Sales Engineers – Re-Inventing the Wheel of Pre-Sales Technical Support

Complex technologies, products, and offerings require more than a typical sales rep to close the deal. As much as we like to think we’re ahead of the curve when it comes to sales innovations, often we’re “reinventing the wheel” in a more efficient, affordable, and scalable form, and sometimes the wheel just needs to be changed in order to get more mileage out of your sales vehicle. One example of this reactive form of innovation is the Sales Engineer (SE).

Sales Engineers are the technical spine of any complex technology sale.

The current wheel is worn with field sales reps that are focused purely on dollars and less on solutions. I would guess you have already seen this in your own programs with flat sales, and it seems to get worse with each new product launch. Sales get bogged down in an endless loop of “I don’t know, I’m not sure, and I’ll need to look that up.”

Sales Engineers are the technical spine of any complex technology sale. They are the product expert and have the technical expertise to know how each product solves the customer’s specific problem. They lead out on technical presentations and they typically own product demos. They support individual sales people at the individual deal level – which puts their expertise at a premium.

So why doesn’t every team just hire and use SEs? Why would someone outsource such a technically-advanced and fundamentally important sales-support position? The answer is simple – there just aren’t enough qualified SEs with technical expertise to go around.

In a well-oiled sales channel, you would see a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio between sales reps and SEs. This is ideal, but not always realistic due to costs. In the constant quest to squeeze more ROI out of a program and lower the overall cost-of-sale, many large enterprise technology organizations deploy 1:5 SEs for every rep, sometimes more! This often causes bandwidth issues where reps can’t get SEs involved because of too many opportunities, causing conflict with reps that eventually leaves SEs unused due to assumed bandwidth conflicts.

When MarketStar creates new solutions to add to our “Sales as a Service” offering, we pay very close attention to the market and listen intently to our customers, then build an affordable and scale-able alternative to hiring internally.

Where most SEs are typically located in the field, in close proximity to key accounts or sales reps, we deploy SEs as an inside, centrally available, resource for sales reps nationwide. We know this is a bit contrary to the traditional model of a field SE that covers a particular market or region, but in our three decades of experience, we have found that the advancement of communications technology (text, chat, and face-to-face video) combined with the sizable cost savings associated with centralized staffing, make an inside SE solution that provides appropriate support, with higher ROI.

Our inside solution opens up your SEs to fill down-time with additional duties and coverage. If a field SE is matched 1:1 with a sales rep, or even 1:5, often times they are not fully loaded day-to-day. An inside SE can expand their net and serve more customers. Some of our clients, like NVIDIA, NetApp, CenturyLink, and VMware, utilize our SEs to assist lead development teams with questions that prospects may have that are too deep for a typical ISR to answer. They are used to assist top partners on larger deals that come through smaller account teams. And in an area that is quickly becoming most primed for growth, SEs are being utilized to support individual sales reps at Direct Market Resellers (DMRs). These SE’s have now transformed from a support element, to a resource that drives revenue.

Ultimately, the true value of the Sales Engineer is realized at MarketStar through their ability to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their product line. They are the experts who identify problems, offer solutions and put the client at ease at a key point in the sales cycle. They help close business, not because they are trained as sales reps, but because they are trained to be great SEs. An inside environment helps foster this practice because they have peers working side-by-side with them. These peers act as colleagues and as mentors, and they help each other perfect their craft. There is nothing a sales person loves more than someone who knows the products and what it takes to get the job done, because the sales reps are able to focus on what they do best, closing deals.

Sales Engineers are a critical innovation in any company’s sales vehicle. But good SEs can be made great when they work in a nurturing environment and are able to extend their coverage to help more customers in your channel. That’s the essence of “Sales as a Service,” and SEs are the new wheel to keep your sales moving forward down the road to revenue.

Click here for a deeper look at what a Sales Engineer can do when paired with MarketStar.