We were promised flying cars, and other Sales Engineering Tools.

In the past five years, the world of Sales Engineering has seen a rise in the voices of veterans who have taken the bold step to bridge and yoke our strengths as a field. Not a week passes without a blog or post from a fellow SE on how to improve our tradecraft. As quickly as this information sharing grows, I observe an opposite void in the dialogue of Sales Engineers about tools to aid our craft.

We naturally sit on the edge of technology, dedicating ourselves to improving the outcomes of our clients, while perhaps remaining a step behind in our own technology for the craft. In the months that led from a gut feeling, I scoured the internet, the cannon Sales Engineering texts, and interviewed many successful Sales Engineers - to discover a real void in technology to improve the efficacy of an SE. It's worth pausing here to exclude the obvious. I recognize the value of web conferencing tools, automated demonstration videos, slide sharing, and a myriad of other apps that support the presentations and demonstrations we deliver.

Where I want to focus my attention is on the point of my greatest pain. After all, as Sales Engineers, we begin always with the problem. At the risk of painting us Sales Engineers, and to be clear, I am focusing on Software Sales Engineers, with the same brush; my most significant challenge in a presentation or demonstration is changing gears fast. We've all encountered this at some point, the conversation goes here, but the primary stakeholder raises a hand and asks to talk about something else, something off the script. The change would not phase any SE worth their salt, but the props needed to support the conversation take time, albeit a short one, to locate.

While you do this, dead air fills the room as you navigate through your supplemental slides, find the right URL or locate a document. The demo starts with your deck, but now you need to quickly open a website, jump to slide twenty of the deck, navigate to a new page, take a screenshot for the primary stakeholder. No matter how prepped you are, being able to turn on a dime (or a sixpence for my people) is a critical skill for the Sales Engineer. The way I see it is, the more comfortable you are changing direction with ease, the more credible you appear to the audience.

A good SE never points out a problem they cannot solve. For me, and my workflow, I think I have found an exciting solution to the problem, and it comes from an unlikely source. It began with my daughter. She was wasting a Saturday watching others playing computer games on YouTube. Yes, proud Dad. What caught my attention was a device on the gamer's desk that looked like a ten-key, except it was backlit with mini-led screen-buttons and as the player was punching in keys, the keyboard configuration would change. At the risk of aging myself, it was very ST:TNG.

The device used was an Elgato Streamdeck. PrimeNow and two hours later I held one in my hands. Before you think this is a review of the device, it's not. I'll not mention the USB cable is ridiculously short or the fact the USB cable is hardwired one side, nor shall I tell you the stand is a bit flimsy. I equally won't tell you how well the software works and that the product does feel like it would take a beating and come back for more. Alas, this is not that kind of post.

So, what does it do? Those of us who are familiar with hot-keys or macros will understand the joy of triggering commands by Vulcan neck-pinching the keyboard. The stream deck is a big bad programmable hotkey and macro nirvana.

Let's walk through a scenario. I have my web conference running; the demonstrated application is in the foreground. Say I needed to mute my line or pause the screen. The stream deck has both icons glowing without requiring me to move the mouse and draw attention. I am in my slide deck, and the customer wants to jump to an integration question... that's slide twenty, I think. I press a button, and it drops me there, another jumps me back to the agenda, and I programmed another to take me to my value prop slide. Quickly launch another virtual machine, take a screenshot of a region, zoom in, zoom out, mark up, make the cursor larger. I even have a button that triggers a floating countdown of varying length.

So why should you care, you can do all this already. I am certainly not discounting the fact that everything I mentioned could be performed with ctrl-alt-somethings, but one button beats two or more anytime. I plan on also taking one to the next tradeshow. Hundreds of decks, documents, videos, and hyperlinks at the touch of a button...and more importantly, without requiring I take attention away from my client. The more I use the device, the more tricks I can make it do.

As a successful Sales Engineer, we need to evolve to remain at the top of our craft, and while we have a growing number of resources to improve our narrative, we need to look beyond to tools that aid the mechanics of our role. To that end, I will devote an equal measure of my time towards improving the delivery method and delivery technology, so that my clients see better outcomes with my products and services.

Let's talk. What tools do you use to improve the workflow of your Sales Engineering craft?