The Super Power of Solution Engineers
Bridge the gap between Sales and Engineering
If you’re selling B2B software, there’s a secret weapon that can accelerate your sales efforts: the SE. Solution Engineers (also known as Sales Engineers) are the key to winning the trust and confidence of enterprise buyers. The more technical the sale, the more important the SE role becomes.
The reason is simple: many buyers have an unstated fear: what if this project fails? In today’s environment of reduced budgets and tighter scrutiny, It’s not a theoretical concern. When buyers introduce a new product or technology, they are putting their professional reputation on the line.
So when the sales rep says, yes we can integrate with Salesforce and the deployment will take just a couple of weeks, that’s nice. It’s like the manager at the car dealership telling me the car comes with a 10 year, 100,000 mile warranty. It’s nothing I can’t read off the web site. The SE is like the mechanic who pulls you aside and tells you to record the dates of your oil changes so there’s no risk that a warranty claim will be rejected.
SEs Win The Trust of Technical Buyers
The more technical the buyer, the less likely they will want to engage with sales. They might be reluctant to provide detailed information about their plans, lest it be used against them in the sales process. But they still need to know whether the product will meet their needs. It’s a dilemma that is best solved with a Solution Engineer. A good SE will win the trust of the client in two ways: first they understand the product inside and out, and secondly, they understand the client’s situation.
A good SE should be able to sit down with the customer’s team to learn more about their technical needs and integration requirements and then define a clear demo or proof-of-concept that hits all the marks and gives them the confidence of a week-long test drive.
A great SE can take all the learnings from customer engagements and help define the product roadmap for the next six months. Not surprisingly, some of the best product managers I’ve worked with came from an SE background.
The ideal SE is a combination of a less-polished, nerdier sales rep and a junior engineer still excited by the promise of new technology, which is a good mix to win the trust of customers. They often have an infectious enthusiasm for the product which helps them connect to technical buyers.
They have genuine curiosity about the customer and their needs. They must have strong improvisational skills when put on the spot to make something work. They might not be able to build your product, but they sure as heck know how to make it sing and work around limitations in a creative fashion. They give the best demo in the company, because rather than showing all the features, they address the specific concerns the customer has raised and put to bed any objections. And they do it while making the customer feel smart about their choice.
One Of Your First Ten Hires Should Be An SE
SEs are great early hires because they can bridge between the engineering world where the product is built and the real world where products are deployed. They can keep deals progressing by being more hands-on than founders and early sales people. This is a powerful combination for an early stage startup, especially when you are still working toward product market fit. A good SE also knows when to bring in Product Management or Engineering to accelerate a deal.
As you grow, the ratio of Sales Rep to SE ratio can vary anywhere from 1:1 to 1:5, depending on the complexity of the product and the level of technical engagement required. For highly technical products (or complicated customer situations) a low ratio of 1:2 may be required. For less technical products, you may have one SE for multiple sales reps. But watch out that SEs aren’t getting burnt out running customer demos and POCs from dawn to dusk.
Takes the time to learn from your early SEs about what’s working with customer deployments and what’s not. SEs might not know they need to report back on product limitations, so make sure you create a culture where input from the field is not only appreciated, it’s actively sought by Engineering and Product Management. At Duo Security, I routinely met with SEs like Patrick Garity and Bryan O’Neil because they would give me ground truth about what was resonating with customers, what wasn’t and how our product needed to evolve.
How to Find Great SEs
The best SEs are experts in your product. I have had good luck finding SEs from within the user community and from the technical support organization. That said, not everyone who is an expert in a product is comfortable being in sales. At Zendesk we found that the more ambitious and extroverted customer support agents made great SEs. They were doing the same kind of work, but doing it pre-sales, rather than post-sales gave their career (and compensation) a boost.
While I don’t recommend hiring from customers, once in a while, an engineer from a customer might approach you. That happened to us at Gatsby, when Chris LaRocque fell in love with our product and architecture. Chris had never worked in Sales before, but his technical acumen and intellectual curiosity made him a natural.
Our top sales rep, Luke Bivens put it succinctly: developers like talking to other developers. Luke described Chris’s contribution to the sales process:
He was an engineer at heart and had firsthand experience implementing our solution in his previous role. So he knew the struggles the customer was dealing with.
He went above and beyond, “jamming” with engineers to make sure they achieved their goals throughout the sales process.
He wasn’t focused on selling—he was there to support.
Give Your SEs A Seat At The Table
Treat your SEs well. They are invaluable when selling technical products to Enterprise customers. They can provide great insights for overcoming technical objections and increase the likelihood that customers will be successful. They are great evangelists for your product and can help identify expansion opportunities within client organizations. And finally, they are often better at seeing repeat patterns among customers than sales reps, who are often so focused on their current deals, that they may not see the forest through the trees.
Make sure SEs have a seat at the table when you’re planning the product roadmap. They're often closer to the action and have a better understanding of how the product is deployed than the engineers who built it.
What’s been your experience in hiring and using SEs? Let me know by posting a comment below.
Thanks to Luke Bivens for giving me a kick in the pants to finish my stalled first draft. And thanks to the great SEs I have worked with over many years, including the legendary Lance Devin and Jim Cyb who are not only in the SE hall of fame, they used their experience as a foundation to build epic careers.