SEU 001 What is a Sales Engineer?

Are you a Sales Engineer? Do you manage Sales Engineers? How about Sales Consultant? I’d really like to help you get some visibility in my book in exchange for a few quotes from you. Free is a great price, and it’s a win-win! Contact me!

Making Sales Professionals Successful

You like one liners? You got it!

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Now before you cry havoc, I already know that the video is not the flashiest video you will ever see. I’m still working out the kinks in these in a new way to video-using dry board/dry erase. I usually use this format in front of prospects/customers and when training, albeit on larger boards and in front of audiences.

Still, this video will give you an idea of my speaking stye, and more importantly how I see the Sales Engineering role today. The job has come out of obscurity since technology has gotten so complicated that sales reps are no longer required to be technical enough to describe what they sell, or demo it.

I do these off the cuff (from memory/experience), but without a live audience it’s more difficult to do. I find myself distracted doing it alone, trying to remember everything-things I wouldn’t do in a live setting. So be merciful about the delivery.

The content, though, I tried to make invaluable to someone wanting to know if being a Sales Engineer would be what they’d like. I cover the basics at an extremely high level, and even that took 44 minutes. Future videos in the series will tackle one subject at a time, but it was only fitting to get the biggest question out of the way first.

I will be numbering these (this one is #1, unsurprisingly) for easy sorting and locating on YouTube.

 

Why Do You Need A Sales Engineer? Part 1

Are you a Sales Engineer? Do you manage Sales Engineers? How about Sales Consultant? I’d really like to help you get some visibility in my book in exchange for a few quotes from you. Free is a great price, and it’s a win-win! Contact me!

The biggest benefit a Sales Engineer can bring to you is the justification, mechanism, and leading-by-example to change your culture from an internally focused one to an externally focused one.

This first video simply illustrates the kind of problems and missed opportunities a company will have if Sales Engineering is not in play. When the entire company becomes focused on Customer Service as the #1 priority, and prioritizes & justifies everything as such, only great things can happen.

In addition, we talk about misaligned corporate culture than doesn’t treat everyone as a customer (internal or external). I make no assumptions as to whether your executives have realized this is the direction they need or not, so I start from square one, building a case and justifying why the benefits of making the Customer King are worth hiring a Sales Engineer to do their part to lead by example to make it reality.

In the first installment of this video series, we take a high level look at what a Sales Engineer can do for you to change your culture forward to a Sales- and Customer-focused one.

Subsequent parts of this small series will address each of the components shown here separately, namely: Exec/Decision Makers, PDM (Product Development Managers), Sales & Sales Management, Engineering & Development (QA, support, etc.), and of course Prospects & Customers.

It is hard for companies selling technology to see how they can move from being a technology-centric culture to one that puts Customer Service at the top. Most who are simply used to doing that way can’t see how focusing on Sales and the Customer will pan out to enable revenue.

I share my experience helping companies understand exactly WHY this should be done NOW, HOW this is done (what customer-focused communication looks like), and HOW a Sales Engineer fits into all this as a catalyst for change, and WHY every company out there needs a Sales Engineer.

Each of these parts is not short, and can be likened to about an hour session I would do when training a group, or at a show. Some are relatively short.

I did not speed through these as fast as I could for a few reasons. For one thing, even though I write out most of what we talk about, some like to take notes, and find pausing a video annoying. In making videos like these, I have to consider the common denominator, and not leave anyone behind.

I apologize in advance if this more thoughtful pace is too slow for you. I think there is a way to play videos at multiples faster than they were recorded on YouTube, so I invite you to explore that option if you need to.

Why Do You Need a Sales Engineer? part 2

Are you a Sales Engineer? Do you manage Sales Engineers? How about Sales Consultant? I’d really like to help you get some visibility in my book in exchange for a few quotes from you. Free is a great price, and it’s a win-win! Contact me!

How does a Sales Engineer fit in? What does an org chart look like when you have a Sales Engineer? Which departments in a company does a Sales Engineer interface with, and why?

We start at this highest level, representing the areas of a company that work together at a block diagram level. The value to each in bringing about a Sales- and Customer-Centric culture is emphasized.

Sales Engineers are chartered with making everyone work together for the Prospect/Customer’s best interests, and for the sake of the deal.

Our next part dives right into how Sales Engineers directly assist Sales and Sales Management.

Why Do You Need a Sales Engineer? part 3

Are you a Sales Engineer? Do you manage Sales Engineers? How about Sales Consultant? I’d really like to help you get some visibility in my book in exchange for a few quotes from you. Free is a great price, and it’s a win-win! Contact me!

Sales and Sales Management is the focus of Part 3, where we tackle the most commonly thought of reasons a Sales Engineer helps get and keep more revenue. No other job title in a company is tasked with making all the different departments work together for stellar customer service, and to focus on the deal.

Throughout this series, I am pointing out very specific tasks that are vital for your success, but are not assigned to anyone, and thus fall off. In each case, we see why a Sales Engineer takes care of each of these, and why your Sales Engineer is the best person to do it.

All too often, the role of a Sales Engineer is confusing to companies with management that is naive or winging it. The purpose of these video lessons is to help companies understand why the role is so vital, but also to illustrate to HR/head hunters/recruiters personnel why exactly a Sales Engineer is NOT a Solutions Engineer, or a Sales Rep/Manager, or an Engineer, or any of the dozens of off-target descriptions I see every year.

Hopefully, when everyone realizes the value, the rich reward of having a Sales Engineer will permit salary to be correctly placed (comp, etc.).

Interestingly, the changes in culture that will push you forward are the ones that don’t require you to change much at all. In fact, it’s simply working BETWEEN the existing elements you already have-but keeping Customer Service the #1 priority. When we make decisions based on how it will help the Customer, and not ourselves, we instantly become more efficient.

Just ask yourself: “How Much Will This Cost?”

P.S. I thought perhaps turning one of the lights off would make less glare, but it really ended up making less light! In future installments I go back to more lights…

Why Do You Need a Sales Engineer? part 4

Are you a Sales Engineer? Do you manage Sales Engineers? How about Sales Consultant? I’d really like to help you get some visibility in my book in exchange for a few quotes from you. Free is a great price, and it’s a win-win! Contact me!

In Part 4, Engineering & Development are the company entities, or departments, we’re taking a look at. How a Sales Engineer works with Engineering to make them more accountable, and more efficient is discussed in detail.

The Engineering, or technical portion of your company is likely only tasked with engineering, development, quality assurance, support, and other goals and objectives relating to them internally. But part of accelerating your business with a customer service culture involves bringing Eng/Dev into the fold with the rest of the company.

We discuss how Engineering can use the Sales Engineer to quantify & justify their needs to elements of the company that have no knowledge or visibility into their space. Making everything into a budgeted project, and making product changes that are designed to positively impact sales and our existing customers is just part of it.

The Sales Engineer helps channel the skills of Engineering into phenomenal customer service, which is the ONLY path to gaining revenue, which allows them to increase head count, improve tools, and generally do their job better.

A Sales Engineer is a win-win for all components of an organization!

We’re All Salespeople (Selling), So Don’t Sell Yourself Short!

Sales Engineers,

We tell it to everyone, but they just don’t seem to get it, or want to admit it. In David Lazarus’ article HERE, he gives more examples from Daniel Pink entitled, “To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others“. If you don’t know who Daniel Pink is, crawl out from under that rock and search YouTube.

A few brief paragraphs from the article:

Continue reading We’re All Salespeople (Selling), So Don’t Sell Yourself Short!

Easy Collaboration On The Cheap

Today we look at some free tools out there that allow you to do some things with documents (today we just look at spreadsheets) that you simply can’t do by emailing copies all over the place.

Objectives

1. To give normal spreadsheet capabilities to all users. This also means more than one user can view/edit the document at the same time.

2. To let multiple users edit the spreadsheet online, without any software installed beyond an everyday web browser.

3. Allow seeing who did what & when, rolling back to earlier versions, and all the essential things collaboration requires.

4. Allow the downloading of the document (as it is in that specific moment) in a variety of formats. Users work off the master online, and each download is only a snapshot of the master at that time, and will not reflect subsequent changes.

There is more than one way to do this (with different tools), but we’ll focus initially on the best & easiest (free) one there is: Google Docs/Google Drive (they are going through a name change crisis now).

Note: You do not need a Free Google account to access/edit a document, only to host one. Let’s start first with an existing account, and create a document for us in this tutorial:

My user on Google will be my main one, Pat Trainor (Pat.Trainor@gmail.com). I will now log in and create a test spreadsheet for our use today:

Continue reading Easy Collaboration On The Cheap