#130 A Crazy Path Into Sales Engineering

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I’m glad to have James Kaikis on the podcast today. It’s always a good time to have fellow Sales Engineers who are passionate and making strides in the presales community. Join us as we chat about how he thrived in Sales Engineering despite coming from a different background, and his encounters with customers, leading a team and growing the presales community.

James Kaikis is a solutions engineering leader at SalesForce and co-founder of the Presales Collective. He has spent most of his presales career in startups, and before that worked in leadership roles in various industries – athletic, facility, recreation, and hospitality. As the host of PreSales Podcast, he is dedicated to growing the Sales Engineering and solution consulting community together by providing resources, knowledge, network, and mentorship to develop long, impactful careers.

Key Takeaways:

Tune in to our conversation and learn:

How James got into Sales Engineering coming from a very different background
What are these strengths that you talk about
How understanding his strengths helped him become great in his role as an SE
How he dealt with pissed off customers as a manager in his previous roles
The customer-centric problem-solving approach
Does he feel more in control now of the product rather than the situation?
How he transitioned from the hospitality industry to technology and pre-sales
His experience from being an individual contributor to building and managing his Sales Engineering team
What his employees think is his best trait and how he shows that in his leadership
The common problems his team encounters in an organization
Why he co-founded the Presales collective
The initiatives they do to help out the presales community in this time of COVID-19
How do you manage to continue growing or keep things interesting while working for such a big company

Quotes:

[12:54] James’ advice for those who want to shift careers: “Subject matter expertise is transferable skills. what are your transferable skills? Figure out what those are and what you’re currently doing when you try to make a career change. They’re looking for things like empathy and curiosity, those are things that people should latch on to when they wanna make a career shift.”

[15:00] On how he empowers his employees: “I literally take myself out of the situations, and I put them in them, and I prepare them as much as possible. Because to me, I look at people in my career who helped me get to where I’m at and they believed in me, they empowered me they let me make decisions, they let me make mistakes. And so I think about that with my employees, and there are times that I can solve these problems myself but I don’t wanna. It doesn’t help me out, but if I can help them grow and reach their potential and do something that they didn’t think they could do, that’s huge. That’s my favorite part about people leadership.”

[20:04] On why he thinks there should be a culture of openness and transparency within the organization: “I’ve always found that people will appreciate honesty and truthfulness in a situation because everyone’s trying to get better. We’re all on the same team, on the same company, trying to do the same things, accomplishing the same goals and we should be collaborating and working together.”

Not So Fire Round

What do you love about training salespeople and Sales Engineers to do demos?

I love seeing the customers’ lights turn on when you’re in a product demo. This is gonna make life better. this is what my job’s all about

What’s one thing you would change about the role of Sales Engineering?

The compensation component of it, specifically around spiffs. It needs to be a SE-related spiff. There must be SE-related spiffs that are a little bit different than the sales commission structure that rewards the people that are kinda in the trenches just as much but on a diff spectrum than the accountant execs who do carry the quotas.

Other than the Presales Collective, what resources would you recommend for Sales Engineers and salespeople?

Selling is hard, buying is harder: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle by Garin Hess

What differentiates the great Sales Engineers from the not so great or ordinary ones?

Curiosity. It’s easy for anyone to say, like, putting your customer at the center or making sure you sell value, but in reality, it’s the step behind that, around curiosity, and understanding what, how, and why you’re gonna be able to present it, that curiosity is the separation of a good experience versus a great experience in my own opinion