#199 Be Known For Something or Stay Stationary

Notes:

Have you ever wondered what makes a sales engineer run long in the industry? Have you ever wondered what practical choices a company must make to keep thriving especially in the sales engineering industry? These are a few of the nuggets of wisdom you’ll get a glimpse of as you listen in to today’s podcast episode with none other than our guest, Jeff Margolese. Jeff Margolese is the Senior Vice President of Global Solution Consulting at ServiceNow, a software company that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations.

Jeff Margolese, prior to being the Senior Vice President of Global Solution Consulting at ServiceNow, worked for 9 years as the Senior Director of Sales Engineering and Product Marketing at VMware. With 30 years of experience, Jeff has already been an experienced Pre Sales Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry. He is also highly skilled in Enterprise Software, SaaS, System Architecture, Infrastructure, and Integration. Lastly, Jeff has a consulting background with a BsC Business Computing focused in Economics and Information Technology from The University of Winnipeg.

Key Takeaways:

Listen to our conversation with Jeff and learn:

How Jeff defines ‘solution consulting’ and how they do it in ServiceNow
How Jeff pushes with the culture of involving sales engineers as early as possible as a global SE leader
What pushbacks were experienced due to the use of their model
What sales engineers or solutions consultants must do if they want to be recognized for the work that they do
What Jeff is famously known for after applying the mantras he believes in
Jeff shares about an outstanding sales engineer to him
The difference in advantages and disadvantages between startups and large companies
How the demand for the sales engineer skill set has changed throughout the years
The different companies that many of ServiceNow’s processes were taken from
How someone can continue to differentiate themselves to keep moving up the chain
A few of the things Jeff tried but failed at or learned from

Quotes:

“It’s nice to have permission to fail.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“Let’s show up. Let’s be professional. Let’s execute.” – Jeff Margolese

“I don’t want to do a demonstration that just says, ‘Hey, I’ll just show you my product…’ I want to come in and give you, I love this term, bespoke– I want to give you a bespoke experience, that’s for you, that feels like it’s yours because that’s how you’ll get them to, you know, open up the pocketbooks and get more value out of it.” – Jeff Margolese