What makes a great Sales Engineer?

Throughout my career, I’ve often been asked (by employees and employers alike) – “what do you look for in a sales engineer?”.??This may sound like a complex question to some though honestly, it is simple.??Some of the confusion may be derived from the many interchangeable titles often used: Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, Consulting Engineer, Customer Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Solutions Consultant, Technical Solutions Architect, and more.??

No matter which titles an organization uses in their nomenclature all ‘selling’ engineers fulfill a common need.??They drive the technical aspects of the sale, usually in partnership with a salesperson who has the overall responsibility of sales across a group of accounts.??

What makes a ‘Great’ Sales Engineer?

Regardless of an organization’s job description I believe there are a few factors that are difficult to measure.??Certainly, we can all gauge a person’s foundational capabilities in the subject matter: routing, switching, security, IPAM, storage, or ‘cloud’.??How do you measure charisma, personality, control, and curiosity???I think it’s easy to measure a candidate against a set of well-defined KPIs, but how do you measure someone’s DNA???Let me use a crude example:??We’ve all at one time or another walked into a car dealership seeking to purchase a new (or used) vehicle.?When greeted with a smile by the next salesperson in queue and asked: “Welcome, how may I help you?” I would be willing to bet that your response wouldn’t be: “I’m looking for a Hill Holder”.??Using the photo below, I’m certain most people would be confused by the complexity of what today seems like a simple solution.??Most of us wouldn’t know the first thing to do with all the pieces of the solution we were looking for and we’d most likely walk out the door more confused than when we walked in.

I believe this confusion adds another competitor to the list vying for the customer’s business.??That competitor is Business As Usual, or BAU.??When we confuse our customers, we put them on the defensive and push them back to what they know really well (their comfort zone).??This is really a disservice to them, especially in a world where things are changing rapidly.??It is our duty to help them understand the changing world and help them understand where technology is headed and enabling them to build their skillset.??

So, what is our role as Sales Engineers in this process of selling technology???Our role is to tie a solution to our customer's business problem.??Continuing on the example above, as a customer I have no idea what to do with all the pieces of (what are those things anyway?).??But I do know what I can do with the solution (pictured below):

Great sales engineers can have a dramatic effect on sales success.??Of course, there are specific responsibilities a sales engineer is required to perform. These include: product demonstrations and technical presentations, proof of concept (POC) and proof of value (POV), competitive analysis, and developing architectures related to the customer’s use case.??We interact with many different groups and business units in our own organization but also within customer’s organization.

The best sales engineers understand the customer’s business.??They have knowledge of particular verticals such as financials or banking, enterprise, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, retail & manufacturing, public sector, and federal.??In many cases, while the technical problems may seem similar there are regulations and processes in each of these that make adopting technology a bit different.??When you can do this, you are viewed as a trusted advisor and not simply someone trying to sell their new gadget or software.

Sales engineers like working with people.??We can speak on many different levels from first-line IT engineering to those making decisions in the C-suite.??The capability not only to know ‘how’ to speak with the different personalities within our customer, but also ‘when’ to change gears from a detailed technical description to a business value discussion.

Let me say a word about?control?here.??If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to be presenting to a large group of technical customers in a large conference room or large event, and been confronted by the?smartest person in the room, consider yourself lucky.??Many times, when presenting to a large group you’ll encounter someone who will challenge everything.??Your job at this point is to recognize the challenge and not become engaged in a back-and-forth to show which of you is smarter.??Control?is the ability to control the room (or own the room) so that you can get back to why you’re there in the first place.??This is a trait and characteristic that is hard to gauge during initial interviews.??Some of the very best sales engineers are amazing when confronted with situations like these.

Making it Simple

Sales engineers communicate both on a technical and personal level.??It’s not just about the bits and the bytes.??They remember that we’ve been called in to help our customers solve a business problem, not to teach a lesson on the CI/CD pipeline.??Usually, our customers are much more experienced than we are since they’re in the trenches day in and day out, and have more practical experience configuring and troubleshooting many different technologies.

SEs have great rapport, especially with their sales peers.??They understand that this is a partnership between sales and engineering and they are integral to the sales process – And! understand the sales process.??The really great sales engineers understand where their deals are in the process and understand the tools used in forecasting the business (Salesforce, Clari are good examples).??With this knowledge they can help identify next steps to move deals forward from discovery, to tech validation, to negotiate and close.

In the End

Our jobs as sales engineers are to make our customer's lives better.??Our job is not to show off all of our product’s features and functions.??That is not the objective.??The objective is to show our customer how their lives will change with our solution.??Remember back to the early part of this article comparing the pieces of the VW Golf to the VW Golf itself.???Customers can see and value how their lives are better with the solution and not simply all the pieces of that solution.??They can attribute value to their use cases and business problem when they understand what we help them solve, and not a lesson on anti-lock brakes.

Footnote

Hill Holder – A special release mechanism on early manually shifted cars that allowed simultaneous release of the foot-brake and clutch to smooth out uphill standing starts.

Photo Credits

VW Golf MK2 Parts -Photo credit: Flickr, Pinterest

VW Golf MK 2 - Photo credit: Car & Classic Auto

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