Blog
Notes:
A big piece of Sales Engineering is Sales. Most engineers don’t like the sales part of Sales Engineering, but it’s what SEs have to excel at to be good at their jobs. Taking it a step further, SEs have to excel at knowing their customers and that will make every aspect of sales easier.
These are all topics of conversation that Alvaro Tuscano and I get deep into, in addition to the challenges of presales in Spain specifically, and how he overcame them to become a great SE and a trainer for other SEs.
Key Takeaways:
- His accidental move into Sales Engineering
- Learning on the job
- Challenges of building a presales community in Spain.
- Becoming Confidence Generators
- Evolution of SE’s growth.
- Perception of Sales vs SEs.
- Working with Customers as a Sales Team
Quotes:
[On the first day] the guy who was going to be my boss on presales, the presale manager, call me to his room and say, okay, Alvaro, welcome, and the first thing that I have to say to you is that I am leaving the company today.” – Alvaro
“The most important thing that I miss, Ramzi, apart from clear information of what presales have to do in Spanish because there is nothing in Spanish, is how to be better presales.” – Alvaro
About sales engineers “They don’t like being out there. If we be out there, we’d probably be in sales” – Ramzi
“I prefer to pay for my mentors than for my mistakes” – Alvaro
Every SE thinks they can do the sales job better because what they see is in meetings when the salesperson’s usually silent and the SE is doing most of the talking or the questioning” – Ramzi Marjaba
“always say that I saw pre-sales, not a trusted advisor, not as a seller, but confidence generators. “ – Alvaro
“the capabilities of your product doesn’t matter to the customer if they don’t solve an issue for them” – Alvaro
“I think sales, the sales team’s job is to help customers make decisions.” – Ramzi Marjaba
“the pain of changing sometimes is bigger than the pain of staying” – Ramzi Marjaba
Links from the show:
- Presales Collective
- Demonstrating To Win!: The Indispensable Guide for Demonstrating Complex Products by Robert Riefstahl
- Great Demo! How To Create And Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations: Third Edition by Peter Cohan
- Doing Discovery: The Single Most Important Element of Software Sales and Buyer Enablement Processes by Peter Cohan
- Connect with Alvaro
