Is your content doing all it can to help the sales engineering function scale?

The sales engineering function requires a good amount of content to operate smoothly.? Presentations, demos, deep dives, workshops, and POCs all require content, and it’s not good to have every sales engineer create this content from scratch all the time (although this does happen quite a bit).? Most organizations have a “standard” presentation and demo for the sales engineers to use at a minimum, and many organizations have much more sales engineer content than that.? The question is whether the content created is doing all it can to help the sales engineering function scale.? Here are some questions/criteria to consider.

• Is it findable?? How hard is it for a new sales engineer to find this content?? Do they have to know the special “team knowledge” to find things, or is there a central place for them to look?? Is there clear metadata as to what the content covers, or do the sales engineers have to review it to figure it out?? Is it searchable, and will those search results be helpful?
• Does the content facilitate self enablement?? It’s important that sales engineers can pick up a piece of content and use it effectively without relying on others to walk them through it.? Is there a guide to the content (speaker notes, demo guide, etc)?? Is there a video walking through the content?
• How easy is it to collaborate?? Can someone else take a piece of content and add to or change it for their needs?? How do they add their version so both are available to others?
• How is curation being handled?? All content gets stale over time and needs updating or removal.? Without this function there is the risk of sales engineers using out of date or incorrect content.? Who is handling this?
• Can the content be used outside of sales engineering???

Sales - Sometimes the sales engineer is unavailable when the account executive needs them for a standard meeting.? Should the account executive have to wait, or can there be a video of the standard presentation and demo being given that the account executive can use to move the sales opportunity forward and catch the sales engineer up later?

Marketing - Marketing loves content too, and would be happy to take clips of demos or other content for particular marketing campaigns if they know it exists.

Partners - Partners want to be able to show your product working with theirs, and talk to your product’s features.? Can some of the sales engineering content help with this?

Prospective customers - If there is a free or open source version of your offering, does it make sense for prospective customers to be able to do your basic demo as a getting started guide?? Can this create a multiplier effect if these prospective customers show the content to others?

Community - If there is a community around your product(s), would they be interested in the source code/videos/documents you use?? Is there a way to leverage their interest for mutual benefit?

Sales engineering content can do a lot to help scale the sales engineering function.? It can enable reuse, promote enablement, and allow other teams to build upon what you have created and collaborate with you.? When you look at the content you use as a sales engineer, can you say it is doing everything it can to help you scale?