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Sales Engineer Process and Methodology

April 30, 2008 By

I think, or at least I hope, that if you are part of any company that has made it beyond the startup phase you will have some type of sales methodology in place. I have come across my fair share of reps and SEs that see little value in such a process-some will go so far as to say it hinders their ability to sell. I’ll be the first to agree that implementing sales methodology does add some overhead to your sales team, especially at first. It would be a bad idea though to judge anything just based on the negative without looking at the positive. For those who actively resist, I pretty much guarantee will never have been accountable for anyone’s forecast except his/her own.The bottom line is that a forecast is a promise, especially from the viewpoint of the CEO, CFO, and shareholders. The company doesn’t really start operating without the sales forecast for the year. If the company’s forecast is based on anything other than science and repeatable process, you’re gambling pure and simple. Variability is your worst enemy. Minimizing it fosters stability-and thus trust-in your company.

I believe this trust is worth the extra effort.

For SEs that are reading this, it probably isn’t hard to step back and agree that reps should be doing thing. But what about SEs? Whoa, hold on a sec. How does this impact me as the SE? I participate in the account review sessions and I work with my rep to even develop the requisite account plans. Aren’t I doing my part?

As an SE you manage a technical sales cycle within the sales cycle. The technical portion of the sales cycle is mostly yours alone to manage and move forward. So here are some questions to ask yourself. Do all SEs perform the same basic demo (allowing for some tailoring) to the customer? What about presentations and product evaluations? Is everyone emphasizing the same 3-5 competitive differentiated benefits of your product to the customer and are these consistent between all touch points with the customer?

When you can answer yes to these questions you have the basic building blocks of a repeatable process with your customers. When it’s repeatable (good or bad) at least you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be. This is how an SE organization builds trust within the sales organization.

So as a leader in your SE organization, I say it is your responsibility to drive towards the same level of process and consistency as our peers. If we want to think of ourselves as pivotal to the sales team (of which I whole heartedly believe) then we should not except or expect different treatment in the level of professionalism we bring to the table.

It’s just too damn important to ignore.

Filed Under: Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales

The Rules of the Game

April 23, 2008 By

One subject that comes up occasionally in my routine discussions with other SEs is career advancement. I am somewhat passionate about the topic as I find great enjoyment in helping others reach their goals. I also have noticed that for many it is hard to take a step back from daily activities to think about their career from a longer time horizon.

There are many books on the general subject of succeeding in the workplace, though there are characteristics that are more unique to being an SE that I thought might be worth it to explore. In talking with many successful SEs and managers over the years I do believe there are some distinct patterns these individuals exhibit. For the sake of this discussion I’m going to assume advancement within the SE ranks as the objective.

Goals
We’ve all heard more than once about the importance of setting and documenting (i.e. writing out) your goals. This area is certainly no different. Are you in your ideal role? Do you want to go into management? You may be interested in staying in the same job and simply upping your pay or type of accounts you get to work with. Whatever your career goal, write down the end state you wish to achieve. This is a longer-term goal. It may change many times, but you need something with which you can start working towards incremental progress.

Plans
Once your goal state is set, think shorter term. What are logical stepping stones you’ll need to achieve to get to where you want to be? Who do you need to get to know? What projects or accounts or positions should you go after? What additional knowledge or skills would you want to develop? All of this information constitutes your plan of attack toward reaching your goal. It will change over time to be sure, but you need a framework in which to make choices that impact your career.

Company Dynamics
This is where we need to talk about the SE role in your company more specifically. I find that many SEs have not thought specifically about what their company looks for with respect to advancement into more senior positions. Folks just assume that if they do their job really well and overachieve against their number they will automatically progress. In less mature sales organizations this is frequently the case, especially for sales reps. As sales organizations mature and SEs organizations form inside them this is less often true.

Here are some questions to ponder about your organization. Are seemingly otherwise good SEs that don’t hit their numbers (even repeatedly) asked to leave the company? If rep/SE account teams bring in a huge deal or blow out their number, is that celebrated the same within both the sales and SE ranks? Are awards given to SEs focused on the deals they bring in or by some other metric? What I’m getting at is that you shouldn’t assume. Take a look at the actions of the organization as to what behaviors are truly most valued. You should also take a look at what are some of the common attributes in others who have attained what you seek. Again, were they simply the ones who brought in the biggest deals? I think you’ll find that if you are in a more mature sales organization this is rarely the case. For example, star SEs and star SE managers possess distinctly different skill sets and passions and hiring managers know this (maybe by figuring it out the hard way).

Once you’ve determined what is truly valued, these activities should provide the cornerstone of your plan. It boils down to simply understanding the rules of the game. And understanding these rules will be the biggest determinant of your success.

Socialize
I’m personally a big fan of sharing my goals with others. It accomplishes two main things in my mind. It makes me more accountable for reaching my goals, and it allows others to help you in some cases to get there. If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s ok, but there are two people that absolutely need to know about them and that is your manager and his/her manager. The reason is pretty straightforward. If these two people know where you want to go, they should be able (and willing) to provide you with a path to help you get there. If you want to become a senior SE, your manager needs to know that you are actively pursuing that goal. A good manager will coach accordingly and if nothing else will appreciate the fact that you do think far enough ahead to plan in the first place. I add the second line manager because of heavy influence on advancement. If they also know about your goals, they become in a small way invested in helping you get there and will usually be very honest with what you need to get results. Most managers may be surprised when you do this simply because most people don’t.

Don’t Set and Forget
One of my beliefs is that the contents of an annual review should never be a surprise to the reviewee. A manager should schedule in ample opportunity to provide feedback and coaching to team members. That said, not every manager agrees on the subject. If you want to achieve your goal, you need to take control of it. If you’re not getting good feedback on your progress at least quarterly, you should begin initiating the discussion. Don’t let your review be a surprise.

Doing just these few simple things should yield surprisingly positive results. To round out the process, Covey’s 7 Habits provides a great primer on goal setting. There is also a wealth of free information on the subject online.

Filed Under: Career Growth

Reducing Email – For SEs

April 19, 2008 By

Entering reduce email into Google results in over 15,000,000—yes, 15 Million—matches. If there is that much information available on the subject, why is it still such a ubiquitous problem, especially among sales engineers?

In my experience, most senior reps and SEs have been through at least one time management course—though most rarely spend much time on the email problem. There is a huge Getting Things Done (GTD) movement which does talk a lot about email management, but most people fail to implement recommendations it preaches.

Considering these facts, I don’t have high hopes for getting you (yes, YOU) to change your bad email habits, but I will at least share my personal tricks in case it helps even one SE.

I. Stem the tide of incoming email – You know that cute quote of the day thingie you subscribed to, get rid of it. Email alerts from PC Magazine or other subscriptions, get rid of them. You can also change the address to reflect a personal email address, but I recommend getting rid of them completely. Do not try to manage them with inbox rules. It doesn’t remove the temptation.

II. Get mandatory discussion lists out of your inbox. Use rules to help. Only review them in batches. Email digests are best. You can also use rules to send routine department announcements to a separate folder. I won’t tell you which one some of mine go to

III. Never wait for the due date. I have yet to find a system that allowed me to delay responding to an email action item that didn’t involve me screwing up from time to time. If it’s a quick task, I do it right then. If it will take longer than 5 minutes I leave it in my inbox until I get to a good stopping point from my other work. If you can’t find time to get the day’s items finished, do them first thing next morning before beginning new work. Once completed, delete or file them.

IV. At the end of each day, file or delete all email out of your inbox except for tomorrow’s action items. You want as much of a clean slate as possible every single day.

V. As for filing, this is becoming less important as search technologies get better. Google Desktop, Microsoft Desktop, and Lookout are all pretty good. Because none I’ve found to be 100% reliable, I do still file some things such as trip itineraries, frequently referenced information, and project related data. Don’t have too many folders that it makes it time consuming to organize. Simple is better than more accurate in this case for me. Do make sure you get everything out of the inbox though.

VI. Dealing with sheer volume seems to be a bigger issue for managers on up. At some level this is inevitable, but whenever I hear of folks complain (read: brag) about getting over 500 emails a day they need to respond to, my only comment is: You’re doing it (email) wrong. But that’s a different post.

Many people have success with other techniques like self imposed time limits or scheduled intervals. I would recommend leaving that as a last resort. Email, like it or not, right or wrong, is a de facto communication channel for many people. Imposing too much rigidity outside of industry norms will aggravate people.

I also have a bit of an issue with those that avoid email using the defense of “If it’s important, you should call me.” I’ll be the first to admit I am guilty of sometimes using email (or instant messaging, again, another post) when a phone call is more appropriate. The thing about phone calls is that (while more personal) are infinitely more time consuming. There is voice mail, playing phone tag, the mandatory 5 minute “how’s the weather” introduction. I have also found that most people (including myself) need a few minutes of thought to accurately respond to certain questions. Ask me a something complicated over the phone and I may have to drone on for a few minutes before I clarify my thoughts. Email allows the person to dedicate the appropriate time to answering the question and forces a tendency towards brevity and clarity.

So in summary, my recommendations are:

- Implement the basic principles (or your own adaptation) above
- Don’t impose too many rules on your colleagues. Be responsive.
- Accept that it is a de facto means of communication for many and treat it with about the same level of care as a phone call and dedicate time to the activity accordingly.

Similar to the feeling you get once you purchase a new car only to notice that seemingly every other car on the road is the same as the one you just purchased: I noticed two other posts on addressing email come across my desk.

One is from Mastering Technical Sales and the other is from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker guest posting on Unclutterer. I recommend reading both of these alongside this post. The primary reason is that there just happens to be a lot of disagreement between all 3 of us authors.

That just goes to show you that there is no one size fits all rule. Each one of us is different and thus will benefit from more from certain systems which certainly depends on your job and company culture.

Filed Under: Time Management

Sales Engineer – From Junior to Senior

April 7, 2008 By

If you’re looking to become a sales engineer, or have been one for a little while but struggle with your role as part of the sales team, I think it is beneficial to step outside yourself and gain broader insight into how you approach your business.

Having worked with dozens of sales teams and a few different companies, I have thought a lot about the role we play as part of a larger sales organization, and my definition has changed an awful lot over the years.

As an inexperienced SE, and having come from an IT background, I always fell back on my strength and assumed it was my job to be a technical expert. That is to say I was supposed to know everything about the product. My job was to spit out these facts with dizzying efficiency in front of the customers my reps lined me up to speak with. To be honest, because I was so well honed from a technical perspective, it did in fact move my career forward, though to be fair it was more because of my abilities and desire to share this information with other engineers than my success with accounts. The reliance on technical abilities is usually the biggest indicator of a beginning SE, especially from those that come from technical backgrounds.

In a follow up I’ll go into greater detail about some typical career paths both inbound and outbound from the SE role.

An SE moves into the senior (or intermediate) level once the realization sets in that you, as the SE, are not being paid to simply understand all the technical aspects of the product(s) you support. You are being paid to leverage your deeper level of understanding to actively sell that technology to your customers. Succinctly: You are primarily a technical sales expert, not a product expert. It is the realization that you don’t just recount what you know, but in that you have the ability to leverage those skills to move the sales cycle forward. You become attuned to how your customers buy and what they are looking for in a solution and tailor your message and actions accordingly.

The pinnacle, principal, distinguished, etc. SEs to me are defined by two factors. The first is a high degree of proactively. Senior SEs are likely to anticipate objections and plan accordingly, but the most senior of SEs are proactive about the sales cycle itself. They seek out decision makers, build consensus within the account, and the most skilled even become trusted business consultants. This takes a lot of effort and is its own skills domain, but one that should eventually be mastered. The second factor to me is that the SE makes those around them better. They can mentor junior SEs. They have translated their own success into documentable and repeatable process. They can convey this information to others. In short, these are the SEs that are ideal to step into management roles if that is the career path they seek.

Filed Under: Career Growth