Scaling Technical Capacity
How Do You Justify Presales Headcount to the CFO?
Justifying headcount was always a challenge for presales leaders, but in the “new normal” where not every company is necessarily growing like wildfire, it’s even more critical to have your data ready. When revenue targets are missed, the hunt for cost savings begins -- and the departments without the metrics to demonstrate their impact upon the business are left defenseless. So how do you get presales out of the line of fire when the CFO says “Okay, let’s reduce the cost of sales”?The risk you want to avoid is getting into a conversation about . Ratios are easy to understand, and CFOs like things to be as simple as possible. They want to be able to say “Hey, we reduced sales headcount by 50% so we need to do the same for presales.” Or: “Our cost of sale is too high, so let’s have 1 presales engineer support three reps instead of two.”Ratios may be easy, but they don’t tell the whole story.Let’s take the case of one Vivun customer, Flexera. Because of the way their presales team works and engages in deals, it’s simply not as cut-and-dried as “Let’s assign two sales engineers to every rep.” As a result of product specialities and overlays, the lens that Flexera uses to view presales assignment is different than ratios; it becomes more a question of which skill sets on the presales team are required to close the most valuable deals.The conversation that each of these organizations has with their CFOs is not about ratios. It’s ?
Matt Darrow
August 11, 2020
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