Being a sales engineer (SE) is a noble undertaking, a lot of fun, and can make you and your employer money. That said, being a good SE and having an org that knows how to use you is not easy. The basics are well-covered elsewhere, so let’s look at some more advanced areas where I’ve seen SEs and orgs trip up before.
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Can you form and maintain your own direct relationship with the customer?
Sometimes I see account managers and SEs bound together so tightly that if I’m meeting one I know I will need two chairs. Truth is, prospects can’t talk to account managers about bugs, or integration difficulties, or the pressure they’re under from their team to buy the competing solution. They need to be able to ping their SE and get straight answers. You, the SE, need to be able to talk to them before, during, and after the sale to get the facts on what’s happening. You need your own relationships.
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You understand the spectrum of responses between “yes” and “no” when asked about a missing feature
In Sales Engineering 101, you are taught never to give a hard “no” to a “does your product do X?” But at some point, the customer will realize that it doesn’t, and they are going to ask you to make it. Here be dragons. You hate to tell the customer no, so maybe you say, “we’ll consider that”. The customer has just heard a “maybe”.
Maybe’s are bad. They give the technical buyer at the customer false hope, and give their financial buyer leverage. If you really, in your heart, know that your Product and Engineering team are not going to do something (they are already neck-deep in development hell, the team is tiny, whatever) then giving a maybe does nothing more than provide a hostage: “OK, we’ll buy…probably, but we’ll write delivery of Feature X into the contract”. Now you can’t close the deal/recognize the revenue until you deliver a feature that your PM doesn’t even want. And your PM dare not drop the feature from the development plan in case the customer does decide to buy. It’s pain all round.
If your product is reasonably well-featured, you can attempt to invert the dynamic to “we’ve looked at it, but we haven’t had enough market demand from live customers” - which is a “no”, but also a flag to the prospect that indicates that if they buy, they might have some influence on the development plan. If it isn’t, say, it’s new and raw and MVP-ish, or you are testing product-market fit, well, you just learned something, but even there, consider responding by asking the customer to monotonically rank X among other competing feature plans that you share with them.
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You and your PM function are not adversaries
It’s a giant, blazing red flag if the Sales and Product teams in your org do not talk to each other and avoid being on calls with the customer simultaneously. That said, at scale Product will not be on most calls, so you the SE have to be their eyes and ears. What is the field doing? What macro concerns do they have, e.g., industry, regulation, scope? How are they using the product? These are often qualitative things that take a few rounds of conversations before they can be meaningfully encoded as feature requests, and sometimes they aren’t amenable to that at all. For newer products, you will sometimes have to play the Voice of Reason to your PM function. If you know that customers in segment X can’t do anything without encryption, and your product doesn’t have it, then you need to re-vector the product-market fit, target market, and sales target trajectory conversations on the double. Broad reading around the industry that you are in, your customers, and their customers, needs to be something you do all the time.
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You and your account manager have mastered the no-look pass
Pulling off a no-look pass requires dedication to preparation ahead of time and complete attention in-game. Otherwise, you just tossed the ball away. Be like LeBron. As part of your prep with the account team, you should plan for the story beats of the conversation, and what is likely to happen at each phase. For example if you are going in to talk about your product’s security, you might reasonably expect the conversation to turn to topics like audit, compliance, CVEs, and IAM/access control, among several other things. So, be prepped to address those if asked. When the account manager, mid-way through the conversation, senses the topic is coming up, they can pull you in and already know what you are going to say. That level of confidence and trust between two colleagues is the gold standard of account manager/SE relations. Work to get it.
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You don’t work for your account manager, you work with them.
Another red flag. Whose meeting is it? They are accountable for sourcing the content, the room/meeting link, the invites and all that jazz. You’re job is to provide content matching the tenor and aims of the session in a consumable format. It is not to be the sales person’s last-minute PowerPoint jockey in the lobby of a Marriott. Don’t enable it.
How did you score? Are there things you can do differently? Let me know.