#214 Learning Enough to Be Dangerous as a Skill

Notes:

Are you new to sales engineering? If you are maybe just a few years into the role and you’re wondering how you can become an all-star, then this episode is for you. My guest Ganesh of AVEVA answers questions about the type of people he hires and sees potential for sales engineering growth. He also talks about the most essential quality you need to have as a sales engineer.

Ganesh Venkataramanan is the Vice President of presales for AVEVA, which is a software company that laid up the global account region within AVEVA property sales. His background is originally in projects and delivery which may be a good starting point for anyone from a technical sales or presales or sales engineering background. Along the way, he decided he enjoyed sales and that’s where he thought he could make the greatest impact.

Eight Ignored Skills That Sales Engineers Should Have:

Why Ganesh decided to move up the ranks from being a sales engineer to a VP of presales
What he did to overcome the feeling of being unqualified for a presales leadership position
Ganesh would consider learning as his primary skill
How do you know you’re going down the right path and learning the right things?
What Ganesh recommends doing before you can learn the right things
How Ramzi prepares interesting and useful questions for his podcast
What differentiates a good sales engineer from someone who can be considered an all-star
One key ingredient of a sales engineer is curiosity
How to tell if someone is being naturally curious versus someone who is faking curiosity
The difference between a manager and a leader
What mentorship means when it comes to managing sales engineering teams
How Ganesh balances his time between hiring and recruiting while making sure his employees are happy with their progress
One reason why most people don’t give useful feedback
Being a leader in an organization must require you to define what success looks like to you

Quotes:

“What if you do something 100 times, or 1000 times, or 5000 times you’re gonna get better at it, right? There is simply no other way to get better at it than to do it multiple times, right? And so over time, as I started doing it more times, I got more comfortable with myself.” -Ganesh Venkataramanan

“Because we’re nervous, right? The reality is, everyone is nervous starting out. Right? And maybe it’s empowering to know I’m not the only one who’s nervous.” -Ganesh Venkataramanan

“I think one key ingredient of a sales engineer is curiosity. And so when someone has that curiosity, then it is easy to turn them on to the fact that this is a learning process, our entire lives, right? It’s what you learn after you already know everything that counts.” -Ganesh Venkataramanan

“The easiest thing what I found is to read before I go to sleep and read first thing in the morning, right? So this morning before we started I spent some time reading, right? And at night. So it’s easy to build a habit and connected to an existing habit. I have a habit of going to sleep at night.” -Ganesh Venkataramanan

“We look for people who are curious, interested in learning, who push themselves in areas that they are not comfortable with.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“Success has many fathers.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“I want to make it very open for people to make mistakes. Technical folks hate making mistakes, we shudder at the idea of making mistakes, it makes us cringe. But the reality is, we’re going to make mistakes and the only one who remembers our mistake is us.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“The best sales leaders in companies do is address the top 20%. There’s simply not the bandwidth for most people to go work with, or everybody and say, I’ll help everybody.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“The ultimate goal is to identify the customer’s true need. And the customer may not be a person, it might be a slew of people within an organization. All of them may have different needs, and sometimes it’s bringing them together in a commonly understood need that is half the work.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“I may not show demo but I could still get to that end goal of helping them understand and solve the problem and that’s more critical than following a slide process necessarily.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan

“The way to get people from being broke rookies to all stars is basically being there for them and help, coach them versus leaving them in the ether, and the question is how can we get those not top 20, not bottom 20, those in the middle to become all stars.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“Anyone who is a leader in the organization has to start thinking of defining what success looks like to them. Let me help them understand where they are good or bad without getting hopefully defensive and let me help them walk that walk towards that success.” – Ganesh Venkataramanan