A sales rep was told by their customer that the decision would be made that quarter. Excitedly, the rep told their SE, “Hey, I’ve got a hot one for you”. The SE, in the course of conversation with the customer’s technical counterparts, discovered that the solution was dependent on the opening of a new building — there was no way the deal was happening that quarter, or even the next quarter.

It is common that the business folks have one view and the technical folks have another. Let’s face it — customer’s lie to sales reps to keep them on the hook. SEs can leverage their technical credibility to to uncover the truth in the situation. Techies tend to be straight with one another.

SEs can provide an invaluable service to the sales team validating the sales rep’s qualification. SEs can discover the true business pain, business requirements, decision timeframe, compelling event, etc. The sooner the better.

The worst thing that can happen is that the sales team spends months assuming what the sales rep heard was correct, only to find out the customer was blowing smoke to keep the sales team on the hook. SEs can help avoid wasting huge amounts of time by spending an hour or so with the customer to validate the qualification. Better to do that, than risk the consequences of months of wasted effort.

Good SElling!

I enjoy golfing. It’s a good thing too, because I’m not very good at it. I always feel like I could do better. The personal challenge to want to do better is motivating.

The other day I happen to see a highlight (actually a lowlight) of Tiger hitting a shot out of a 3 foot high rough onto the side of a hill for a raised green, into another 3 foot high rough. It was probably one of Tiger’s worst shots in his professional career. I’ll bet when Tiger hit that crappy shot, he didn’t say, oh darn this titanium shaft, or bugger-all my 100% leather shoes. He said, I’m going to practice that shot on the range tomorrow until I get it right.

There are a thousand different golf skills to master. As a rule, I practice 3 golf skills at a time, master those, and move onto the next 3. If I can get down a dozen skills in a year, that’s goodness. The same goes for being an SE. There are a thousand different skills to master. Master a few at a time, and then move onto the next few.

We as SEs spend 90% of our training time learning product features, tools, bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, knobs and dials. As SEs, do we need to be technically competent? You bet. Do we need to be obsessive about it in order to achieve fast and efficient solution decisions? Absolutely Not! Yet, the corporate powers that be continue to throw tons of technical training at us, and barely a lick of soft skills training.

Do you know who Hank Haney is? He is Tiger’s coach. Yes, Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer ever, relies heavily on his coach and tirelessly practices his technique to continually improve his game. He doesn’t obsess over the technical specifications of the equipment he uses. As an SE, why should we be any different?

Like Tiger, we should spend 90% of our time learning how to swing, how to hold the club, how to stand, how to pivot, how to, how to, how to — and practice the heck out of those skills so we hit 90% of our fairways and two-putt 90% of our greens.

Of course, let’s make sure we understand and use the right equipment, but much more importantly, let’s make sure we learn and study and practice how to be the best SE that we can be. For an SE, this means a) there is always room for improvement, and b) the large majority of our training time should be for soft skills improvement, not understanding equipment features.

Put in a word with the corporate powers that be — perhaps they should re-assess their training priorities for SEs.

Good SElling!

Back in the late 80’s, I came out of the engineering ranks and began my SE career at Sybase, a company that embraces sales engineering process. Having been an engineer, I thought at first I was supposed to show everybody how smart I was about relational database internals — those were the days of Codd’s Rules when “we’re more relational than you are”.

After I raised several objections on my own that came back to bite me, I began to realize the SE role was more than about being smart. It was about “restrained smartness”. It took years, but I realized being an SE was about helping customers make faster decisions, getting solution decisions faster, making good use of time, and working smart. “Sell while you teach”.

And I loved every minute as an SE. Every day was something different — New customers, new problems, new locations. I loved the diversity and knowing I was genuinely helping people solve tough business problems — In the early days Sybase ran circles around the other databases out there — it was a blast to never lose.

When I left Sybase, I had the SE thing down to a science. Boy was I shocked when I landed on the dark side of the moon. Chaos reigned. Fires burned out of control all the time. See lightning, hear thunder. Demo demons ruled the asylum. It was not fun, at all.

Bouncing around in several jobs, the pattern continued. There had to be a better way. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Good SElling!

Ever wonder what you’re worth as an SE?

Here’s a quick bit of math to give you a pretty good idea.

My premise is that the revenue per unit time an SE is associated with can be computed as:

# qualified deals you’re working on x average deal size (list price) x technical win rate / average days to solution closure

To give you an example: 10 x $50k x 50% / 120 days = $2083 per day

Let’s play with some math…

Spread out over a year, that’s $520,750 per SE. For an average team of 8 SEs for 250 working days, that’s $4,166,000 per year per team.

Suppose you improved the performance of each of the 4 parameters (metrics) by 10%. This is not at all unreasonable. That’s $3081 per day per SE — a 48% increase in revenue!

If each SE improved their performance just a little bit, the incremental revenue could be dramatic. There has been precedent for much better improvements actually being realized. One of our customers saw a 425% increase in 6 months, in large part, due to our SE Skills Improvement Program www.salesengineering.com/resources/casestudies.php

The SE can be a very valuable resource to the sales organization. Believe it.

Good SElling!

We are in the business of providing impact-the-bottom-line skills to teams of SEs. Operationalizing a new skill is one of the hardest things for a manager to implement.

We worked with an SE organization awhile ago whose managers had been promoted from within. Many had not received formal how-to-manage training. The culture for these managers was to still want to be buddies with their teams, “If the SEs like it, they’ll use it”. They were Laissez Faire managers — hands off, let the SEs do what they want to do. Heed my warning — This is a recipe for failure.

When new skills are presented to any individual, their first reaction is often, “Gee I hope this goes away. I’m too busy to do this new stuff. I’ve been doing fine as an SE for 10 years, leave me alone.” Despite all the explanations of benefit to the organization and themselves, SEs will often resist change. Change is viewed as a waste of time.

Change will only happen through routine, persistent, repetitive practice. Especially for a new soft skill, this can take 3 to 6 months before the practice begins to become accepted and routine. Change will not and cannot happen with a hands-off management style.

My fellow SE Managers, to operationalize a new soft skill, we must put the “manage” back into “manager”. New procedures and policies must be defined and rigorously implemented. Executive management needs to strongly and vocally support the change. Contests and rewards are needed to motivate behavior. Those of you who believe in MBOs, leverage the heck out of them for at least two quarters.

Executive managers, you will need to lean on your line managers. Consider weekly or bi-weekly reviews of team behavior through technical opportunity reviews of critical deals. Insist that your managers have the quick crisp answers to questions like “can this deal come in any faster?” “How will we overcome the risks in moving forward?” “Show me the performance measurements for the new skills since the last time we met.” Insisting managers have crisp answers will ensure they are staying on top of their people for the answers, and that their SEs are involved in similar regular reviews and practice.

So, when operationalizing new skills, it is important to put the “manage” back into “Manager”.

Good SElling!

A colleague of mine likes to tell a story about an SE and sales rep who had finished an hour long pitch. The sales rep talked for 10 minutes about the company and its financials, and the SE spent the rest of the hour running through a demo.

At the end of the demo, the key decision maker said, “Ok, now I have a few questions for you…” And looking at the sales rep said, “…and you can leave now!”.

The SE is the “credibility side of the sale”. In many cases, it is the SE who customers really want to talk to. That credibility is a powerful weapon for the SE to leverage.

The SE can leverage their credibility to better understand the true qualification of the opportunity. Early in Sandler’s sales methodology book he says, “Customers lie”. True, but they tend to lie more to sales reps than SEs. What the sales rep hears from their business constituents will be very different than what the SE hears from their technical constituents.

The SE can leverage their technical credibility to get closer to the truth. In doing so, the sales team can compare notes on the stories they hear, identify discrepancies, and act to resolve them.

Expanding on this example, the SE has a strategic role to play in the entire sales cycle — Qualification, development, and closure. A strategic SE owns all aspects of achieving the solution decision, what we call Solution Closure. The empowered SE project manages Solution Closure, owns their schedule, and has an equal say with the sales rep in the account strategy.

As a result, the empowered SE decreases their time to solution closure and helps grow deals having a direct impact on the bottom line. The case study on the web site provides a living example of the significant impact an SE can have on the business.

Good SElling!

As CTO and founder, allow me to personally welcome you into the first ever SE blog. I thought for my first posting I’d talk a little bit about the motivations for starting the company 10 years ago…

I was managing a team of very technically oriented SEs and we’d just sent them through traditional sales training. When they came back, the feedback was that about 30% of the training applied to them. When you spend that much money on training and T+E, you hate to hear that kind of feedback.

So it got me wondering if there was sales training out there specifically for SEs. There was nothing to speak of. From that need, “TechSellEnts” was born — the first name we used for what is now salesengineering.com.

As we’ve evolved, we have found that the SE role can be so much more than tactical demos, pitches, installs, and fire fighting. Doing better demos or presentations does not go very far in impacting the business. If you find you are a “demo demon” or subservient to sales reps — bells should go off in your head.

SEs, in fact, can have a measurable and dramatic impact on the bottom line — the trick is in executing a specific SE workflow (a process) that focuses on measurable impact. The workflow goes from start to finish, always with an eye toward how you can get to a solution decision faster and how can you grow the deal. As an SE, you can, in fact, have a dramatic impact on the business.

But it requires breaking a lot of bad habits that maybe you’ve built up over the years, and maybe changing the way SEs and sales reps work with each other. There is potential culture shock in your skills improvement. But if you’re willing to go the distance, there can be an amazing payback.

The ride over the last 10 years has been a blast. As introducing this new blog shows, we as a company continue to evolve and improve to bring a new level of solutions for the SE community. I hope you enjoy the ride with us.

Good SElling!

– Phil

What’s out there to help you out with demos, proofs of concepts, time tracking, etc. What tools can’t you live without? What would you really like to have if it existed?

Share with us your war stories. Tell us about your moments of glorious success. Any flaming Faux Pas out there? The funnier, the better.

What best practices work for you? What gets you to a solution decision faster? How do you grow deals?

What practices have not been effective for you? Help your colleagues avoid the same traps and pitfalls.