#184 Different Presales Skill Needs for Different Presales Teams

Notes:

Are you a startup company and wondering whether hiring an SE is necessary? Or are you in presales and are considering working for a startup company? Listen to know more about how SE wears different hats and contributes to solving clients’ business problems, the success criteria of an organization.

Justin Ryburn is currently the Director of Global Solutions Engineering at Kentik. In our interview with Justin, he shares the importance of having a sales engineering team and how startup companies can benefit from having an SE because they provide value to their business clients.

Key Takeaways:

How he transitioned from network engineering to sales engineering because he loves the presale side, being out in front of the customers, and helping customers solve hard technical problems.
His turning point where he no longer felt he was able to help and contribute while working in a big company
The challenges of wearing multiple hats while working with a start-up organization
The things he looks out for when hiring SEs
Why startups should not underestimate the importance of having a built solutions engineer or pre-sales engineering team
The right time for startups to build their sales teams and hire their first sales rep and SEs
Identifying the skillsets of SEs that give value on the business and technical side
His perspectives on proof of concept vs proof of value to shorten the sales cycle
Treating and engaging every customer differently when there is an offer for a free product trial
Solving business problems is a prescriptive form of success criteria
A mature employee: Having boundaries to avoid burnout
Good relationships and rapport are important in creating a sustainable process in an organization

Quotes:

“The interesting thing about working for a startup is there’s whatever the number is a thousand/a million things you could do in your day, and all of them arguably would provide value. But what you got to figure out is, what is the critical most important thing you’ve got to get done today? And what can wait till tomorrow? Like, learning to prioritize your time because you’ll wear a lot of hats is key to success and survival to startup and I’ve definitely found that to be true.” – Justin Ryburn

“So what would be right for us as far as an organization and structure and team size wouldn’t necessarily be the same for other companies. So you’ve really got to know your product, your customer, your market to really be able to answer what size team do I need?” – Justin Ryburn

“There’s a point at which you’ve built a product, you’re ready to go to market with the product. And you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve proven that there’s some value to this product, right customers… there’s a product-market fit, I guess, is the right term. For that’s probably the point at which I see most companies hiring their first sales rep in their first SEs.” – Justin Ryburn

“We’re not spending our time doing testing to prove out that some concept exists, and it could potentially work. We’re proving that this product that already exists, has value and that it solves real-world business problems for the customer. – Justin Ryburn

“You know, one of the areas that I think the SEs teams can really help, if we do a good job of doing that, and working collaboratively with the customer through, that is shorten the sales cycle. In that, you know, proof of concept/ proof value, whatever you’re calling it, and that stage of the opportunity because I definitely I’ve seen and even you know here kinda early on, we spent a lot of time in what we call proof of concepts which were really trying to find the problem, right? – Justin Ryburn

“What we’re trying to solve; we do know what their business problems are; we do know what our product does to address those problems. Those are the ones we’re talking about, where we want to be more prescriptive and more repeatable to find those success criteria at-front so that we can move them quickly through the stages.” – Justin Ryburn