Recently, I was in a conversation with someone not very familiar with the software industry around sales and supporting sales.
While there is plenty of literature around running sales organizations, I found myself explaining the basics of what other teams “surround” the sales team to make wins happen.
Here’s the way I think about them:
Let’s start clockwise, with PMM (Product Marketing Managers). They sit at the quadrant of Multiple customers and multiple sales people. Their main objective is to create sales enablement material that benefits both customers and sales teams at the same time. While it is certainly possible for a PMM to get deeply involved in a single deal, it’s usually is for a small period of time. Otherwise, they are playing the role of pre-sales.
Next, the Sales Manager. She sits at the quadrant of multiple customers and is an individual contributor. This makes sense as a sales rep continuously needs to work her pipeline, becoming the entrepreneur of her patch. Making the number at the end of the quarter is a function of having multiple opportunities (hopefully) at late stages taking into account the inevitable delays, cancellations, and more recently, COVID.
Next up, the Pre-Sales Manager. He has a unique role of pairing with the sales manager on a per-deal basis. While you can argue that pre-sales (or Sales Engineers/SE or Solution Consultants/SC) also work multiple deals at the same time, their success is defined by how deeply they know about individual opportunities… the technical requirements, gaps, overcoming objections, and creating a roadmap for individual customer success. It can be argued that Pre-sales engineers are way more important in software and SaaS sales as they combine both the tech savvy and business savvy. Funnily enough, Tom Siebel who founded Siebel Systems (CRM) was a pre-sales engineer and legend has it that he sold all the deals for his sales counterparts!
And finally, Sales Ops. Sales Ops is the inverse of Pre-sales, and sits on the quadrant of 1 customer and many sales people. What this implies is that as far as pre-sales is concerned, there is only one customer — the ICP — and they have to make sure that this customer is being addressed by the organization through all of their interactions with Sales. It translates into systems, processes, reporting, metrics for pipeline, and enablement calendars working in conjunction with the other 3 teams.
Hopefully, this makes sense! Let me know if you see the world any differently as oversimplification always has its costs during real-world implementations.
