Some Sales Engineers get a bad rep. SEs are demo jockeys, SEs are not motivated to sell since they have a high base. Sometimes SEs are thought of as a fill-in AE since AEs are thought off as just order takers. Also, people think that SEs are developers. That is it part of their job to create custom products for their customers.
To clarify, SEs are not demo jockeys. We do demos as part of our job, but we usually have to do a lot of discovery to perform the right demo. If our job is as simple as just go do a demo, we can pre-record the demo and put it on youtube. SEs are motivated to sell. Maybe not by money, but by the challenge of solving the problems for our customers. AEs have their job that goes beyond order taking, SEs have their own job. And SEs sell whatever products they have. They can customize it to solve a problem, but the expectation that the SE will build a custom product is Ludacris.
So in this who we discuss:
- How Matt became a Sales Engineer
- What sales engineers are and are not
- What is a “Customer Success” role
- Doing a DiscoDemo
- Working with too many Account Managers
- When to add more SE resources in a company
- Expanding into the wrong market
- Why he started SE TOR
Not So Fire Round:
What do you love about being a Sales Engineer?
- Being challenged differently every day
What would you change?
- Becoming a subject matter expert in other areas that he is in today.
Books/Tools/Resources:
What separates Great SEs from the rest
- Flexible
- Good teammate
Join SETOR’s slack channel
SETO’s LinkedIn
Check out Matt’s LinkedIn
