This is your other job

May 17, 2021 Leave a comment

As a sales engineer, your primary job is to help your sales team achieve their goals. Usually, this means helping the team to hit a revenue target but –depending on the size of your company– it could also entail enabling partners to learn your product or ensuring that customers experience the results they expect.The first word in your job title is “sales” so the goals of the sales team are your goals as well, regardless of where you sit on the org chart.

All of that being said, as a sales engineer you have another job, one that often doesn’t get discussed…

Read more of this post

Filed under Product Management, Sales Engineer Tagged with ,

The Best Sales Engineers on Television

July 3, 2017 Leave a comment

Quick… think of one resource you would recommend to an aspiring sales engineer to learn the finer points of giving great demos. A book? A blog? A class?

I recommend watching TV.

Couple Watching Movie In Living Room

Watch TV, Become a better Sales Engineer

Read more of this post

Filed under Demos, Food, Sales Engineer

Sales Engineers are Story Tellers

October 22, 2013 7 Comments

storyteller

Many sales engineers think of themselves as technical experts or trusted advisors. That’s great, but we should also strive to be master story tellers. Here’s why… Read more of this post

Filed under Demos, Sales Engineer

Sales Engineering Courage and Leadership

April 30, 2012 Leave a comment

It’s Your Job to Tell the Emperor that He’s Not Wearing Any Clothes

 

I’ve talked a lot about discovery because it’s so important. Now let’s examine what comes next.

After you’ve gathered a sufficient amount of information about an opportunity, you and your account executive decide whether or not this opportunity is a good fit for your company’s products and services.

Often this is much harder than it sounds. Here’s why… Read more of this post

Filed under Sales Engineer, Sales Process, Sales Reps

The Joy of Discovery – Part 1

December 6, 2011 2 Comments

Dog digging in the sand at the beach

Author’s note: Discovery is a big topic, so big that I’m going to cover it in two parts.

Before you ever decide to demo software to a prospect you first have to conduct a process called discovery. There are at least two different types of discovery: business discovery and technical discovery. Business discovery is a discussion with the prospect that usually covers BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline.) Most of these topics are the domain of the sales representative, but the critical topic of “need” (ie, why do they need this software?’) overlaps with technical discovery, which is the domain of the sales engineer. Read more of this post

Filed under Sales Engineer, Sales Process

Why do you demo?

November 15, 2011 9 Comments

Why Do You Demo?

Not too long ago I watched a sales engineer on my team deliver a product demo to a prospective customer. After he was done, I asked him a critical question:

Why do we demonstrate products to prospective customers?

Read more of this post

Filed under Demos, Sales Engineer

The Secret Formula for Great Sales Engineers

November 1, 2011 10 Comments

Ask any VP of Sales… high quality sales engineers can be very hard to find. Why is this? The challenge lies in the fact that great sales engineers possess skills that are often considered mutually exclusive.

So… what’s the secret formula that makes for a great sales engineer?


Read more of this post

Filed under Sales Engineer

How to answer a question

October 18, 2011 Leave a comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As technical experts, sales engineers are asked questions all day long. Via phone, email, web conference or in person your typical sales engineer gets bombarded with questions from all directions.

To the layman, answering a question is easy… you just reply with the answer. As it turns out, there is an art to fielding questions and most people never learn how to do this really well.
Read more of this post

Filed under Sales Engineer

Which is more important to an SE… trust or respect?

October 4, 2011 3 Comments

In 1997 I moved to San Francisco and joined a Java tools start-up called Infoscape. They had never hired a sales engineer, but that was ok because up until that point I had never been a sales engineer.

I learned a lot on that job, most of it the hard way. One of the easier lessons was shared with me by a more experienced sales engineer named John Kotch who joined our team about a year after I started.

One day as we we discussing the sales engineer / sales rep dynamic, John told me

“It’s important for the customer to trust the sales rep and respect the sales engineer.” Read more of this post

Filed under Food, Sales Engineer, Sales Reps

So… what do you do?

September 20, 2011 3 Comments

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

–Albert Einstein

Eventually you will find yourself at a cocktail party where someone asks you:

“So… what do you do?”

“I’m a sales engineer” is the obvious answer. This usually leads to a confused stare. Read more of this post

Filed under Sales Engineer