Blog
Notes:
Before you can build a stellar product and launch it to the masses, you need to have a thorough understanding of what the product is. In this episode, I talk with Dan Hellerman of Saleo to find out why he chose to be in charge of Product, why he and his co-founder and CEO still do demos to this day, and why the role of Sales Engineers is so important in the sales cycle.
Dan Hellerman is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Saleo, which is a demo environment platform that helps software companies create great software demos to win and retain more customers. Saleo is the only platform in the market that allows you to control your actual live software demo in its live native environment. They have worked with companies like Drift and Clary and SalesLoft, and Terminus to help them power their live demos.
Dan has more than 11 years of experience leading product and marketing teams. Before co-founding Saleo, Dan was the VP Media Strategy & Architecture and led the advertising product at Terminus, Head of Marketing at Cloudreach, and led Digital Marketing at SevOne.
Key Takeaways:
- What it’s like co-founding a startup like Saleo
- Dan explains the role of a Chief Product Officer
- The importance of keeping your ear to the ground and listening for problems
- Why good sales engineers don’t mind complaining
- The lift of a sales engineer versus salesperson in the sales cycle
- Why Dan chose to work with Justin, his co-founder and appoint him as CEO of the company
- What it’s like to give up some control to someone else to do the product
- The difference between early development vs later development in a company
- How should new learnings and information be collected for new sales engineers?
- Would Dan want to switch back to marketing versus staying in sales engineering?
- The role of a Sales Engineer during demo
- When does Saleo demo for new customers during the sales cycle
- The biggest mistakes larger organizations are making when it comes to marketing and customers
- What he’s learned about the role of sales engineering over the last six months or things that have shifted about the role itself that can help future generations
- Different categories of solutions engineers and sales engineers that Dan has run into
Quotes:
“Product-led growth is all about listening to your customers and building what they’re looking for.” – Daniel Hellerman
Good sales engineers don’t mind complaining. When someone takes pride in their work, and they’re not getting the support they need, they will let people know. So good sales engineers don’t mind doing that. They’re also trying to find workarounds and solutions. But still, like, I’ll tell you what makes it easier for me.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“The companies that I see treat their sales engineers with the same rockstar status as their sales team, and hopefully their marketing team, tend to be the ones that succeed and end up the most successful.” – Daniel Hellerman
“For me, it wasn’t about losing control. It was about giving up the things that I didn’t think would make the company successful if I ran them.” – Daniel Hellerman
“There’s a benefit to selling software, and there’s a benefit to selling and building. I think as we hire the right one, that definitely will be like it’s a collaborative experience. But for us early on, there’s just been so many individual learnings on a per customer basis that we’ve just really not wanted to hand it off. We’ve seen it much more valuable use of our time to sit on those demos than not.” – Daniel Hellerman
“You have to have a very deep understanding of the product. And so when we hire solution engineers for Saleo, it’s not just people that have a love of demoing products, it’s people that have a love of software in general. Because I always say this to our people is like, all of SaaS is there to make complex data simple.” – Daniel Hellerman
“How you brand and how you build a product to market is going to immediately affect how you sell. And so I think the biggest part you’re missing is just that, that product”- Daniel Hellerman
