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The secret sauce to your sales success? It's what happens before the sale. It's the pre-sales. And it's more than demo automation. It's the work that goes on to connect technology and people in a really thoughtful way. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, pre-work centered around the human that makes the dream work, but you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what you already do best—combining your technical skills with your strategic insights. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to grow revenue. You're not just preparing for the sale—you're unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales engineers who make a difference, their challenges, their successes, and the human connections that drive us all, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to V5, where we spent exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox on topics in B2B sales. I'm Jarod Greene, but that's not important because what is is my guest. I am joined by none other than David Yockelson, who is a Distinguished Vice President and Gartner Fellow. And his hot take, his soapbox today is going to be around value management. So David, when I get the timer going, you got five minutes to get on your soapbox. You ready to play?
David Yockelson [00:00:30]:
I couldn't be more ready.
Jarod Greene [00:00:31]:
All right, let's cook and go. What do you got?
David Yockelson [00:00:34]:
All right, Jarod, well, I'm going to break the rule a little bit, and I'm going to ask you a question first. What's the most valuable commodity that pre salespeople have?
Jarod Greene [00:00:42]:
I think it's the blend of sales and product knowledge.
David Yockelson [00:00:46]:
So normally that would be a good answer, but clearly you haven't read my mind. So I'm going to say time. Time is their biggest commodity and most valuable to them. And the problem, most of the bad pun time is there's not enough of it. There's not enough of those folks to go around and deal with strategic accounts or deal with non strategic accounts. And AE's are trying to pull them in all sorts of different directions. And, you know, what do they have to do every day? They've got to tailor information for specific customer accounts. They have to build demonstrations.
David Yockelson [00:01:19]:
They have to try to explain or help their AE's explain why a particular solution is better, different, more valuable, and whatever that means to the customer. So they're driven in a gazillion different directions. And fortunately, there are a few ways to help them out and help them gain back some of that precious commodity of time. And so my soapbox ultimately becomes a discussion of, let's call it just generally speaking, value management. And another term that I'm going to actually give you three names for product experiences or interactive demos or demo automation. Now, I think most people have probably heard of these things in some form or fashion, but particularly at this moment in time when sales teams writ large are overburdened. For many companies, top of funnel is great. Middle funnel, bottom funnel.
David Yockelson [00:02:19]:
Trying to actually get those prospects to opportunities and get those opportunities convert, it's really hard. So how do you get their attention? How do you tell them the right thing so that they continue to move through the funnel and even for the existing customers, how do we tell them the right stories? How do we make sure that they've realized the value they've gotten from their purchases so that they buy more from us. And so tree sales can be, should be, must be a huge part of that now. So lets talk about the how. Lets start with value management. So everybody is pretty familiar with the notion, or at least metrics like return on investment or total cost of ownership, or maybe even net present value if you talk to finance people and so on. The challenge for most organizations is, and this is not to speak down to the accounting executives, but theyre often not ready to have those conversations with the customer. Pre sales needs to jump in and help.
David Yockelson [00:03:13]:
Now, sometimes those pre sales people are called value engineers or value consultants, or they're pre sales folk, they're sales engineers. And their job is to help convey that economic value component with the AE, or even for the AE to the customer. And so the good news is there are two handfuls of technology to help them do that. And I guess the way that I would simplify it before I move on to the next thing is, the most important thing they can do is help that AE help the customer develop their business case. Everyone needs a business case to purchase, particularly as the price tags get bigger and you as sellers, pre sales account execs must help them do that. So that's number one, I would be spending a bunch of time looking at that, automating that, providing them. Second thing, we know that unfortunately, despite the awesome work that pre sales and salespeople do, buyers don't want to talk to them, at least not right at the start of the buying process. On the other hand, the buyers do want to see the value that they're going to get from the solutions products that they're going to buy.
David Yockelson [00:04:23]:
How can you do that? So this is where demo, automation, interactive demo, or providing a product experience of some sort comes into play. And once again, pre sales can be the heroes here. Now, they always have been the heroes of coming up with demos and spinning up production systems and typing data into the applications. Guess what? Things have gotten a tremendous amount easier for them. So this is another area where automation can come to play and rescue them and give them their time back by allowing them either to pre create demos that you could send out to that prospect, or if you're doing it live, have a pre made portion of your application seemingly running and be available in the context of that customer, no matter what vertical, no matter what use case role. And the greatest news is that these sorts of demos are very, very easy to create and manage and reuse and share another great way, or the pre sales team to gain some of that valuable time back and try to move the ball forward through the funnel or through the loop or whatever go to market motion you prefer.
Jarod Greene [00:05:33]:
David, what would you say to the folks who say, yep, I do those. I have my roi calculators, I have my tco. I don't know if I believe the data. You guys come back and say, I'm going to get a 700% roi. What are your thoughts on folks who may be a little skeptical about the leverage of tools and processes that support the value management conversation?
David Yockelson [00:05:51]:
I think it's all about when you use them. So I would tend to agree, and it's what we hear back from people as well, that when you start with an ROI story, people don't want to believe it because it's not their information, it's not their data. So in a case study, it can be representative. But what the buyers really need to understand is, okay, given their situation, their numbers, their parameters, their infrastructure, what's it going to look like for them? Which means that the value story has to become a person to person collaborative discussion and a work through what that is going to look like in their specific case. And at that point, it works really well. And you spent a little time with all of my titles and all that sort of stuff. The fellow thing came from a huge amount of research on the importance and the efficacy of value management in that sort of a mode.
Jarod Greene [00:06:40]:
And that is time. See how I tied it back together with the beginning about the valuable commodity.
David Yockelson [00:06:45]:
Fantastic.
Jarod Greene [00:06:46]:
Sales engineer said, yeah, I like that. I like to fancy myself a little bit of a connector, so that's great. We love the take. And again, for sales engineers out there, sales leaders take heat. This is valuable advice to make sure value manager is part of conversation. David, thanks for hanging out with me today. I appreciate it.
David Yockelson [00:07:01]:
My pleasure and thank you.
Jarod Greene [00:07:03]:
All right, take care.