What is A Sales Engineer?
A Sales Engineer (SE) works closely with the Product, Marketing, and Sales Teams of a Product or Service Company to assist Customers, in a pre-sales environment, in learning about the Company’s Products. Critical to success as a Sales Engineer is LISTENING TO and UNDERSTANDING WHAT the Customer Actually NEEDS. Not what you think they might need. Not how you can shoehorn your products into their environment.
A frequent statement from Sales and Sales Engineering is: “The customer does not know what they want.” This is logical and completely normal. The customer can’t possibly know the entire universe of options of products and services that might assist them in being more effective, productive, and efficient that is affordable with their current situation and status.
Understanding where a potential Customer is headed with their Product development, Markets, and Sales Process is the first step. Understanding the Customer’s Budgeting Cycle is a next step. Understanding the Customer’s IT environment and user capabilities is yet another step. With these steps, the Sales Engineer begins to formulate whether their Company’s products or services match the customer’s environment. This is critical to determining if it is worthwhile and productive in pursuing the Customer further. One way to be unsuccessful as a SE is to spend more time than appropriate only to learn that your company’s products are not a good fit. These steps are known as establishing and documenting the Customer’s Current State.
Once the SE determines, and Product and Sales agree, that it is a potentially profitable venture to proceed, really taking the time to understand what the Customer actually Needs and Can Afford is the next step. This is known as creating and documenting the Customer’s Future State. The Future State is essentially a visioning activity to show the customer what their working environment will look and feel like and what results it will produce. The main motivational driver is for the SE to develop a Value Proposition (VP) for the Customer. A VP is a compelling financial statement to the Customer that makes a no-brainer reason to purchase and deploy the Company’s product.
One VP that I used in the past: A potential customer (prospect) was investigating using my company’s products but they had no additional budget for that year. They were running on six-year old servers (nearly fully depreciated) that were approaching end-of-life and whose servers had no further upgrade potential and my company’s products could not run on. But the server company had invoiced the prospect for an annual maintenance/support contract with the prospect that totaled nearly $400,000. My company’s software was $250,000 to purchase and 22% Annual Maintenance and $50,000 professional services to install and deploy. This was a dilemma, no money, a budgeted invoice for old equipment that had multiple issues and a price tag from my company that was not budgeted. We had two options. The first was to wait until the next budgetary cycle, six months away, and get an budget approval for 18 (6+12) months out. Which meant that the prospect would not be able to start realizing the benefits of my products for at least 24 months. Nobody was happy about this situation, especially my Sales Person whose commission for this quarter was on the line. However, I researched and found a second option. By contacting a different emerging server company and a grey market computer company, I found that new servers that would run my company’s products AND the prospect’s older software for $100,000 (my company’s partner rate) and that they could sell their aging servers for $75,000. By proposing to my company that they delay invoicing the first annual maintenance payment until the next budgetary cycle, that we could actually propose to the customer new servers, our new software, development, training, and porting of their old software for just over $400,000. It did involve also utilizing the CIO’s signature authority of $50,000 to make up the remaining. No Brainer: New Servers, New productive Software, Continuation of existing Software all for same cost as the old server’s invoice.
This is how the Sales Engineer earns its salary and commission.
