Blog
Notes:
In this episode, we’re joined by Rafael Lluis, the Head of Sales Engineering at Liferay. We’ll talk about how he got into the field of sales engineering and what it takes to be successful in his role today.
Rafael started his career in consultancy and then moved on to presales and eventually became a Sales Engineering Manager. Today, in his current role, he manages a diverse team of international SEs and how they collaborate across different countries, cultures, and requirements. We talk about where the presales team spends most and least time and where they should be improving, as well as best practices in planning sessions, demos, and “critique sessions.” We also discuss how sales engineers juggle learning with other priorities—and what they’re looking for in their ideal hire. Finally, Rafael shares what he sees as the future of presales and the skills that people need to work on to succeed.
Rafael Lluis is the EMEA Presales Lead at Liferay, Inc. He is a Sales Engineer with more than 20 years of experience that started developing projects with different technologies (.NET, Java, PHP), then evolved to business analyst and project manager, and finally decided to be fully dedicated to Sales Engineering/Presales.
Key Takeaways:
- A little background and introduction of Rafael Lluis
- The main difference between consultancy and presales
- How Rafael went from consultancy to presales and then become SE manager
- Is there a language requirement from SEs to be able to work in all these different territories?
- The challenges he faces today managing people from different cultures, different languages
- How SEs collaborate together being from different areas and having different requirements
- Having an internal platform is very important for collaboration
- Where the presales team spends the most and the least of their time on and where they should be improving
- The Liferay Digital Experience Platform
- Rafael explains what a critique session is
- How sales engineers juggle learning and all the other things that they have to do with their customers and their sales team
- Finding that one in a million person who would have the technical skills, the sales skills, the tough skin, and the ability to learn continuously on the fly
- How Rafael makes sure that the person you hire is the person you want and is not stolen by somebody else before you can provide an offer
- The future of sales engineering and presales and the skills that people need to work on
Quotes:
“If you really want to have everything in a single place, you need to duplicate, do your work again, you need to go and instead of just starting, add the item into the platform in the correct place, blah, blah, blah. And that takes time. So we try to do whatever we can with the time we have.” – Rafael Lluis
“A key talent that all of us sales engineers do have is the ability to search. To create relationships and to search.” – Rafael Lluis
“I’ve seen this a lot where SEs, practice on their own, and then they go into a meeting with a salesperson who messes everything up for them. Not because it’s a bad salesperson, it’s just because they never communicated what they want to do with the salesperson.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“What can you do day by day, day by day? If you cannot do it today, then you try tomorrow, early in the morning, and you are ahead.” – Rafael Lluis
