#185 Sales Engineers Can Be Found In the Strangest Places

Notes:

“We might sell something, and it might be great, it might solve all the problems. But if there’s not a good transition from the sales team to the service team, it doesn’t matter what we sold, is not going to go.” This is what Andrew Morari had to say about the challenges most common to sales engineer managers or technical lead.

Andrew Morari is the Director of Solutions Consulting at Uberflip, a premier content experience platform that enables marketers to scale how they incorporate content into every touchpoint and remove friction from the customer journey by surfacing the right content at the right time.

Andrew is also a Marketing Technology Enthusiast & Senior Consultant with an appetite to learn technologies and the strategic use behind them across the marketing landscape. He’s got 12 years of experience with sales and customer relations and leads and manages the strategy deployment and adoption of hardware and software solutions.

Key Takeaways:

Why he considers being a salesperson at Best Buy selling games to parents and children was the best job he ever had
Moving back into sales engineering after consulting for years even if he knew very little about the role
How he first started as a consultant for sales engineering teams
What was holding these teams back from really fulfilling their potential
Various kinds of pushback Andrew experienced from his team that changed the way they think about sales engineering?
How his years of experience as a consultant pave the way for him to lead the solutions engineering team as a director? Currently?
What are some challenges that you know, you didn’t see coming back? Or just punching you in the face gently? I guess.
The challenges in hiring and where to find talent nowadays
How to make sure that the worst thing we can do as leaders is hire someone and then fire them?
Andrew’s strategy for keeping his team on the top of their game: Andrew needs to approach proof of concepts.

Quotes:

“We’re speaking more of their language instead of we’re on the sales team, of course, but we’re not truly there just to sell, I want to make sure that you have the problem. I’ve uncovered it and we’re actually solving the problem.” – Andrew Morari

“It was just understanding gaps, and then how we can actually work with other people to solve them. That’s a very wide-open thing to say. But what I’ve always liked about any role I’ve ever had, is looking at a problem and trying to solve it.” – Andrew Morari

“We might sell something, and it might be great, it might solve all the problems. But if there’s not a good transition from the sales team, to the service team, it doesn’t matter what we sold, is not going to go.” – Andrew Morari

“You’re owning the customer journey from beginning to end. Like it’s not the end doesn’t end with the PO ends when exactly. They’re using the product.” – Andrew Morari

“So I started looking at nontraditional people who were eager to learn passionate about something and could tell a good story.” – Andrew Morari

“I know myself and the rest of my team feel a little bit more suited to that rather than just, you know, here’s what we do. And here’s how we can fit it to your pains. It’s more here, your pains, and here’s how you can solve them.” – Andrew Morari

“Support is like the unsung hero in every organization. No one knows the product, like support all of the issues with it. All of the good parts, they really get a good understanding.” – Andrew Morari

“The first and foremost thing, of course, is to become an expert at the platform we work for.” – Andrew Morari

“There’s a big aha moment when they’re able to see what they’re doing today directly compared with what they could be doing with us. So that alone is worth the effort for sure.” – Andrew Morari