To succeed now and in the future, every organization, regardless of industry, must evolve to become a technology-driven company. As they adapt to keep up with the rapid pace of change, digital transformation is key, and partners have a vital role to play.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, digital transformation efforts are expected “to reach $1.78 trillion [and] the role of presales—also known as sales engineering, solution architecture, solution consulting, and system engineering—has become more important…Presales professionals are directly responsible for technical discovery, presentation, product demonstration, solutions development, and evaluation management—so much so that the sales team increasingly relies on presales to drive this highly technical phase of the sales process, and to do so much earlier than before.”

Trends in Partners Presales

As resellers of portfolios that include software, services, and hardware, partners have their own brand identity in the market. When a vendor has a large portfolio, a partner wants to support the customer across multiple solutions, so getting a partner to focus on the software piece can be a complex challenge.

BMC’s partnerships help our customers evolve to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise across five key technology-enabled trends: Transcendent Customer Experience, Automation Everywhere, Enterprise DevOps, Data-Driven Business, and Adaptive Cybersecurity. We are also transforming our own business at the same time as our customers and our value-added resellers.

At BMC, we enable our partners with demand generation, marketing, and most importantly, comprehensive solutions. Presales is a highly valued organization that now includes the formal Value and Solution Engineering (VSE) group, which has over 400 contributors and managers worldwide. Presales is aligned not just to the sales organization but also shares technical knowledge and is a connective tissue with our BMC partners in a supporting role when necessary.

The BMC presales teams ensure that the business value of a proposed solution’s technical capabilities is clearly defined and articulated at every step of the customer’s transformational journey. Working with cross-functional leaders from solutions marketing, product management, development, services, and sales, they ensure these solutions deliver value both for the customer and BMC.

A Game-Changing Resource

The role of sales is also undergoing an evolution. “As customers research solutions for themselves—rather than trust the word of the salesperson throughout the buying process—the role of the salesperson has shifted from representation of features and function to more assurance that the right team of SMEs are brought into the conversation,” says ITA Group. It’s therefore more important than ever to educate partners at the presales stage so that they understand the solutions they’re selling and can communicate thoroughly with customers.

To scale and grow the partner program and help partners learn by “teaching them to fish,” BMC implemented a game-changing presales application. The tool is dedicated to making our partners successful by focusing on the partner’s presales role and delivering instruction in the way people learn best—through practical experience—supported by direct engineers who offer expertise but allow the channel partners to handle it directly.

The easy-to-use application is accessible through a dedicated presales landing page and offers content and best practices as well as:

1. A self-service skills assessment built on BMC Helix that allows partners to record their current level of knowledge for each solution, set goals, and assign priorities for the enablement needed
2. Recommended learning paths for technical and soft skills, listing all the content, including demos, that they need to achieve the required level of knowledge
3. Access to demo enablement assets, including pre-created demo videos, click-through presentations, and scripts to learn how to demo BMC technology, plus support from a center of excellence and BMC Support and the ability to request demo enhancements based on customer feedback

Cleber Souza, a senior sales engineer with BMC partner Online Business Systems, found the resource extremely helpful. “Being able to tell the right story to each prospect and deliver quality demos are crucial to drive opportunities to a positive outcome,” he says. “The BMC presales application supports our activities by providing us access to the required technical resources, pre-canned user stories, and enablement we need to get the job done.”

Conclusion

In today’s economy, the value of presales has become clearer and gives both BMC and BMC partners additional opportunities to grow revenue as we and our customers evolve to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Learn more about our BMC presales application from our conversation below.