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4/1/1: 4 Random Thoughts from me, 1 tools to help Sales Engineers, 1 quote for motivation
4/1/1 Common Struggles That Sales Engineers Have, Old and New
- April 7, 2022
By Ramzi Marjaba
4/1/1 Weekly
4 Random Thoughts, 1 Tool, and 1 Quote
This week I talked about mentorship, and why assigned mentorship specifically sucks. I remember when I was being mentored, my assigned mentor would be very reactive, waiting for me to come to them and ask questions. Yet the relationship was not open enough for me to ask them questions.
When I was assigned to mentor people, I’d make sure to build the relationship and provide assignments and guidance on what my mentee would like to work on. It was not passive, it was a proactive relationship to make sure that the mentee was successful.
If you want to check out this week’s podcast where I talk about my experience and what I’ve done to overcome bad mentors, click the link below:
#207 Mentorship Sucks, How to Overcome it?
Now I’ve been working with many SEs as a coach, and one of the questions that come up, especially for those who don’t have a customer success team, is what is my role after the sale? How should I support my customers?
I answer the question in the video below
Now I will discuss a few other common situations that we work through in this week’s 4/1/1
4 Random Thoughts From Me:
1- Many aspiring SEs complain that they don’t have presales experience. When I start chatting with them, I find out that they have lots of customer experience, either advocating for the customer, consulting with them in a post-sales fashion, or handling tough situations on support cases.
2- SEs get invited onto calls by their account managers and they don’t know what the calls are about. New SEs wait for the perfect moment to reach the AM on chat to ask this question, but AMs are always busy with meetings (or so they would like us to think 🙂 ). But we still have email, and we should be able to email them and get a response when they have time. If an email doesn’t work, then we call them, text them, message them. The last resort is to jump on a call blind and hope for the best.
3- How technical should SEs get in a discovery? That comes up quite often. And the answer is it depends on the audience and the goal of that specific call. If the audience is not technical, then there is no reason to go deep into the tech. If the audience is technical and the goal is to do a deep dive into the tech, well then, get technical!
4- Generalist SEs who are new to companies sometimes have a problem of trying to learn too much at the same time. When I ask them “How is that going for you?”, the response is usually “Not good”. It’s always better to focus on learning one product and having time set aside to focus on learning that product. It doesn’t mean you will know nothing about the others, it just means that for the others, you’ll have to do “Just In Time Learning”. And that is when you know you have a presentation, a question you need to answer, a demo, you will spend some time, other than the aforementioned focus time, to learn a specific use case, or feature, etc. Then, you can build on it.
1 Tool:
Talking about learning, I created this PDF a few years ago to help guide myself focus on what to learn as even though I was experienced by some people’s standards at that time (after 5 years of being an SE), I have just changed jobs and had a lot to learn.
1 Quote:
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” – Zig Ziglar
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