Executive Summary: 

• Sales support should be used for the areas where salespeople are notoriously weak or relatively uninterested. 

• Before adding the additional cost of sales support, it can be more cost-effective to provide necessary training and sales automation tools to enable the sales professional to be more productive.

 • All salespeople are not created equal.

 • Allocate expensive sales support in a careful and specific manner.

 • Expect a return on investment. Measure and track this return. 

The best sales professionals in the world are hardcore business practitioners. They understand their own specialist vertical intimately. They are well connected and highly remunerated. As a business owner, you want this. Sales professionals read their compensation agreement carefully and then set out to achieve the best outcome for themselves and the company.

 When the planning and business analysis is done, the members of the top sales are 20% who contribute 80%.

 In this situation, the average company provides a lot of support in pre-sales with the explicit goal of leveraging the highest performing sales members. 

The case for providing sales support can be examined from two angles: skill enhancement and ROI.