A blog about being a Sales Engineer (SE).
Gerald Jampolsky said: To give is to receive.
As SEs we jump from customer to customer trying to bring in new business all while keeping existing customers happy, staying up on our products, and being in-the-know with industry developments. With just a fraction of your most valuable time spent face to face with your prospects, how can you keep that connection alive and well after you’ve gone. [Read more...]
Every SE organization has them. The “go-to” SEs are the ones you turn to when you absolutely need something to go well. I’m certain you can think of several off the top of your head. If you want to be considered as one of them, these are the steps you need to follow.
THE expert denotes a singular entity. This is true, but only as it pertains to a specific subject (see Ch 17). The go-to SE for one product is almost certainly not the same for a separate product. Or there can be different go-to’s for different parts of the technical sales cycle (e.g. presenting versus proof of concepts).
Find one particular subset of study within your organization where you are uniquely qualified to be the best in the world at something. Like any company competing in a free market, if your niche is too big you can be out-niched, if too small you risk not having the requisite demand.
Expert and go-to status are not the same. You need to have sufficient knowledge before you’re given the chance to leverage it.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a case for a 10,000 hour practice requirement before someone can be considered a top expert. For broad topics I can definitely agree, but regardless of the time requirement, the key takeaway is that you need to outpractice everyone around you. Expertise is not simply a bestowed genetic legacy!
This means you need to immerse yourself in your niche, reading every book, subscribing to every website, blog, and relevant news outlet. It means you need to actively seek out and connect with other experts pertaining to your niche inside and outside your company.
Even if you haven’t written the book on the subject, you need to be able to if someone asked.
Thankfully if you’ve reached this phase the difficult part is behind you. Luck is 9/10ths preparation. And if have truly put in the sacrifice to master your subject, SEs and reps will find you with amazing speed and precision.
But, in the tradition of The Sales Engineer, we don’t leave ANYTHING to chance. Here is how you can accelerate your mind share in the sales community.
Despite what you may hear, there is such a thing as job security. It just doesn’t come from a company. In lean times, the truly helpful and knowledgeable will always have positions.
Have you ever felt like you were tasked with selling something like this?
Watch the full Onion spoof. It is hilarious (and props for the special effects!).
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
When you are speaking with a customer and you feel like this, you are either:
The scenario is almost always #1 (we hope). There isn’t much you can do about #2, but we recommend you switch the product you sell. So let’s only focus on #1.
Product Management is responsible for defining a persona, observing a need, and then solving that need. A persona is an extrapolation of themes observed in the market. It is fictitious by definition and will never perfectly match your customer.
The first implication for your role is that you provide value by helping Sales qualify. This means you assist in reviewing prospects for potential matches to your target business segment. The better you help determine fit, the quicker the sale can be closed.
But, what if you are in a position where you have a very limited customer list and product portfolio? The real value you bring is your ability to show the customer that your square peg fits into the round hole better than anyone else.
In essence, your true value lies in your ability to craft general market solutions to specific customers.
So next time you’re feeling a little down because the product doesn’t have the features you think it needs, come back to this post. Realize that this imperfection is what makes your ability so critical to your company. Finally, re-watch the video. Be thankful you don’t have to sell THAT thing!
I don’t know about you, but my head spins every year with all of the media attention on achieving New Year’s resolutions.
Let me see if I can cut through the clutter for you. In my experience this is the only process that truly works sustainably:
Yes, I’m talking about the SE organization in most companies. The SE org is a nexus in terms of capability and communication. We are able to relate to people, comprehend our technology/services, and match technology/services to business problems better than the competition. Not only do we interact with virtually all internal departments, we also interface deeply and continuously with customers.
This is a good thing right?
Absolutely, but there is a catch. Sales is in the (enviable?) position of being exposed to all of the internal and market shortcomings of its company and product. When Sales makes demands things usually happen. Those demands much of the time fall to the SE to provide resolution or workarounds.
What I’ve seen is that in very small companies the SE wears many hats. And this only slightly improves as a company grows. Product Managers invariably run into the same problem, but there is usually a high ratio of SEs to PMs so you can see where many requests end up.
I think that in any given day we could fill up our calendars working to solve perceived problems elsewhere in the company. Oftentimes we fall in that trap—I know I do. It’s in our nature to want to solve problems and be helpful.
But should we indulge ourselves for our customers and shareholders?
My answer today is much more of a resounding no than it used to be. In my earlier years I was more about highest and best use of my time from a shareholder perspective. I have gradually shifted to a sales territory perspective, which means the highest and best revenue for your sales team.
It isn’t because I caught the “not my job” syndrome, quite the contrary. I think it has to do with a slightly better understanding of human nature…
If you are an SE manager you have to maintain a watchful eye that your team isn’t getting caught up in firefighting institutional issues. Keep them focused on solving customers’ business problems with the solutions in your bag.
If certain problems become so acute they cannot be ignored and they cannot be acted upon, assign a single czar/taskforce from your SE/manager ranks. Make sure all of them are dealing with problems the same way, carefully documenting progress, and publishing a very noticeable scoreboard of progress. Most times we cannot direct change, we can only influence. It’s a good thing we’re skilled at that sort of thing 
At the end of the day we should be exerting effort to be the best we can be in the job we are assigned to. Taking our eye off that ball makes us less effective in our accounts.
Sometimes this simplest of axioms captures points most clearly:
Focus on that which you can control.
I recently covered some of the different compensation split options available for Sales Engineers at a very high level. This prompted a few questions, mostly around the use of MBOs. As a follow-up, let me go into the various options available to SE management as well as some common pitfalls.
MBOs are targeted performance goals. As such they should always follow the SMART approach. Even though a standard quota plan is just an example of an MBO, most sales/SE managers use the term more to apply to goals other than sales targets. For this article, I will refer to it in its more general sense.
Others may group them differently, but to me there are 4 categories of MBOs for SEs:
This ensures that the 3 main stakeholders in business are accounted for: shareholders/owners, employees, and customers.
These are the goals that concentrate on the financial statements and address the needs of shareholders or owners. I suppose this is technically a euphemism for “shareholder satisfaction” These are also the most common compensation plan metrics—sometimes the only one (over 70% of SEs have a bonus plan tied to sales/revenue). This is even more so for AEs. Here are some options that may be available depending on your company’s revenue reporting capabilities:
There is a host of revenue generating activities that are not specific to one’s own accounts. Creating sales collateral and supporting other account teams are specific examples. This category also applies to activities that go to morale boosters which address the needs of the employee stakeholder. Examples include:
Goals in this category encourage positive and long-term relationships with customers, which is in everyone’s best interest. These can include:
Each of the other categories addressed a specific business stakeholder. Process improvement is a very broad category that concentrates on the foundational goals that generate continuous improvement in each of the others. This is best illustrated by the concept of moving the fulcrum over, or sharpening the saw in Covey terminology. It covers everything from contributions to business process improvement to personal development. Examples include:
Each of these basic options can be tailored (and weighted too) in numerous ways limited only by your creativity and ability to get at the data. You can focus these goals on specific products, business segments, or even competitors so that they align to company strategy.
With the ability to be flexible also comes the possibility of actually lowering productivity if you aren’t wise in how you approach them. Some of the most common pitfalls include:
Hopefully this gives you a head start on crafting your own MBO program. By no means is my list comprehensive and should be thought of as a starting point of discussion. Mastering Technical Sales also has a balanced scorecard that may be helpful that matches fairly well with this post. I’m also working on a template for me to use personally that I will include here in the future.
I was going through and organizing my calendar the other day when I decided to check in with myself on my progress towards my goal of better organization. A while back I had gone through and color coded my calendar and also started documenting where I was spending my time. I knew I needed to get a better handle on where my time was going if I wanted to manage it.
If I look at where much of my time was going, most of the entries (not including the ones I went back and added) were generated by others. Since that time, most of my calendar entries are self generated. This isn’t to say I’m spending vastly more time in meetings, but that I am generating/accepting meetings from topics or agenda items that I initiated.
Seeing it from this perspective for the first time was very exciting!
From that I devised a quick test you can perform to gain the same insight.
It’s pretty easy to think (or even assert) that you are managing your own time; it’s another to have a datapoint that can confirm your story.
If you want to get more exact and/or automate the process, you can export your calendar and use color codes to sort your time and perform calculations. Save the template you create and every quarter you can create a visual depiction of your time slices.