Time and task management are wired to everything we do in our professional lives. Sales engineers are skilled in utilizing advanced tools that maximize their efficiency, productivity, and performance to meet deadlines. Time and tasks are significant resources for an SE to juggle between multiple projects and support several account executives. In this blog, we’re going to look at how an SE can effectively optimize time and tasks through the POC sales management platform.
Key Challenges
Multitasking demos, technical evals, customer engagements and other sales engineering activities takes a lot of work. Keeping track of what’s going on in every POC is manual and time consuming. Now, let’s review how current tools help Sales Engineers with their tracking and visibility.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a remarkable CRM platform but it’s not easy to work with especially for sales engineers. Salesforce enables rapid customization for most business processes. However, the setup and configuration are complex and time-consuming. Platform is usually slow to access. The UI and rules sometimes take too long to update the information. Since the platform is owned by sales teams and managed by sales operations, it’s usually not configured to how Sales Engineering teams need it for their field operations. Their strict approvals for customization in salesforce makes it difficult to customize.
Success platform is purpose built for sales engineers. It provides most of the sales engineering workflows out of the box with capability to customize. It assists SEs with efficient POC management. The interface is easier to navigate and simple. The features can be easily customized according to the sales engineering workflows.
Challenges with Email collaboration
Emails play a vital role in every sales engineer’s life. But emails take a toll on SE’s focus from their tasks to searching and answering emails. Emails are inherently non-transparent. This causes information islands to be created. It’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. Additionally, when the inbox is flooded with multiple mails, it’s easy to miss high priority tasks. Due to lack of context, locating project specific information becomes a time-consuming task.
Success arranges the information with proper context and helps SEs to keep track of their projects. It becomes easier for an SE to have continuous visibility into the status of a POC/ project. POC information contains data from salesforce opportunities such as deal amount, customer contacts, product specific details etc.SEs can quickly create tasks and use cases, add tags, competitors, project dates. One click on the report, provides complete details of POCs.
Slack & Team Integration
Slack is an instant messaging software that allows direct communications, enables channels that can be organized by client, project, teams, etc. Though slack is organized, it can become chaotic quickly when several people collaborate on a project. Slack does not understand the context of POC projects, so the search system fails to provide the right information and group them so it saves time for SEs.
Success integrates with Slack and uses it in such a way that SEs get notifications with proper context. Success provides easy access to POC data, along with search and filter POC data in Reports. It further helps in better communication among the teams and customers for efficient POC management. It allows three types of collaborators to work on a POC project for better visibility and engagement. They are the,
Working from Memory
SEs work is usually repetitive from customer to customer. Lot of activities and trivial tasks can be tracked through remembering and executing them. However, running sales engineering activities from memory is usually not consistent and prone to errors.
SE typically converses with 10 to 15 people every day. This involves prospects, internal team, AEs each with their own thread. The demos and POCs collect a lot of data from different stakeholders. The best practice is to follow certain processes and run book for running the POCs efficiently. Relying on the memory may cause things to slip on follow ups and create inconsistent execution.
Success is the single pane of glass for all POC information. It becomes a go to platform for SEs to track all of the POC related information, and get continuous visibility. It can also remind SEs of tasks and milestones, so nothing is missed. SEs can create “action plan” templates within Success, which reduces manual work significantly when starting new customer engagements.
Follow-ups
Follow-ups are an integral part of SE activities to track and keep customers engaged. However,the process of follow up is very manual. Using traditional tools is difficult because they don’t understand the context of POC. Success solves this by providing automated reminders and dashboards.
In Success, the notes feature help the SEs to document the summary of a meeting, mail threads and upcoming tasks. The tasks attribute consists of a POC’s priority, its due date, and milestones. Success also has a feature to update the current status of a project. These features help an SE to remember the follow-ups to be completed on time and manage tasks efficiently.
SE’s don’t have to remember every detail of a project and every update and requirement. Instead, they can automate their process with Success. It makes their life easier and organized.
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
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