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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 The Most Important Thing SEs Should Do to Make Everything Else Easier
By Ramzi Marjaba
4/1/1 Weekly
4 Random Thoughts, 1 Tool, and 1 Quote
My history has been shared a few times on the We The SEs podcast, blogs, and other chats. It should not come as a surprise that I worked in Support and then Network Design before becoming a Sales Engineer. Like every job, those 2 roles had their own challenges. The big difference is as a support engineer, I knew what I was supposed to be good at to do my job well. I had to know how to break stuff. So I had to know the technology, how to use it, and try different things to break it to reproduce a customer issue and escalate to another team. At that point, my job is done and I pass it on to someone else.
As a Network Design Engineer, I needed to know how to build things. Again, I needed to know the technology, send a questionnaire to the customers to understand their needs and design a network.
As Sales Engineers, this is not the case. We need to know technology, sure. However, that is meaningless if we cannot use it in a way to help the customer. Still, I do believe that there is one thing that if we know how to do properly, it makes all the other things SEs have to do easier. I discuss it with this week’s guest Paul Urfi.
Now let’s talk about that one thing
4 Random Thoughts From Me:
1- Discovery! If we can do a proper discovery, then we will know which problems the customers actually want to be solved and how to present the solution to focus on that problem. That helps us in the Demo, POC, and helps the account manager while working on closing the deal.
2- The best discovery happens directly with the customers. We don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes we need to perform the discovery with the account managers who are acting as gatekeepers or they forget to invite us to the calls.
3- Every customer meeting is a discovery. You are doing a demo, that’s also a discovery call. POC is in progress, don’t forget to be curious. The system is sold and now the CS team took over, don’t forget to check in with them and do a discovery about what other issues they have seen and what else you can be helping the customer.
4- Practice your discovery. Get a group of friends, preferably SEs, and practice asking questions. Try to trip each other up as practice should always be harder than in real life. That is the only way to get better at it.
1 Tool:
OBS – Open Broadcaster Studio:
A free tool that allows you to do great presentations. Most streamers on YouTube today use it, and we can use it as Sales Engineers to seamlessly transition between camera only, presentation only, or any other combination of.
1 Quote:
“Curiosity is the process of asking questions, genuine questions, that are not leading to an ask for something in return” – Brian Grazer
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