What should an AE do during a demo?

I’ve been a sales engineer for 20+ years and I have a lot of thoughts about what a sales engineer should (and shouldn’t) do during a demo, but this article is written for account executives.

getcomfortable

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Sales Engineering Courage and Leadership

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

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

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