The first step in a sales cycle is a lead. And leads come through many avenues. One of the biggest ones is marketing. According to ChatGPT, tech organizations spend 10 to 20% of their total revenue on marketing. 

There is corporate marketing, and then there is product marketing. Corporate marketing focuses on the brand, the logos, the advertising, and merchandising whereas product marketing focuses on telling stories about how their products solve problems. 

Product Marketing could be engineers who work with sales teams and customers to gather those stories, and then write them in such ways that can be accessed by as many other customers as possible. 

They also lead webinars and create all sorts of content to be posted on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, or their corporate blogs.

However, the biggest lead generation engine I’ve seen is Sales Engineers. This is true in enterprise sales, small to medium business (SMB) sales, government, etc. It’s also true whether working for a startup, or a established large conglomerate.

Why is that? 

SEs are trusted. 

Also, SEs as small-scale marketers. We talk to a small audience with stories that resonate with that audience and only that audience. The caveat is that it’s easy for Sales Engineers to expand the scope of their message to touch more people. So the question is would it be useful?

When working at a startup, everybody wears multiple hats, so it would make sense that Sales Engineers have to participate in marketing activities. The question is how much. They still have their main job to perform. So how many pieces of content should they create in one month, how many webinars, and how many stories should they share with the marketing team?

Also, how can they share it? There are many tools, but I’m currently an advisor for Oqire.com, and in this tool, every opportunity has a win-loss analysis that should be filled in, and stories can automatgically be collected without extra effort from the sales team or the marketing team.

In many larger organizations, SEs need to be involved on occasion with conferences or events where they have to man a booth for a few days. That is the extent of their participation, yet organizations like AWS, according to inside sources, SEs are encouraged to participate in online events, or even create their own.

So an SE Process could be as follows:

1- Creation of 1 YouTube video a month about a topic assigned by product marketing

2- Conversion of this video to a blog post

3- Removal of excerpts to use as posts on LinkedIn shorts YouTube, etc.

Note that in this case, all the SE has to do is the video creation, and the product marketing can choose to do the rest. That’s a couple of hours of work a month. 

No, here are some workflows to ask yourself as you decide what SEs will do in marketing.

Will your SE team participate in marketing activities:

If no: What needs to change for your team to be able to participate?

If yes:

What type of activities will they participate in:

• Webinars
• Conferences
• Knowledge base articles
• How to articles or videos
• Podcasts
• Blog posts
• Youtube 

Who will participate in these activities?

Most SEs participate in conferences and trade shows. However, if there’s a presentation or a talk at those conferences, that is usually reserved for more senior SEs. 

Jr. SEs can man a booth and chat with people if they have someone senior to help them out. This changes with more experience. 

As for blogs and videos, Sr. SEs can talk about any topic, while Jr. SEs can focus on How-tos to start and as they learn about the product, industry, and value, they can start working on more value-based articles.

What is the desired outcome?

How often or how much content to produce?

Marketing is not an SE’s main job, however many SEs enjoy doing this type of work, and it usually leads to more sales. But there has to be a balance between SEs solely working on content, or having 10% of their time to spend on it for example. 

And depending on the size of the team, the goal might change. 

What could be in your way?

Depending on the size of the company, it’s usually someone in marketing who would scoff at Sales Engineers getting involved in marketing.