As Sales Engineers, we often focus on the process – learning how to get better at sales, qualifications, discovery skills, demos, but rarely do we associate creativity to help us… until this podcast. Today we sit down with Patrick Pissang, a thought-leading sales engineering coach and trainer from Germany, to learn all about how we as Sales Engineers can lead with creativity and the unexpected so we stick in our client’s minds. He shares with us his valuable insights on how mindset is so important for a pre-sales team, how creative SEs can be in their careers to get more deals and help their account managers, secret tips to create a vision for your clients, and breaking the mold of what a pre-sales position should be and making it your own.
Key Takeaways
Join in on our conversation and learn:
- What Patrick does currently and how he became an SE coach and trainer
- How he balances his time between developing business with clients, coaching and training pre-sales teams, and giving them a burning desire for products or software
- Why he believes Sales Engineers should focus on mindset training first before going into demo training
- How his past experiences being in the pre-sales team allowed him to think more creatively in creating a vision for your clients
- Why you should always ask your account managers and executives “Why do we want to win this account?”
- How the pre-sales team can be more than just a resource in the company but also as a co-lead for opportunity deals
- Six Secret Tips to lead with the unexpected and stick in the client’s mind
- A Day in the Life, Idea Sex, Press Release of the Future and System Thinking
- How you can model your software in a way that it solves problems for your clients
- How he finds time to come up with creative ideas despite his busy schedule
- How he started meditation to reframe his mindset
- Why he left an already successful SE career to start his own company
Quotes:
On how we can be more creative as a sales engineer: “Be bold, use your creativity, engage with clients in a way they haven’t seen before, do everything you can to build a vision for your client because you can differentiate yourself as a pre-sales engineer for every deal.”
On how to develop business: “Sometimes you complain because you only get bad opportunities. If this is the case, why don’t you go out and find a new opportunity? You have everything in your toolbox (even as a pre-sales) so go out and make a new opportunity. There is nothing holding you back, make yourself happy.”
His take on having a risk mitigation strategy: “Every pre-sales team goes into a demo exercise, demo training and after that, we expect more sales. That’s pure risk mitigation because you put the process on people, and I think that’s a bit misleading in pre-sales…You limit the people and you make them equal. Sales come from different people having different ideas, joining them, and going forward, or else it alone could never be a complex software. We have different roles, skills, and strengths in a pre-sales team, and we need to play them out instead of putting a risk mitigation process.”
Not so Fire Round
- What do you love about being a freelance SE coach and trainer?
“My freedom, my family, and I can do whatever I like.” - What would you change about your role?
“(In terms of) scaling, I would hire people earlier, delegate more work to have more ideas.” - Are there any books, tools, resources that you can recommend to sales engineers?
Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer’s Handbook 3rd Edition by John Care
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger
Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool for Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future by Cameron Herold
4. What separates great sales engineers from the not so great ones?
Discovery skills, how to talk with the client, when to ask business-related questions. Not being afraid to ask the WHYs and go deep into the business.
Connect with Patrick Pissang on Linkedin:
A fantastic map to all the different SE tools created by Patrick
