The Sales Engineer

Reach a Crazy Amount of Prospects

Darrin Mourer — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:59:03 +0000

You’d be hard pressed to find an SE who thought they didn’t have enough work to do. We’re all short on time for keeping touch points with our customers and looking for ways to reach farther. I covered this conceptually with communications platforms. Today I want to highlight a particularly effective piece of content you can create for that platform—the standing tech briefing.

These go by a couple names including tech fest, lunch and learn, birds of a feather, etc. The general idea is that you are committing to host a reoccurring series of meetings for your customers where attendance and agenda are not restricted to a single customer.

You might, for example, host a weekly meeting where you provide a free, one-hour training for an issue you had to overcome, or a new product feature, or an analysis of the latest computer virus that will wipe us out.

Your goal in all this is to build credibility in yourself & company, foster a sense of community around your solutions, and keep your customer relationships alive in a scalable/sustainable fashion. Easy enough right?

Actually this is a tough one to swallow. You have logistics, communications, content creation, and delivery. In all it probably takes 4 hours per session on average, more at first. But, if you compare that to making several phone calls plus 1 hour meetings to cover these subjects with potential individual prospects, you can start to see where you get your time back plus some.

So, how do you go about getting started:

First, you need to have your communications platform in place
Begin with an attainable goal, maybe 1 session per month for the first quarter
Write down your first 3 talks, put some thought into the titles and make them catchy
Socialize your plan with your manager and reps after you have ideas for the first 3 talks. You need their buy in because this takes time away from their specific selling activities
Get their suggestions for potential topics
Ask them to help you market it. Good attendance early on (i.e. social proof) is critical in building attendance longer term
If you have a local office, take advantage of it and invite local prospects to attend in person. Offer food.
Keep the published session to an hour including Q&A
Ask your manager and reps to attend. Get their feedback
Include your peers and partner community

After your first few sessions, you’ll likely be in that place where it’s not yet a habit (i.e. it still feels like a chore) and the value is questionable (i.e. you haven’t reached critical mass). Use the lessons learned to improve. If you can manage 1 session every 2 weeks try it. Push through for a second quarter before making a final decision. I think you’ll be happy with the results.

—

For folks already doing this, I’d love to collect your tips for an advanced posting on the subject at a later date.

How NOT to Become a Support Engineer

Darrin Mourer — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:58:42 +0000

As Sales Engineers we are paid primary to bring in revenue. For most SEs this either means selling to new customers or upselling existing customers. This means that you’re highest and best use to your organization is being in front of prospects qualifying, presenting, demoing, etc.

For a variety of reasons we often fall into the snare of becoming a pseudo technical support engineer after the sale. To draw a distinction: The best SEs are always in touch with existing customers and supporting the relationship. Other SEs get trapped in supporting the product instead. Let’s look at a couple tactics for giving you the best shot of minimizing the post-sale support blues.

Know Your Product, Know Your Rep

If you’re new to the company, you need to spend some time understanding your product’s lifecycle. Is there a history of troubled upgrade paths? Does the product log well? Are error messages easily understood? Are there 3rd party connectors that cause issues?

You also need to understand the capability of your support organization. Are there different levels? Is the lowest rung outsourced to the lowest bidder or is everyone tight knit in one location with great tenure and expertise?

Finally, you need to understand your rep’s mentality toward maintenance, support, and services. If they’re transactional and always on to the next customer, you may be stuck holding the bag. If they’re relationship and service oriented, they may be more inclined to ensure the customer is supported long term.

These questions help you build a profile of your situation. It is built around answering the question of: What services and support does my customer need to be successful long term with our product.

Tee Yourself Up for Success

Every company’s product being different, some SEs will be supporting services and support intensive products. Others are selling stable, commoditized software. Depending where you fall on that continuum determines how much attention you need to pay to this during the sales cycle.

To the extent you feel these options will ensure you success, you need to have the conversation with your rep about both your positioning these options with the customer during the sales cycle. If you’ve thought through the questions above and articulated this well with your rep, you’ll both be in alignment and telling the same story.

So when it comes time to offer the quote to the customer, the needed level of support and services is baked in and the customer understands the value and requirement for them to be successful.

Nail the Transition

Once the PO is signed, it becomes critical that you hand hold the customer through the early couple weeks in transitioning them to the post sales team. That means following up and ensuring they have their support account activated and/or the services team scheduled.

Spend the time to help them understand how to troubleshoot the product when the product is still installed in the POC or lab configuration. Show them the knowledgebase, the user forums, and the support website.

Hopefully, while you were engaged in the POC you captured their open actions list. Now is the time to assist them and ensure all open questions are logged with support and you’ve conducted a live handoff with them.

In the end, there should be zero doubt from the customer as to who owns their issues (i.e. not you) and how to engage support on their own moving forward.

Put Your Follow Up on AutoPilot

A lot of folks don’t internalize the difference between supporting the relationship versus the product. Some SEs are weary of reaching back out for fear of being dragged into support issues. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Make it habit of following up with all of your customers on 1 or 2 week intervals initially, extending that to 4-6 weeks over time. Here are some topics to cover:

How far have they come in their deployment
Is any tuning/customization needed
Has their skillset been keeping up with the needs of business and solution
Is there any feedback for product management
Are there any open support issues

Ideally you’ll know the answer to that last one beforehand assuming your support desk has a case reference tool. In either case don’t be afraid to ask the question.

Assume that there will be a least a few things the customer is unhappy with. That’s ok, let them vent a bit. Here’s the trick—if there is an issue you should own (e.g. feature request), help them out. If it’s a support issue, do not offer to take ownership or assist in troubleshooting. Instead, ensure they’re making progress with support.

Your goal is to ensure support is doing their job and following up and giving appropriate time and attention to the matter, nothing else. If you choose to involve yourself, you may help in the short run, but you’re invalidating the correct support process and teaching them you are a support resource. You are not.

Know Thy Escalation Manager

Now, despite your best laid plans, some customers will go it alone and self educate and self support—likely for budgetary reasons. Or, you’ve gone through the steps above and you’ve determined you’ve got a serious customer satisfaction issue you need to help resolve. What do you do?

I think most of us understand the value of building internal relationships. I think for SEs this holds doubly true for your support team. These folks don’t always get the accolades you do as part of the sales team. You need to get to know at least the key folks on the team that you’re likely to be working with. Most important is the support manager or the escalation manager in larger companies.

This individual gets the call when you need another set of eyes or heightened priority on a customer issue. The time to be trying to cultivate the relationship is not while you’re under fire of a high priority support case.

Before calling, do you best to understand the issue. Do your best to explain the context of the issue and why this is indeed worthy of attention. Do not assume that you are the only one with a high priority incident going on. The more context you can offer, the better the manager can respond. And keep a level head!

Finally, when you feel you’ve done your best to educate and prep the support manager, offer to host a warm introduction between them and the customer. It lets the customer know you’re involved, it removes stress from the situation, and (assuming you stay out of support’s way) you’re clearly demonstrating your separation of duties.

—
In reality, this should drastically reduce your post-sale workload tremendously—but never completely. In those (hopefully) rare instances when you have no choice but to roll up your sleeve, remember that it’s an excellent opportunity to increase customer satisfaction as well as your own brand. Don’t do the minimum. Throw yourself in and do everything you can to get the customer over the hump. As soon as that’s done though, do what you can to reassert the correct process.

Staying Top of Mind with your Customers

Darrin Mourer — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:29:23 +0000

Gerald Jampolsky said: To give is to receive.

As SEs we jump from customer to customer trying to bring in new business all while keeping existing customers happy, staying up on our products, and being in-the-know with industry developments. With just a fraction of your most valuable time spent face to face with your prospects, how can you keep that connection alive and well after you’ve gone.

In the book Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, one of the main tenets of the book was to establish a process for keeping a newly established relationship fresh and relevant. Forgive the techie analogy, but relationships evaporate in much the same way RAM loses it’s content if power isn’t supplied at regular intervals. Such is the rapport you just spent a few hours on the plane or road and in meetings building with your prospect.

You can break down the solution into three areas:

Permission
Platform
Punch

Permission

Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing to gain full understanding of the value of obtaining “permission” or buy in from someone for you to contact them again. They are “paying” you with their attention, and they can easily stop payment at any time.

When you come across a new contact and you build some rapport, use that opportunity to explain that you occasionally distribute some form of communication (we’ll get to that in a moment). Get their approval before you follow up with them.

Platform

Depending on your industry and target audience, there are several ways to build a platform to handle distribution. You need something that:

Easily allows you to add/subtract people
Even better if it allows people to do it themselves
Allows you to segment or “tag” your list members by category
Is separate from your company’s infrastructure

Your platform could be as simple as an email list you build which you can manage in Outlook, or it could be a blog you start on industry topics of interest to your contacts. There are plenty of free blogging and newsletter platforms you can leverage. Blogger and MailChimp are good examples respectively.

As your audience grows, there will naturally be some segmentation among them. Take notes on the situation in which you go to know a contact and keep that with your contact info, such as in the Notes field of a VCard.

When you create your email list (for example) you can create specific personal distribution lists and categorize them accordingly.

Punch

If establishing your process is king, your content is queen. It has to have punch–meaning it has to 1) relevant, and 2) interesting. Your content can come from a lot of places. You yourself should be subscribed to a ton of blogs and feeds for fodder. Your company blog, press releases, and industry journals are great examples.

Two pieces of advice: Never copy verbatim long parts of articles (link to them instead), and always customize content to your audience as best you can. Personalization makes a huge difference in mass communication.

With the email list example, let’s say you are a security software vendor with health care accounts. Instead of just parroting what you just read on the latest piece of malware, briefly mention it’s ramifications to your customers, what you’ve seen in the field personally, and how it may uniquely impact the health care vertical.

Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll see what articles/information generates the most response. Refine your templates and content and then automate as much as possible.

Within two quarters you’ll be amazed how many people remember your name and mention the communication.