As Sales Engineers we are paid primary to bring in revenue. For most SEs this either means selling to new customers or upselling existing customers. This means that you’re highest and best use to your organization is being in front of prospects qualifying, presenting, demoing, etc.
For a variety of reasons we often fall into the snare of becoming a pseudo technical support engineer after the sale. To draw a distinction: The best SEs are always in touch with existing customers and supporting the relationship. Other SEs get trapped in supporting the product instead. Let’s look at a couple tactics for giving you the best shot of minimizing the post-sale support blues.
Know Your Product, Know Your Rep
If you’re new to the company, you need to spend some time understanding your product’s lifecycle. Is there a history of troubled upgrade paths? Does the product log well? Are error messages easily understood? Are there 3rd party connectors that cause issues?
You also need to understand the capability of your support organization. Are there different levels? Is the lowest rung outsourced to the lowest bidder or is everyone tight knit in one location with great tenure and expertise?
Finally, you need to understand your rep’s mentality toward maintenance, support, and services. If they’re transactional and always on to the next customer, you may be stuck holding the bag. If they’re relationship and service oriented, they may be more inclined to ensure the customer is supported long term.
These questions help you build a profile of your situation. It is built around answering the question of: What services and support does my customer need to be successful long term with our product.
Tee Yourself Up for Success
Every company’s product being different, some SEs will be supporting services and support intensive products. Others are selling stable, commoditized software. Depending where you fall on that continuum determines how much attention you need to pay to this during the sales cycle.
To the extent you feel these options will ensure you success, you need to have the conversation with your rep about both your positioning these options with the customer during the sales cycle. If you’ve thought through the questions above and articulated this well with your rep, you’ll both be in alignment and telling the same story.
So when it comes time to offer the quote to the customer, the needed level of support and services is baked in and the customer understands the value and requirement for them to be successful.
Nail the Transition
Once the PO is signed, it becomes critical that you hand hold the customer through the early couple weeks in transitioning them to the post sales team. That means following up and ensuring they have their support account activated and/or the services team scheduled.
Spend the time to help them understand how to troubleshoot the product when the product is still installed in the POC or lab configuration. Show them the knowledgebase, the user forums, and the support website.
Hopefully, while you were engaged in the POC you captured their open actions list. Now is the time to assist them and ensure all open questions are logged with support and you’ve conducted a live handoff with them.
In the end, there should be zero doubt from the customer as to who owns their issues (i.e. not you) and how to engage support on their own moving forward.
Put Your Follow Up on AutoPilot
A lot of folks don’t internalize the difference between supporting the relationship versus the product. Some SEs are weary of reaching back out for fear of being dragged into support issues. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Make it habit of following up with all of your customers on 1 or 2 week intervals initially, extending that to 4-6 weeks over time. Here are some topics to cover:
- How far have they come in their deployment
- Is any tuning/customization needed
- Has their skillset been keeping up with the needs of business and solution
- Is there any feedback for product management
- Are there any open support issues
Ideally you’ll know the answer to that last one beforehand assuming your support desk has a case reference tool. In either case don’t be afraid to ask the question.
Assume that there will be a least a few things the customer is unhappy with. That’s ok, let them vent a bit. Here’s the trick—if there is an issue you should own (e.g. feature request), help them out. If it’s a support issue, do not offer to take ownership or assist in troubleshooting. Instead, ensure they’re making progress with support.
Your goal is to ensure support is doing their job and following up and giving appropriate time and attention to the matter, nothing else. If you choose to involve yourself, you may help in the short run, but you’re invalidating the correct support process and teaching them you are a support resource. You are not.
Know Thy Escalation Manager
Now, despite your best laid plans, some customers will go it alone and self educate and self support—likely for budgetary reasons. Or, you’ve gone through the steps above and you’ve determined you’ve got a serious customer satisfaction issue you need to help resolve. What do you do?
I think most of us understand the value of building internal relationships. I think for SEs this holds doubly true for your support team. These folks don’t always get the accolades you do as part of the sales team. You need to get to know at least the key folks on the team that you’re likely to be working with. Most important is the support manager or the escalation manager in larger companies.
This individual gets the call when you need another set of eyes or heightened priority on a customer issue. The time to be trying to cultivate the relationship is not while you’re under fire of a high priority support case.
Before calling, do you best to understand the issue. Do your best to explain the context of the issue and why this is indeed worthy of attention. Do not assume that you are the only one with a high priority incident going on. The more context you can offer, the better the manager can respond. And keep a level head!
Finally, when you feel you’ve done your best to educate and prep the support manager, offer to host a warm introduction between them and the customer. It lets the customer know you’re involved, it removes stress from the situation, and (assuming you stay out of support’s way) you’re clearly demonstrating your separation of duties.
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In reality, this should drastically reduce your post-sale workload tremendously—but never completely. In those (hopefully) rare instances when you have no choice but to roll up your sleeve, remember that it’s an excellent opportunity to increase customer satisfaction as well as your own brand. Don’t do the minimum. Throw yourself in and do everything you can to get the customer over the hump. As soon as that’s done though, do what you can to reassert the correct process.
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