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.
Consumer (B2C): Products and or services directly between a business and consumers who are the end-users of these products or services. You market to the person as a consumer
MSMB/MSME (B2B): Products and services are sold directly between businesses. These are small and medium businesses segmented by data such as ownership structure, the 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 level than SME sales. Because of the longer and more complex buying process, the focus is on building relationships with the customer, addressing the buyer’s specific information needs at each step in the buying process.
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 for them to approve and begin work on a given project. Layers of regulation slow the overall efficiency of the contracting process. You sell to the person as a government contracting officer or representative or government program manager.
The purchase decision for B2C is not a complicated process and is generally self-service. 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, back 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), Demo Jockey, and so on?
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 demo’s for your buyers, where these videos or vignettes are hosted, either 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 team or Sales team can use custom videos that drive awareness leading to acquisition through the buyer journey. If this is the case, I recommend you look at tools such as 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 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 needed 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. But 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 usually is at the top of the sales funnel. The Demo Jockey does multiple demos a day, supporting anywhere from 4 to 8 SDR or Sales Reps. These are basic informational demos showing your product in action. The SE provides your buyers the opportunity to learn more about your software and provide answers on your solution’s features, advantages, and benefits. The SE 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 to specific customer needs, the SE will tailor each presentation to highlight the prospects’ needs. They are typically engaged at the middle of the funnel and engage after Sales has determined this is a qualified opportunity.
The Solution Consultant’s role is broader. They fully own the technical part of the pre-sales journey.
The SE has the technical chops to respond to objections that revolve around product capabilities. They are focused on the overall solution picture. The SE will create a demo that directly ties your product’s value to the customers’ needs.
The SE is an expert in your product but adept at continuing discovery during the live presentation. They are continually framing questions to ensure the demo is personalized for the prospect(s). SEs are skilled in gathering information such as potential competitors they could be working with. The SE can uncover additional pain points the business has experienced in the past. The prospect can provide other details to an SE that they would never tell their AE.
To work successfully with sales, the SE understands the business needs of the prospect. They can take that understanding and transform that into a technical framework, which they then translate into business terms that your prospect understands.
They are aware of 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 the most sense.
Your Solution Engineer will always position your solution regarding what value it provides 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.
Skills to look for in a Sales Engineer.
When looking for a Sales Engineer, you need to be honest with yourself.
- Do you need to have pre-sales that focus on creating content for Sales Development and Sales Reps to share with customers?
- Do you need to have the demo jockey, which provides a live tour of your product in action?
- Do you need to have a technical team that will 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. The following are a few of the skills you want to look for 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 part of the pre-sales activity. If the product is complicated and expensive, demonstrations are mandatory. These demos are a technical presentation where you attempt to show your prospect the aspects of your product to help them with their work. An SE will require a degree of competence with your product and understand the related engineering and business processes. If you show features without explaining their value, you will not influence the prospect through the buyers’ journey.
- Q&A Skills
Asking and answering questions is the foundation of selling. When your SE asks knowledgeable questions of the prospect and answer concisely, they show they understand not only the prospect’s technical needs but 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. In essence, 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. Without this call, you cannot fully understand the prospects’ use case. The discovery call is where you uncover the needs of the buyer. For Sales Engineers, understanding the technical issues and linking them to critical business issues is vital. The discovery call defines the presentation. The discovery is crafted to illicit the buyer’s current situation, how they do it now, what needs to change. You need also need to recognize what the prospect sees as the “ideal” solution.
- Competitive Analysis Skills
The SE needs to know their product and the use case for the solutions, but they also need to understand the completive landscape. If you only understand your product and not the competitor 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 have a sense of a prospects’ specifics issues, they cannot define your value. This understanding allows the SE to uncover specific pain by asking specific 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 will 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 value of the product, 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 finding, hiring, and deploying these Pre-sales resources will increase the close rates.
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