure that only I, or someone on my team, could write an SOW, and that I had signing authority, which meant no contract was signed without my review and approval. As my team grew, more were trained to work with sales to scope an engagement, write the proposal, and draft the SOW. I was no longer tied to every deal. We had scale, and I had the confidence that my team was properly trained and would address the needs of the client, services, and sales. I also had a check point before the proposal and/or SOW went to the client to be sure that nothing really difficult would fall through the cracks.  
4. Standardize offerings, with standard proposals, SOWs, and other sales and marketing tools also help. Sales knows what they can sell; we know what we need to deliver. Clients will certainly ask for something different, something tailored or custom, from time to time. When a salesperson can recognize these custom requests and has been trained on how to deal with them (call your regional services manager for help), things start to come together.

I once worked at a software company that didn’t believe in SOWs and believed that minimal project description was the way to sell services: Reduce the barriers in the conversation, shorten the sale cycle, get the deal, and services will figure it out later. There was a lack of partnerships between sales and services resulting, in some cases, in significant animosity between individuals and teams. It also resulted in an unmanageable services organization in which every project was different, there were high switching costs for consultants between projects, we had to significantly over investment in delivery (we did everything the client asked us to do, regardless of what they were paying us, because the client and we had no boundaries), and we had high turnover within the consulting team, which lead to customer satisfaction issues and more animosity with sales. That example is the perfect example of what not to do. We lacked strong relationships at the VP and Director levels between sales and services, no expectations or time to work one-on-one with sales (getting to know them and working in partnership for the best alternative), and no meaningful offering definition and sales training to ensure consistency in sales and, in turn, delivery.   

Fortunately for me, other than that one example, I find that most sales teams truly want to do the right thing. They do not want to sell the wrong engagement to the client, and while they have little tolerance for anyone slowing down their deal, once you get a few successes under your belt, they will trust the system and work with you.