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