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Notes:
What are your career aspirations for the next five to ten years? If you are just starting out as a sales engineer today, what goals are you pursuing in your first year? More importantly, what are you actually doing to achieve your goals?
Our guest for today has all the answers, and why wouldn’t he? He has been a global leader in sales engineering for years at multiple stages of his career. Today, he joins us to share years’ worth of insights on what steps you can take toward a leadership role.
Paul H. Pearce is a Principal and Certified Training Partner at Great Demo!, a company founded by Peter E. Cohan, keynote speaker and author of a book of the same name. Paul H. Pearce describes himself as a “[c]ustomer-oriented, executive-level sales management professional with extensive experience developing strong and profitable client relationships, managing high-performance sales operations, and driving multi-million dollar contracts in an evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise software market.”
Key Takeaways:
- How Paul started as a presales consultant
- How Paul set himself up for a leadership position accidentally
- The importance of putting the interests of the business first before your interests in getting ahead in your career
- How to ask for what you want
- Why working hard is not enough to get a promotion
- How to express your desire to take a leadership role without demanding it
- How managers could help individual contributors move into leadership roles
- Why thinking like a business person rather than a technical person is critical when eyeing for a leadership role
- The importance of volunteering on special projects
- The difficulty but necessity of stepping back and assessing your sales processes
- What Paul most enjoy in his leadership role
- The nuances of commitment in a company
- Paul’s next leadership aspirations
- How to be a good manager
- What should be tracked in one’s business
- How SE leaders could get their voices heard in an organization
- How to train account executives on how to deliver a great demo
- What should SE managers and leaders do to be part of forecasting calls
- Why individuals working in pre-sales are in a unique position to take on leadership roles
- The importance of getting into the heart of the matter
- Resources to check to improve as an SE
- Why some standards used to do demos are outdated and how to correct them
- The importance of discipline
Quotes:
Be ready to act fast to have an opportunity. — Paul H. Pearce
Let’s not focus on what’s happened. Let’s focus on how we’re going to move ahead. — Paul H. Pearce
Think about the impact on the business, how to solve that, how to position yourself, but more importantly, put the business ahead of yourself and figure out what the plan is going to be and have one. — Paul H. Pearce
If you want anything, it doesn’t matter if it’s being the leader or anything that you want, the first thing you have to do is let someone know, and you have to ask for it. — Paul H. Pearce
Let them know that’s what you want and ask for their help on how to get there. — Ramzi Marjaba
Be a business person and really reduce the amount of time that you’re talking about features and technical functions, whether you’re in a demo or you’re talking to your boss, and then increase the amount of time that you’re spending discussing value-related business ideas. — Paul H. Pearce
Look at the business, as opposed to the tasks and the problems that you’re faced with on a daily basis. — Paul H. Pearce
Volunteer for special projects. Figure out what your team’s working on and what some of the challenges are. — Paul H. Pearce
I think the pre-sales communities get a very unique ability to be the center of the organization. You reach and touch probably as many organizations in our companies as anyone. You’re connected to services, support sales, and product management. So be the conduit. And if you want to enhance your leadership, be the conduit between all of those. Present feature enhancements request the product but correlate it without impacting sales. — Paul H. Pearce
When you get a deal, the first thing you need to say to anyone in sales is, first of all, thank you and congratulations. — Paul H. Pearce
Discipline drives the habits that we form. — Paul H. Pearce
Links from the show:
- Connect with Paul H. Pearce on LinkedIn
- Great Demo! website
- Great Demo! by Peter Cohan
- Doing Discovery by Peter Cohan
If you enjoyed this podcast, please support the show by dropping a review or rating on iTunes – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-sales-engineers-resource-for-sales-engineers-by/id1378292171
