What if there was a job where at least one time a week, and most weeks, many times, you had to do some activity where you would be openly judged either a "success" or "failure". And that process repeated every week of every year. Would you do that job?
I'm a technical person who works with sales people. The product my company sells is complex and most sales people don't have the background or context to answer all the technical questions that come up during the sales process. So that is where people like me fill in. We have different titles:
Sales Engineer
Pre-Sales Engineer
Systems Engineer
Sales Architect
Sales Analyst
and others....
The most common short hand way to say "Sales Engineer" is to say "SE" or "SA". Most of my co-workers and friends that do this job say "SE".
THE HARDEST DAY EVER (at work that is)
As a SE I do many things. One of those things is delivering the product demo. Most of the time these are done over a Webex, but many times they are also given "in person" at the customer site. Here is a story from one of my demos.......
We had been working on a project with a customer that represented a large financial transaction for our company. So large in fact that our CEO and CTO were both involved in the sales process. All of the selling stages had been completed and we were at the final stage in our SaleForce process, stage 5, "Negotiation". That means we were at the end, well almost.
The last step was to meet with the core group of VPs that would be impacted by our product, we needed their final "buy-in". Once we had that final approval, we were good to go to close the deal.
The plan was to meet at the customer's office, do an overview of the project history, and then I would do a final "summary" demo showing a customized version of our product tailored to the needs of this specific customer. My demo was supposed to only be 5 to 10 minutes long, no longer, period. That was no problem, I been working with our product for 4+ years, had done literally "hundreds" of demos over the years, and knew exactly what I was going to say, every sentence, every word.
How did I know my demo script so well? Well in addition to me delivering various incarnations of it over the years, my manager and I also practiced the night before. We actually dry-ran it 10 times in total, me giving the demo and him looking for flaws or ideas for improvements. In addition to the customer's Senior Executives in the room, our CEO and CTO would also be joining over a Webex, so it had to be perfect.
The Problems.
When we showed up early to the customer's office to get set up we ran into a few problems.
1) There was a mix up in the room scheduling and we ended up in a room that was smaller than the original one we planned on. There were no other rooms available. The room we got could hold maybe 8 people comfortably. We were planning on about 14 people showing up.
2) For some reason my laptop would not project through the desktop projector set up in the room. Even after switching to my own set of video cables that I carry in my back-pack, no image would show up on the projector. That was a problem.
Luckily when we tried my manager's laptop, it worked. And because our product is accessed through a browser, and all of us on the SE team had a "setup" script that we ran to get all of our tabs opened, so it was no problem to make the switch between mine and his. The only problem was that the projector only supported a very low display resolution, much lower than what I would ever run on my laptop. So I had to quickly run through my demo steps before the customer came in, using the reduced video resolution, so I wasn't surprised during the demo.
The meeting time arrived and the attendees starting show up. Because the room was smaller than planned we squeezed the chairs together and pulled some other chairs from empty cubes near our conference room. The tables were in a classic "U" shaped setup arranged so all sitting positions could see the projector screen. I ended up on the bottom of the "U" where the projector was setup.
The customers came in and started filling the seats. On my left was another person from my company, on my right was the most senior person from the customer. He was the "Senior VP" that everyone else reported to.
Normally that would not bother me, but......his chair was squeezed right up next to mine. Literally we were like two economy airline passengers sharing the same arm rest between us.
In addition, because the quality of the projector image was so poor, he ended up just looking over my shoulder at my laptop display while I spoke, and the others sitting farther away watched the projector screen.
So it was my manager, CEO, CTO, the senior crew from the customer, all watching me do my 8-minute demo. No pressure. Time to be "judged".
In the end it all turned out ok, but it was very stressful along the way. But this is the life of a SE. A life that few people really understand. Even though I'm not personally a millionaire, I personally perform actions, and activities that directly impact the success of sales projects reaching into the millions.
I survived that day because:
1) We showed up early so we were able to recover from the situation with the projector.
2) My manager was a SE before he became a manager, so he knew exactly what I was going through and helped me get prepared. We were "over prepared", which is exactly what you want when you have a high pressure "do or die" event to deliver. Even though I'd given our standard demo hundreds of times, we practiced ten more times the night before and made the wording "exactly" right for the customer we were with. As a SE manager, his job is to make me successful, which he did.
3) We were standardized. Even though my manager had the "smaller" version of our standard laptop model, all of our demo setup was the same on everyone's machine on our team. So I was easily able to switch to his when mine didn't work.
4) We kept it simple. We had our plan thought out before hand, knew exactly what we wanted to do for the entire meeting, and executed our plan. This greatly reduced the risk of something unexpected happening in the middle of our session.
Next post I'll take a look at all the things I do as a SE in a typical week. Everything from doing presentations, configuring pricing proposals, coding in Python or even in C++, to configuring servers in the cloud. That's what a SE does......"everything".
I'll also answer the question hinted at the beginning of the article. Why do this job?
END
I'm a technical person who works with sales people. The product my company sells is complex and most sales people don't have the background or context to answer all the technical questions that come up during the sales process. So that is where people like me fill in. We have different titles:
Sales Engineer
Pre-Sales Engineer
Systems Engineer
Sales Architect
Sales Analyst
and others....
The most common short hand way to say "Sales Engineer" is to say "SE" or "SA". Most of my co-workers and friends that do this job say "SE".
THE HARDEST DAY EVER (at work that is)
As a SE I do many things. One of those things is delivering the product demo. Most of the time these are done over a Webex, but many times they are also given "in person" at the customer site. Here is a story from one of my demos.......
We had been working on a project with a customer that represented a large financial transaction for our company. So large in fact that our CEO and CTO were both involved in the sales process. All of the selling stages had been completed and we were at the final stage in our SaleForce process, stage 5, "Negotiation". That means we were at the end, well almost.
The last step was to meet with the core group of VPs that would be impacted by our product, we needed their final "buy-in". Once we had that final approval, we were good to go to close the deal.
The plan was to meet at the customer's office, do an overview of the project history, and then I would do a final "summary" demo showing a customized version of our product tailored to the needs of this specific customer. My demo was supposed to only be 5 to 10 minutes long, no longer, period. That was no problem, I been working with our product for 4+ years, had done literally "hundreds" of demos over the years, and knew exactly what I was going to say, every sentence, every word.
How did I know my demo script so well? Well in addition to me delivering various incarnations of it over the years, my manager and I also practiced the night before. We actually dry-ran it 10 times in total, me giving the demo and him looking for flaws or ideas for improvements. In addition to the customer's Senior Executives in the room, our CEO and CTO would also be joining over a Webex, so it had to be perfect.
The Problems.
When we showed up early to the customer's office to get set up we ran into a few problems.
1) There was a mix up in the room scheduling and we ended up in a room that was smaller than the original one we planned on. There were no other rooms available. The room we got could hold maybe 8 people comfortably. We were planning on about 14 people showing up.
2) For some reason my laptop would not project through the desktop projector set up in the room. Even after switching to my own set of video cables that I carry in my back-pack, no image would show up on the projector. That was a problem.
Luckily when we tried my manager's laptop, it worked. And because our product is accessed through a browser, and all of us on the SE team had a "setup" script that we ran to get all of our tabs opened, so it was no problem to make the switch between mine and his. The only problem was that the projector only supported a very low display resolution, much lower than what I would ever run on my laptop. So I had to quickly run through my demo steps before the customer came in, using the reduced video resolution, so I wasn't surprised during the demo.
The meeting time arrived and the attendees starting show up. Because the room was smaller than planned we squeezed the chairs together and pulled some other chairs from empty cubes near our conference room. The tables were in a classic "U" shaped setup arranged so all sitting positions could see the projector screen. I ended up on the bottom of the "U" where the projector was setup.
The customers came in and started filling the seats. On my left was another person from my company, on my right was the most senior person from the customer. He was the "Senior VP" that everyone else reported to.
Normally that would not bother me, but......his chair was squeezed right up next to mine. Literally we were like two economy airline passengers sharing the same arm rest between us.
In addition, because the quality of the projector image was so poor, he ended up just looking over my shoulder at my laptop display while I spoke, and the others sitting farther away watched the projector screen.
So it was my manager, CEO, CTO, the senior crew from the customer, all watching me do my 8-minute demo. No pressure. Time to be "judged".
In the end it all turned out ok, but it was very stressful along the way. But this is the life of a SE. A life that few people really understand. Even though I'm not personally a millionaire, I personally perform actions, and activities that directly impact the success of sales projects reaching into the millions.
I survived that day because:
1) We showed up early so we were able to recover from the situation with the projector.
2) My manager was a SE before he became a manager, so he knew exactly what I was going through and helped me get prepared. We were "over prepared", which is exactly what you want when you have a high pressure "do or die" event to deliver. Even though I'd given our standard demo hundreds of times, we practiced ten more times the night before and made the wording "exactly" right for the customer we were with. As a SE manager, his job is to make me successful, which he did.
3) We were standardized. Even though my manager had the "smaller" version of our standard laptop model, all of our demo setup was the same on everyone's machine on our team. So I was easily able to switch to his when mine didn't work.
4) We kept it simple. We had our plan thought out before hand, knew exactly what we wanted to do for the entire meeting, and executed our plan. This greatly reduced the risk of something unexpected happening in the middle of our session.
Next post I'll take a look at all the things I do as a SE in a typical week. Everything from doing presentations, configuring pricing proposals, coding in Python or even in C++, to configuring servers in the cloud. That's what a SE does......"everything".
I'll also answer the question hinted at the beginning of the article. Why do this job?
END
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