A week in a Life of a Sales Engineer

A Sales Engineer’s life can be chaos, with requests, demands and questions coming from every side. It could be a Account Manager (AM) scheduling a demonstration for a customer, your manager asking for an update on some equipment that you asked for, a customer needing support on the spot (and it’s your job to keep them happy), and your own commitments that you proactively scheduled for yourself.

With all these forces pulling on an SE, can we even describe what a typical week looks like?

I cannot speak to other SEs, I can just share my experience. After more than 4 years of being an SE, I’ve learned to manage my time very effectively. If an AM tries to schedule a demo for me without asking me first, then I push back. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it is because if I was not involved in gathering information, then I will not be able to do an effective demo (John Care wrote an article about preparing for preparing for a zero discovery demo) If you want more info . Also I may have other opportunities I am working on. If my plate is full, then something will have to be removed off my plate. You can only do this if you have good communication with your AMs.

Keep in mind that no matter what you do, your life will be some sort of chaos. I, for one, do enjoy ORGANIZED chaos.Therefore I try to organize my week as much as possible. I aim to break down my days into specific repeatable tasks. For example, on this day, at this hour, I visit some customers. It’s not always a success, as I may show up and the customer is not available, but at least they know I was there to help, and I know what I’m doing in my week.

A small disclaimer before we go on, all of my customers are in one region. I do not travel more than 30 minutes by car to visit customers. When I visit a customer, I have a several other customers within stone-throw away. There aren’t many other SEs in the same situation. Some travel once a month, others travel on a weekly basis and their week will look vastly different from mine. I still recommend you organize your chaos when you’re in that situation too.

Here’s what a typical week in my professional life looks like:

Mondays:

Mondays tend to be my office day, where I meet my Account Manager to discuss our game plan for the week. We discuss open tasks that need to be closed, which deals he is looking to close, and what I can do to help achieve that . Our Post Sales Engineer is usually in the meeting with us, whether physically or through a conference call. We discuss any open Field Issues and how we are going to tackle them and when. Some companies don’t want their Pre-sales engineers doing any post sales work, but in my line of work, doing post sales works builds trust with the end user and they give me information that they would not give otherwise. So I help out with those when I have the time.

This meeting usually takes around 1 hour. Once we adjourn, I can make the plan of which customer I’m going to see, and why I’m going to see them. There usually is a goal I’m trying to achieve by visiting customers. I like the goal to be more than just touching base. It could be discussing a potential problem they are having, or making them aware of a product that can help them.

I then go through my task list and email. I make sure that everyone I was supposed to contact the week prior, or even if there are some questions that I need to answer from a demo or discovery call, I make sure I answer and attempt to push the activity forward. By that I mean, if there is a sale involved, push the sale forward. If there is no sale, I want to make sure that the customer uses the equipment they already own as much as possible, and integrate it to their daily lives. So if the activity I need to do is schedule a training, or come in and help them configure the product for a specific purpose, that’s what I would do.

Tuesday through Thursday

Tuesday through Thursday are dedicated to meeting customers face to face. These are usually pre-scheduled meetings with the customer. It could be a discovery call, a demo, training, POC, putting out fires, etc. I schedule more meetings or drop ins on my calendar based on the Monday meeting with my account manager. The drop ins can be for a variety of reasons, but here are some:

• Closing an technical issues about an opportunity. After the demo or the proof of concept is done, we can usually gauge in the customer debrief meetings if everything is closed from a technical perspective. However if the customer goes silent after the POC and doesn’t commit to purchase, then it is possible that there was something missing technically which we were not informed of. It could be a competitor coming in with some FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) or could be that their requirements have change all of a sudden. I can find that out if I drop in on my own without my account manager, and just have a quick discussion with the sponsor engineer. When I drop in without the AM , the customer is usually more open. He or she lets me know if it’s a technical issue, a commercial issue, or if there is no issue and it’s just taking time to get the purchase order in (PO)

• Getting more information for a demo or POC. The more information I can get from the customer before a demo, the better. The best demonstrations I’ve done had one thing in common, I used customer terminology, I was provided access to their environment (with supervision) and given documents about their current way of doing things. During a discovery, if a customer agrees to providing that info, I have 3 ways of following up. Through email which can be deprioritized, through a phone call which my request can be noted, but then deprioritized, can be ignored, and finally face-to-face. When I show up, the customer and I end up having a friendly chat, and in most cases, I get the information I need. I am very respectful of them and their time. I am not forcing my way to their cubicle, but on their own, when the customer sees me, they end up remembering and get that task out of their way right away. If they are busy, they just tell me to come back later and that is more than fair.

• Attempting to get the customer to use our solution. If the customer buys, we’ve only won half the battle. Some companies have professional services to come in and help deploy the product and train the customer if the product is complex to use. Our product is not that complicated, and the customers don’t like spending money on professional services. So it is my job to remove any obstacles the customer might have to using our product. If they are using the product, I can use the time to do a mini-discovery. I can take the time to see if they need anything else. If so, work on that opportunity while making sure they are happy with our current solution. If they don’t need anything else at that time, at least they are happy using our product.

• Making sure that the customer doesn’t have any questions for me. This is similar to the previous reason, but for existing customers. My experience is that some existing customers may be too shy to ask questions. When I show up at their desk unannounced, this is how the conversation goes:

Ramzi: Hi, how are you doing?

Customer: I’m doing well, how are you?

…..small talk…..

Ramzi: Have you been using our stuff lately?

Customer: yes, it’s been going great. Actually, I ran into something last week, can you help me with it

This usually leads me to sit with the customer anywhere from 5 minutes to hours to help them with a question. If I didn’t visit, then the question would have went unanswered, and the customer would not have used our offerings. If this accumulates, then the customer might never use our offerings, and then they have no reason to buy more.

Once I’m done with customer visits and head back to the office, I go through my notes. For opportunity updates, I update my account manager. If there are any technical questions that were not answered on my visit, I schedule a time on my calendar to either look into it. Looking into it would be trying to figure out a configuration, emailing a product manager for information on new features, releases, etc. I also schedule follow up reminders on my calendar since if I don’t, whatever I’m supposed to do slips through the cracks.

Friday

This may be specific to my customers, but most of them don’t actually want to see me on Fridays. They either have the day off, or they are working on finishing up their open tasks from the week. Out of respect for them, I don’t drop in unannounced. If there is a pre-scheduled meeting set up by my account manager, then that’s a different story.

The afternoons however are booked up for learning. In the world of networking or any other high tech industry, new technologies are popping up everyday. If we want to hold our own while having a discussion with a customer, we need time to learn new things as they come up. A few hours on a Friday afternoon is not nearly enough for us to learn everything we need to learn, but it will have to do.

A Note About Travel

As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t travel. Lots of other SEs I know however do which makes their chaotic lives even harder to schedule. Travel not only affects our business schedule, but also our personal lives, especially if the SE is married and has children. Activities, doctor’s appointments, nights out are all affected by this. It would be useful to also have a travel schedule. From my conversations with other “travelling” SEs, it seems they like to keep the same schedule I keep, where Mondays and Fridays are office days. If there is a customer meeting that needs to be attended, it can be done via webex, zoom, or any other conferencing tool. Then they travel on Tuesdays, meet as many customers as their heart desires, and fly back on Thursdays.

My experience may be vastly different from other SEs, so I am curious what a week in other SEs life looks like. If you would like to share, I’d love to hear it.