Every Customer is a Design Partner - Leading Your Sales Motion with Sales Engineering
When a startup is born, founders lead sales. Design partners, pilots, or founder-led sales - they have many names - these customers work with a startup to solve a problem.
Conversations about contracts & pricing are kicked down the road until the customer sees value & the path to capture it.
Said another way, founder-led sales are sales engineering sales, not account executive sales.
As a company scales, founders transition sales to others. The default behavior is for founders to pass sales to account executives.
AEs, experts in closing contracts, often focus on reducing sales cycle & maximizing contract value - which aligns with their incentives & compensation plan. The very best blend aspects of sales engineering & sales closing.
What if founders transitioned sales to sales engineering rather than AEs?
That achieves a few goals:
- Validate the value proposition first to ensure product-market fit.
- Continue to understand the customer base, its segments, its nuances to inform product development
- Develop strong relationships with customers as reference accounts in the future
- Provide technical help to the customer to smooth rough edges in the field including onboarding tooling
Technical companies, especially open-source, have achieved some of this with developer advocacy or developer relations teams. Devrel educates the market, assists them in solving their problems, then sales engages.
A sales flow of :
devrel -> sales engineering -> account executive
much more closely parallels the founder sale
awareness -> problem solving -> commercial terms
than the classic sales motion which places sales engineering after the commercial conversation :
awareness (SDR) -> commercial terms (AE) -> sales engineering (SE)
This last motion may work in technical companies with established brands, where customers trust the vendor to satisfy their claims. At this point, sales should optimize the sales funnel for maximum productivity : short sales cycles & larger contract values.
But for those startups still needing to prove the value or with more patient strategies, sales engineering-led sales extend the successful pattern of founder-led sales until the startup establishes a brand & social proof in the market.
Co-founder & CEO, Pepsales AI
1 年The role of Sales Engineers in understanding the customers and their pain points and matching them with the product capabilities is as close as it can get to founder-led sales. I wrote about how Sales Engineers effectively use personalized sales demos to win the customers. https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/singhkajay_salesdemos-productdemos-sales-activity-7122250915931189249-aHzE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Passionate about Generative AI / Data Analyst/ AI / Software Tester And Innovative Thinking. ?????? | Content Writing, Sales
1 年???? Every Customer is a Design Partner - Leading Your Sales Motion with Sales Engineering ???? "?? What an insightful post on the importance of Sales Engineering in leading the sales motion! ???? Sales Engineering plays a pivotal role in building strong relationships with customers and turning them into design partners. By understanding customer needs, providing technical expertise, and collaborating closely with clients, Sales Engineers become the bridge between sales and product teams. They ensure that the solutions offered align perfectly with customer requirements, resulting in successful partnerships. ???? Speaking of effective collaboration, I highly recommend checking out Jeda.ai for streamlining your sales process. With its powerful features and user-friendly interface, Jeda.ai empowers Sales Engineers to create visually stunning diagrams, templates, and presentations that impress customers and drive sales. It's the perfect tool to showcase your solutions and demonstrate value effectively. ????
GTM Executive | Advisor | Board Member | Former Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia
1 年Very interesting idea. SEs ability to constantly A/B test the messaging in real time as they feel what lands seems like a huge potential asset as you navigate early product market fit.
CEO & co-founder at Crosser - Stream Analytics & Intelligent Integration
1 年For Enterprise SW it makes sense to have SE's involved but should they lead the sales process? Good and well trained AE's will know how to navigate this topic and will bring in SE's to establish value first but the AE's does so much more that an SE doesn′t do naturally. And SE's are typically a scarce resource, much more than the AE's. So to have SE's lead an enterprise sales process is a big question mark in my book.
CMO, Hypergrowth Advisor, Took Atlassian Public
1 年YES and related, several dev-focused hypergrowth companies I know have replaced traditional BDRs with technical evangelists. They find more engagement?and sales progression with that model than with the traditional sell-to-book-a-meeting type of person.?