The Role of Pre-sales Engineer in the Saas Sales Process

This post is for Saas Companies that sell to three of the four primary target markets. I will use the following definitions of a target market.

The business-to-consumer (B2C) model involves the direct provision of products and services from a business to consumers, who are the end-users of these offerings. Marketing efforts are directed toward the individual consumer.

MSMB/MSME (B2B): Products and services are sold directly between businesses. and segmented based on factors such as ownership structure, number of employees, revenue, or industry. You sell to the person as a business decision-maker or influencer.

• Micro-Companies <10 employees, $0 –$25M
• Small Companies 11-50 employees, $26M-$100M
• Medium Companies 51-250 employees, $101M-$500M

Enterprise (B2B): Customer with >250 employees, revenue >$500M, typically publicly traded, has five or more physical locations. You will have a well-defined sales cycle. These customers usually involve long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and a higher risk than SME or Mid-Market sales. Because of the longer and more complex buying process, the focus is on building relationships with the customer, and addressing the buyer’s specific business needs is equired at each buying process step.

Government: (B2G/B2A) business-to-government or business-to-administration. You are selling your product or services to the government. Sales to Governments are long and often arduous as it takes them to approve and begin work on a project. Layers of regulation slow the overall efficiency of the contracting process. You sell to the person as a government contracting officer, representative, or government program manager.

The decision to purchase a B2C is not a complicated process but a self-service process. The B2B and B2G sales processes are more involved, as you sell to many people involved in the purchase process. In the B2C sale, you would not need technical sales support. The customer may view a video and quickly install and use your program in a self-service model backed by a support team to address any concerns.

When do you need Sales Engineers?

The Sales Engineer or SE may also go by different names, but the roles are similar: Solution Consultant (SC), Pre-Sales Consultant (SC), Technical Account Manager (TAM), Customer Engineer (CE), and Demo Jockey, to name a few.

In the B2B sale, if your product is easy to use and does not require complex customer-specific configurations. Your Product Marketing team should create pre-canned demos for your buyers, where these videos or vignettes can be hosted on your website or sites such as Vimeo, Wistia, or YouTube.

Suppose you need to have a more sophisticated way to communicate your messaging. In that case, your SDR or sales team can use custom videos that drive awareness and lead to acquisition through the buyer journey. If this is the case, I recommend you look at tools such as Storylane, Consensus, or Vidyard.

With an interactive demo, your team is now immediately equipped to allow the buyer to identify their problems themselves, slowly narrowing down to a possible specific pain point that moves the sale process forward. The interactive demonstration streamlines the discovery stage and is customized and personalized, with relevant information provided to the decision-makers.

As you can see from the above, there is no compelling need for a technical pre-sales resource to deploy on sales calls. Instead, the Sales Engineers should build and manage your demo environments with relevant content that can follow your sales process. These guided demos would be used in calls with prospects, either your SDR or AE teams.

The SE may lead instructional webinars or provide one-on-one value-oriented demos for sales. If you provide customers with a trial for all the above or even offer a freemium model, you can leverage them during the discovery process to uncover additional needs. With these, your team will have the tools to “sell” your product and service.

Your Sales Leader should understand the point at which they need to have the pre-sales technical team engage with your sales team and prospects. However, they may not understand the type of SE they need. I want to review two primary types.

The Demo Jockey

This type of SE provides a scripted demo before a customer enters a product trial and is usually at the top of the sales funnel. The Demo Jockey does multiple daily demos, supporting anywhere from 4 to 8 SDR or Sales Reps. These are basic informational demos showing your product in action. The Demo Jockey allows your buyers to gain more exposure to your software and provide answers on your solution’s features, advantages, and benefits. The Demo Jockey alleviates a barrage of questions that the non-paying prospect may direct to the Support team.

The Sales Engineer

When your solution is designed to be configured according to specific customer needs, the Sales Engineer (SE) will customize each presentation to emphasize the prospect’s requirements. SEs are typically involved in the middle of the sales funnel after the sales team has qualified for the opportunity.

The SE has the technical chops to respond to objections around product capabilities. They focus on the overall solution picture. The SE will create a demo that directly ties your product’s value to customer needs.

The SE is an expert in your product but adept at continuing discovery during the live presentation. They continually frame questions to ensure the demo is personalized for the prospect(s). SEs are skilled in gathering information about potential competitors they could be working with. The SE can uncover additional pain points the business has experienced. The prospect can provide other details to an SE they would never tell their AE.

To work successfully with sales, the SE understands the prospect’s business needs. They can transform that understanding into a technical framework, which they then translate into business terms that your prospect understands.

They know a competitor’s product and understand what the other solutions do and do not do. The SE is astute in sharing your product roadmap when it makes sense.

Your solution engineer will always position your solution regarding its value to the prospect, and they do not do a feature dump loaded with tech speak. The SE knows the technical part of your solution but only talks about it when the circumstances demand it.

The Skills to look for when you hire a Sales Engineer.

When looking for a Sales Engineer, you must be honest.

1. Do you need pre-sales that focus on creating content for Sales Development and Sales Reps to share with customers?
2. Do you need to have the demo jockey which provides a live tour of your product in action?
3. Do you need a technical team to participate in a discovery call to collect requirements, discover the pain, and then present a demo that can deliver the possible ways to solve that problem with your solution?

Your SE should have the necessary engineering skills to function in any of the three roles above and subject matter expertise in your solutions target market. The third role will have additional soft-skill requirements. You want to look for the following skills in your SE or have an enablement program to train your SEs continuously.

• Presentation Skills: Capable of providing sales-focused presentations for your solutions. Able to understand the prospect’s needs and articulate value and ROI.

• Demonstration Skills: Like presentations, the product demo is a regular pre-sales activity. If the product is complicated and expensive, demonstrations are mandatory. These demos are technical presentations where you attempt to show your prospects the aspects of your product to help them with their work. An SE will require a degree of competence with your product and an understanding of the related engineering and business processes. If you show features without explaining their value, you will not influence the prospect through the buyer’s journey.

• Q&A Skills: Asking and answering questions is the foundation of selling. When your SE asks knowledgeable questions of the prospect and answers concisely, they show they understand not only the prospect’s technical needs but also create a focus on helping them understand how your product will help.

• Technical Discovery Skills: As the subject matter expert, the SE needs to engage the Sales Rep in a pre-sales call for discovery before engaging the prospect. The discovery call is one of the most vital aspects of the SE’s role. This skill helps define the presentation or demo to deliver to the buyer. You cannot fully understand the prospects’ use case without this call. The discovery call is where you uncover the needs of the buyer. For Sales Engineers, it is vital to understand the technical issues and link them to critical business issues. The discovery call defines the presentation. The discovery is crafted to reveal the buyer’s current situation, how they do it now, and what needs to change. You must also recognize what the prospect sees as the “ideal” solution.

• Competitive Analysis Skills: The SE needs to know its product and the use case for the solutions, but it also needs to understand the competitive landscape. If you only understand your product and not the competitor’s solutions, you can be left open to a blindsided attack. Remember that 70% of buyers know who the competitors are, which includes doing nothing! The SE needs a solid understanding of the business and market issues faced by the prospect. If the C does not understand a prospect’s specific issues, they cannot define your value. This understanding allows the SE to uncover pain by asking questions to show real value and ROI.

• People Skills: People skills are one of the genuinely critical skills to look for in the SE. When applied to every interaction with the prospect, the SE puts prospects at ease and develops trust with the buyer. They value the SE’s knowledge and welcome the follow-up. The SE knows and understands that they are not selling to a company. Instead, they sell to people who work inside a company. This relationship with this potential customer tips the scale.
• Sales Skills: Sales skills are not just a show and tell, then asking for the money. We expect the SE to understand what is essential in the sales process and focus on a sales opportunity’s viability from a technical perspective.

• Teamwork Skills: The Solution Engineer is an essential part of a sales team. The SE must be able to be in sync with the different personality types of your Sales team. The SE will know and understand the sales process and their role as the product’s subject matter expert, and they “sell” the product’s value, and the Sales Rep is the “closer.”

So, consider your market. If you are selling B2B or B2G, understand how your Sales Engineer can support your prospect journey. Appropriately deploying these pre-sales resources will increase closing rates.