#186 Dissecting the Untold Truth about Channel Sales Engineers

Notes:

Have you ever considered becoming a solutions consultant for channel partners? As a sales engineer, it helps to view other career opportunities available to you and understand how they can add value to your role at a company. Today’s episode will focus on defining what a solutions consultant for channel partners is, the difference between working with channel partners and working with direct, and how to maintain the channel partner-solutions consultant relationship.

I’m joined today by Kyle MacArthur, a Presales Strategist for Global Partners at Pegasystems. He is a senior Presales Solutions Consultant with 16 years of experience consulting with Fortune 500 customers in both the USA and the UK and has worked across industries including Retail, Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, Media, and Government.

Key Takeaways:

What is a Presales Solutions Consultant for Partners and what do they do?
How Kyle started as a solution consultant in manufacturing in the US and moved to the UK to become a solution consultant for partners
Kyle’s rocky start as an IT developer and how he stumbled upon the presales role
What Kyle’s perception of sales engineers was like before he got into presales
Why he chose to stay in his role as a presales strategist or solutions consultant
The biggest difference between a direct seller versus a channel seller?
Considerations you need to take when selling to channel partners, whether big or small
How the business problems of partners and customers are very different
Half the battle is where is this easiest to sell, and then how to sell it.
Is selling through channels a lot more challenging than selling through direct?
How to overcome the difficulty of feeling not in control
How do channel partners offer multiple solutions and decide between different vendors or competitors?
Who would make a good SE for partners? What qualities would you need to have if you want to try becoming a channel SE?

Quotes:

“To enable partners, for presales, you’ve got to understand the nature of 100 different partners. And they all have different strengths, weaknesses, ways of working different tools, different personalities. So it becomes a really interesting chess match of getting people enabled. That’s the fluid nature of being a partner solution consultant, enabling these people to sell your product, and you’re not possibly going to be in the room.” – Kyle MacArthur

It’s a matter of a lot bigger relationship math… the complexity of what you need to prepare them for is higher than being able to focus intensely on a deal.” – Kyle MacArthur

“You’re grabbing mindshare from a competitive product that they also sell. And sometimes you have to help them with the architecture of our product will work with that product. – Kyle MacArthur

“It’s a constant battle of awareness for what is the latest your product can do, what problems can you solve, why is that better? Or how does it compare to the competition that solves the problem as well? – Kyle MacArthur

“Are we doing the right things? How are they feeling about the help we’re giving them? Can we do it better? Can we supply them with tools that make it easier cut days and weeks out of the sales cycle?” – Kyle MacArthur

“I think it’s generally a more experienced sales engineer that’s comfortable already with a sales engineering process and at least a product. So that once that learning is under your belt, then learning the partner side which like, you know, we’re discussing here, there’s an added layer of complexity to it.” – Kyle MacArthur

“You need to be relationship-focused as much as technical focused, which as a junior SE trying to learn both might be a little bit difficult.” – Ramzi Marjaba