#220 From One Product Sales Engineer to Multi-Solution SE

Notes:

Is it easier to have only one product to sell? What happens when the company grows, either organically or through acquisition? Does it get harder or easier? Is it any different? These are all questions that I tackle with my guest David Ledger.

David Ledger is a Regional VP of Sales Engineering and a Sales Enablement provider. He is a strong proponent of learning and improving. As the organization grows, the portfolio grows with it and so should the Sales Engineer’s skills. 

Key Takeawats:

  • Getting into Sales Engineering
  • Having only one product to sell to all customers
  • How the Discovery process changes as companies grow the portfolio
  • The SE Skillset as the number of products in a portfolio changes.
  • Getting specialists involved
  • Integrating acquired organizations vs selling separate products.
  • Learning acquired products.
  • Using their own products internally
  • What the 4th quarter looks like for SE Managers.

Quotes:

“You might present exactly the same product feature for 2 different customers, but the way you talk about is different because it’s addressing a slightly different challenge.” – David Ledger

“We like to think we’re the absolute expert in the product that we sell, so we have to have the mentality shift to well, we don’t know everything about everything.” – David Ledger

“It’s nice to provide a pretty good career trajectory for people and see Sales Engineering as a defined career trajectory that we can take” – David Ledger

“(SE) is the only job in technology where you can combine multiple skills into one job” – David Ledger

Links from the show:

Music on the show: Watchmaker’s Daughter by Reeder