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!

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