wetheses

In this episode, Tim Brömme and Jan-Erik Jank come back to the podcast to have another casual chat around their roles as a sales engineering leader and an individual contributor, what they love about presales, how to coach team members, and what character traits most companies are looking for when hiring sales engineers. Tim Brömme and Jan-Erik Jank are presales professionals and leaders with a passion for technology, people, and leadership. They are also hosts of the Sales Excellence Podcast, a podcast for Software B2B Sales & Presales. In this episode, we chat about how they started podcasting, what they love about it, and what they want to improve upon.

Show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show196

If you’re a sales engineering manager, you know that your people are the lifeblood of your company, and you want to help them succeed as much as possible. But how? It's not enough to just give them tools and training. They need support too – someone who can answer questions when they arise or even anticipate what those questions might be before they happen so you can preemptively address them. That's why in this episode, we have Derrek Young with us to talk about how you as an SE manager can provide support for your team members and make sure every one of your SEs has everything they need at their fingertips so that nothing gets in the way of closing deals faster than ever before.

Derrek Young is the Worldwide Director of Sales Engineering at Stack Overflow. In this episode, you will discuss how to get to know your team, the LOLA approach, and most importantly, build a culture of feedback.

Show Notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show195

Currently, there’s the Great Resignation happening. However, it’s been difficult retaining good talent for a while. Some individuals move companies in a few months, others in a couple of years. Those who stay with one company for more than 10 years are rare. Is it even a good thing to stay with one company that long?

Damien Hanna, the President of The North American Association for Sales Engineers and an active SE Leader at Citrix comes on the show and we discuss why people move, how organizations and SE leaders can entice people to stay, and having tough career conversations to move up the ranks, or move out of the company.

Sales Engineering is not an easy profession. SEs have to deal with many people, from Sales, management, to customers. It is especially harder when the sales team was recently known as an implementation-only team.

This is where Andre Peixoto finds himself, managing a brand new Sales Engineering team that was, until recently, an implementation team. 

We discuss what are the challenges that Andre and his team have had to overcome, and what he sees as the future of his team as they are growing and shifting into a true Sales Engineering organization.

Full show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show193

Sales Engineering is the perfect role for a mother or a father. We get to set our own time, on our own schedule, and be there for our family. We also get to be great at something.

Show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show190

How do you explain what sales engineering is to someone completely new to the organization? Are introverts better than extroverts at becoming sales engineers? Let’s find out in today’s episode with Amir Ibrahim.

Amin Ibrahim is a PreSales leader with seventeen years of experience in tech and currently helps companies smash sales targets by building strong teams and amazing careers. He is the Senior Director, Value & Solutions at Hootsuite, and is passionate about building, whether it's new teams, roles, sales motions, or ways to use technology. Shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show187

I’m joined today by Kyle MacArthur, a Presales Strategist with 16 years of experience consulting with Fortune 500 customers in both the USA and the UK and has worked across industries including Retail, Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications and more

Skills needed for SEs are much different than those in larger organizations, potentially. Also, different products being sold to IT could require different skills. We discuss these topics with our guests.

shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show184

Joel Duffield is the Lead Solutions Consultant at Vidyard and has been a listener of We the Sales Engineers podcast since its humble beginnings in 2018. Now he is an SE Lead! We talk about his journey

Shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show183

Being a founder-based seller can be tough. For one, you’ve got to wear multiple hats, and two, it becomes harder to take track of all the things you’re running. What we see most founders struggle in is handing that baton to sales roles, especially presales. In today’s episode, we talk to Joseph Fung on why that is so, what founders can do to get out of that sales role fast, and how sales engineers can make many founders and company owners’ lives so much easier and better. show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show181

We are not perfect. Mistakes can be made. Some small ones that we can just brush off, others that are big. Big enough that causes someone to lose on a guaranteed job. We talk to Vaibhav Malik who although he did everything right, one mistake caused him the job. Luckily he learned from it and found another job that he is excited about. Check out the full show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show177

What differentiates someone as a good leader? This can happen before the person is even promoted to a leadership role. Today we talk to Sonu and see his story and he became the reluctant SE Manager.

Show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show174

Thinking about giving presales a shot? If you are considering switching careers and wondering about the potential room for growth or longevity you could have in this role, then this episode is for you. Today, we chat with Supriya Yerramilli as she shares how she decided to become a sales engineer and her journey preparing and getting herself into that role. 

Suriya Yerramilli changed careers from public accounting to working successfully in the tech space. Her previous experience working as a product specialist, full-stack developer, instructor at General Assembly in coding programs such as Python Programming, Front-End Web Development, and Software Engineering Immersive has led her to her dream role as a sales engineer.

Shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show173 

I often ask people who are new to sales engineering what their career plans are. Most of them answer to learn coding or public speaking, but rarely do they have a deeper reason or motivation behind learning them. It’s because most job descriptions for Sales Engineers list certain skills and qualifications such as multitasking and persuasion, but these skills are not as necessary as you think.

That is why in this episode, I want to focus on the valuable skills that can help you become an indispensable SE and advance your SE career (without you even realizing it). We will examine situations where you can apply deep work and focus and show alternative skills you can learn to set yourself apart from other SEs.

shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show170

As a sales engineer, it’s not enough to have exceptional technical knowledge about the products. It also needs to have an in-depth understanding of the customers and how the product can help solve their pain points and challenges. One way to do that is to master handling objections. How do the SE and the sales rep go handle a sales conversation where the sales team and the prospects walk away happily in the sale? Is it possible to create a win-win situation for both parties involved despite the customers’ many objections?

That’s exactly what we’re talking about in today’s podcast with Amazon's #1 International best-selling author and America's #1 expert in revenue expansion and sales optimization, Doug Brown. He is the founder and CEO of Business Success Factors, a company offering business training, and Vibitno.com, the web-based company that accelerates sales, and has advised companies such as Intuit, CBS Television, Procter & Gamble, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Nationwide, Embassy Suites, Inc., among many others. Show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show169

Over my years of being a Sales Engineer, I’ve come to know and am still learning about new terms and roles that help in the organization. One of these roles is around enablement, sales enablement, or revenue enablement. Many are still uninformed about this role and often have it confused with marketing, channel sellers, or customer success managers.

As you’ll learn in today’s episode, revenue enablement does not fall into any of these roles, but it’s orchestrating and collaborating across all these channels to have effective customer conversations as well as address the needs of all departments throughout an organization. We invited John Moore aka The Collaborator to shed more light on this topic.

Show notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show167

Thomas Edwards is a Solutions Consultant and Enablement Specialist for Financial SaaS Solutions with expertise in automating and controlling the entire financial close process for large firms. As a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA CGMA), he has a strong background in finance and accounting. Thomas started The Modern SC blog to share his thoughts about the Solutions Consultant role, was previously a Solutions Consultant Manager where he looked at automating many of the mundane SC work. Full Show Notes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show161 This show is sponsored by: Success.app Learn how you can stay on top of your proof of value, and make sure that you and your customers are working together to be successful. Book your demo: https://calendly.com/pudding-app/wetheses

If you’ve been following this podcast long enough, you’ll know that I built this to create a community of Sales Engineers all over the world so we can all grow and learn together. But how many of you belong to an organization catered specifically for your profession? Ken Lambert, the current President of the North American Association of Sales Engineers (NAASE), aims to bring Sales Engineers and technical sales reps across North America in one organization to enable members to connect, create Certified Sales Engineers and advocate on behalf of the profession. The organization provides members with opportunities to network on industry-specific forums, webinars, and blogs. Moreover, through its membership, a certificate is awarded to Sales Engineers that designate them as skilled, life-long learners who are passionate about client success. In this podcast, we talk about why he founded NAASE, the commonalities and differences between Sales Engineers working for software and non-software industries, how he differentiates himself from other Sales engineers, and how you can prospect on Linkedin or connect with prospects without being sleazy. Shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show160

There are some common skills that SEs should have. Demonstrations, asking questions, storytelling, whiteboarding, and so on. However, there are a few that will level up your game. In this episode, we're going to talk about 8 skills that are mostly ignored or rarely talked about that you could definitely take advantage of if you want to advance in your career. What’s great about them is that you can apply them to just about any area in your life, outside of work. But if you worked on 2 or 3 of these skills a year, imagine how exceptional you could be as a Sales Engineer.

Course: The Road to Sales Engineer (https://wethesalesengineers.com/r2se)

If you listen to the podcast version, you'd head that this episode is sponsored by

Consensus: go to GoConsensus.com/wetheses to see how you can automate your demos and speed up the sales cycle

and

Success: Go to Success.app/wetheses to see how you can stay on top of your proof of value, and make sure that you and your customers are working together to be success.

As employees of the corporate world, talking about how much we make, the perks of the jobs, and how much we work to get that payment is frowned upon. Employers don’t want the employees to know what the other person is getting paid. On many occasions throughout my career, a manager gives me a raise only to follow up by saying, please don’t tell anyone about how much you are making. 

The goal for today’s interview is to eliminate all that. We talk to John Cook, the Senior Marketing Manager at Consensus, who did a lot of research into the subject. In 2020, he released the Sales Engineer Workload and Compensation Report based on this research. 

Today, we chatted about the 2021 report that he is currently working on!

Shownotes: https://wethesalesengineers.com/show156