SE Whisperer

Most of us tech sales folks have a partner who carries the water for us on the bits and bytes of the technology.  Whether your company calls them Systems Engineers, Sales Engineers or Solution Engineers; everybody knows and loves the "SE".  Let's face it, most of us would be lost without our SE.  Not only do they bring brainpower, knowledge and ideas, but also (and almost as important) gobs of credibility.  Unless your SE is a real whack job, customers tend to take their word as gospel. 

I've got a hell of a lot of respect for our technical counterparts.  I've been fortunate enough to work with some of the best technical pros on the planet.

Whether you work with "the best" or "the worst", there may come a time when you have to be a "SE Whisperer".  In sales engagements, the strengths of the SE, such as a strong technology focus, the desire to serve or the need to be absolutely correct, can become weaknesses. Here are some of the issues you might experience:

+Frequent interruptions (of the salesperson or the customer)
+Disagreement in front of the customer
+Answering a question on behalf of the customer
+Jumping into pricing discussions (or any other business issue)
+Immediately answering questions without discovering why they asked*
+Stealing the show by going on far-out technology diatribes**
+Distracting the customer by playing with cool tech stuff**
+Launching a presentation with pornographic images (this actually happened to a buddy of mine!)

*To clarify, not questions like, "Do you run on Windows?", more like "How does your system handle parallelism?"

**One of my SEs developed a habit of covering our architecture COMPLETELY, often spending 20 minutes on one slide talking about features and functionality that DID NOT APPLY to the customer's needs!  In another position, once my SE took out a folding keyboard for his Palm pilot at the beginning of a meeting and spent the first quarter of our time configuring it and telling the customer how great it was.  (that was the first and last time!!)

The point here is to point out some of the behaviors that can lead to lost sales.  It is your responsibility to identify these issues and coach you SE to work with you in your paradigm.  I suggest that you schedule some time with your SE routinely to compare notes on what is working and what is not.  Get ready because you probably have some bad habits that need to be addressed as well!  (like saying "you know" every 3rd word!)  When you have to work with another SE, schedule a few minutes before the call to strategize and set expectations for how you work.

In celebration of our "right hand", our "partner in crime", our "Johnny on the spot", let's resolve to give our SEs some love - a hug, or a bottle of wine, or a gift certificate and some good vibrations.

Think: What do you like best about your SE?  What would you change about you SE? 

My answers: Competence & Availability!! 

Do You Grok IT?