#148 Improving Your Relationship with Sales

We’ve touched upon this topic a few times before on this podcast: How can we achieve harmony with our salespeople as Sales Engineers? How can we work efficiently as a team? As a hybrid Sales Engineer combined with a sales role, I’ve had both salespeople and SEs come up to me asking for help on how to deal with their SEs or vice versa. Most of the times, I recognize that it’s a misunderstanding caused by either of these reasons: one, they don’t communicate with each other very well, and two, they often have unrealistic expectations about their partners.

So today that’s what we’ll go over with: the expectations salespeople have of SEs, the expectations SEs have of salespeople, and how to set realistic expectations so it’s a win-win situation for both sides of the team.

Key Highlights:

What Salespeople Expect of their Sales Engineers:

1. They want the SE to take technical ownership of the customer.
2. They hate surprises. 
3. They want the SE to know the product.
4. They don’t want to have to follow up with the SE all the time.
5. They expect the SE not to wait to be asked to do something.
6. They expect the SE to be efficient.

Unrealistic Expectations Salespeople have (And it is your Job as the SE to change them):

1. They expect us to demo without asking questions. 
2. They expect us to be available to them at a moment’s notice without dropping everything else.
3. They expect us to treat everything as a priority. 
4. They expect us to know everything about everything.
5. They expect us to read their mind 
   
   

What Sales Engineers Expect of their Salespeople:

1. We expect some guidance occasionally.
2. We don’t want to constantly have to follow up a million times with salespeople. 
3. We expect to have some heads up about a demo.
4. We don’t want to have to constantly correct them in front of the customer, or in general.
5. We don’t want to have to repeat ourselves a million times to our salespeople.
   
   

The KDOFE Way of Maintaining a Good Relationship with your salespeople as an SE and vice versa:

K – Knowledgeable – Know your product.

D – Decisive – Give me a straight answer and tell me exactly what I need to do.

O – Ownership – Be proactive, go after opportunities.

F – Follow through – If you committed to something, follow through with it.

E – Expectations – Set and clarify expectations.

Quotes:

03:46 “Sometimes we need to recognize when things are not going so great and figure out how we can do better.”

05:24 “You have to have open lines of communication with your salespeople. It’s not up to them to open the lines of communication or up for you to open the line of communication, its whoever wants to take the leader will open the lines of communication. They may lead the opportunity, but you may lead the team even as an SE.”

20:39 “Reduce work off your account manager’s back and basically allow them to trust you more, and they’ll get off your back. A lot of relationships tend to get better when that is done.”

30:35 “I am all about proactivity, taking ownership and taking initiative but if you give me guidance about what to take initiatives on, that’ll make my life easier.”

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review and get a chance to win a copy of The Essential Guide to Navigate Your Proof of Concept written by one of our guests on the show, Tony Matos.