Blog
Notes:
Having someone who worked on the procurement side, the vendor side, and the value-added reseller side in a condensed period allows us to ask many questions and get a holistic view of these different roles.
Our guest, Wesley Bellman has that exact experience in addition to a few more, so we get to see the similarities of working in procurement and how they interacted with VARs.
Key Takeaways:
- How the military benefited Wesley’s ability to be better as a Sales Engineer
- Using mentors to emulate and become a sales engineer
- Going from Customer to Vendor
- The benefits of going to a Value Added Reseller
- Enablement of Sales Engineers vs handcuffing SEs.
- Improving and getting creative as a sales engineer
- How Wesley was invited to the podcast
Quotes:
“Sales and procurement are two sides of the same coin” – Ramzi Marjaba
“I didn’t really get a lot out of that kind of organized training. I most of what I learned was on my own time. And when I was able to get access to the technology in a way that I could play with it, build some things.” – Wesley Belleman
“Sometimes people overuse the sports analogy. I think because in sports like the, yeah. the, like, a lot of the rules are the same over a long period of time. Uh, versus in business, for example at Palo Alto, they’re acquiring a new company every few months. And so the things that you have to be able to talk to a customer about or demo a customer, the software’s constantly changing.” – Wesley Belleman
“I was just talking to a brand new SE and he has no idea if he’s doing things right or wrong, which reminded me of myself. When I became an SE, it took me a year and a half to know that I was doing things wrong. I was very creative doing this. Pray and pray. I made jokes all the time, but it was still and pray.” Ramzi Marjaba
