Who "supports" demo environments for Sales demonstrations?

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Which department should be responsible for supporting the demo environments/instances that Sales uses to demonstrate to prospects?

I have my own [very strong] opinion 😃 but would be curious to hear what others think.

Comments

  • Alexander Ziegler
    Alexander Ziegler Founding Member | Expert ✭✭✭
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    Interesting question. And I'm curious as you to read opinions here. I was part of a larger discussion around the general topic of "How can we make sure that eLearning is up to date + support is guaranteed". One topic was Sales / Partner Enablement, but the discussion was around in general eLearnings that we all have somewhere. Everybody in this meeting was worried about not up-to-date and not well-supported eLearning. Especially internally we identified old/non-supported content. The consense in this meeting: We should all make sure in the future that any eLearning that is created/sponsored by a group is also maintained/updated/supported by the same group who is created the eLearning (or the group is funding somebody to do this). This would not be something new, but it would follow the way how we all treated ILT: once put out it did exist as long as somebody maintained it.

  • Jeremy Blanton
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    Excellent topic for discussion! I have participated in this discussion in past organizations as a delivery practitioner. The source of the concern lies in the challenge of Skills compared to organizational alignment and the value that alignment may or may not bring. I am unaware of any existing data points that we have to guide this conversation, so I am limited to my own experience. With that said, I have seen solutions implemented with IT and others implemented with Delivery.

    There are sound positions for both and a true "Risk-Free" solution likely requires participation for both departments. This may be a great topic for a Quick Poll - Thank you so much for sharing.

  • PatrickMartin
    PatrickMartin Founding Analyst | Expert ✭✭✭
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    To answer your question, I believe that the Support organization needs to own this. My reasoning behind this is that a Sales Engineer could encounter an issue that customers could encounter as well. This needs to be captured and documented, as part of the Knowledge Management process, so that it can be reused by Support and/or customers via self-service. If another owns it that does not have these processes in place, the content and knowledge could be lost.

  • Jonathan Corrie
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    Hi @PatrickHurley

    Would love to know your opinion on this as we have been refining our approach.

    Creation of the updated demo org was a combination of our leaders for pre-sales, product marketing and sales.

    The maintenance of it will be owned between pre-sales and product marketing:

    • Presales owned the technical upkeep, e.g. latest version of product, testing
    • Product marketing owns the sales enablement and wider product marketing of new use cases