Tips for a Sales Engineering Interview

If you are considering a move from consulting or development into the world of pre-sales consulting/engineering, and you are not certain of how to prepare for your interview and you are looking for some tips, hopefully this post can help you out. A logical starting point is to figure out how have you positioned or upsold additional functional in the past, such modules, consulting time, or training etc in your past engagements... A sales engineering manager is less concerned with if you delivered your projects on time and budget (although those are important attributes) or if you know 50 different developments languages and design patterns. Instead they are more concerned if you are able to 'position' (ie: sell) your unique value to an organization during pre-sales cycles based on your technical/solution crafting skills.

So here are my basic SE interviewing tips for folks considering entering into the sales consulting world for the first time, so that you can be better prepared before you jump into the line of fire of a bunch of Sales Engineering interview questions. So be prepared to discuss:

-Real life client examples of how you solved a business problem using technology solutions
-The business value that your technical/software solution has solved in business terms
-Your most complex solution/implementation and how you were able to grow future business based on your relationship with your customer
-Examples of how you were able to successful convey a technical process to a standard business user
-Examples of when you had to effectively present to C-level executives/business decision makers to successfully position your solution
-How you have been able to solve a business problem by thinking outside-of-the-box
-Details of how you were able to come up with a solution to a business problem quickly off-the-cuff

If you are already a Sales Engineer, the tips I provide would vary significantly, so stay tuned for a follow-up post on that...Good luck on the interview!

A Sales Engineer's Pre-Game Warm Up

It is amazing how often you can increase your demo close ratio, by increasing your prep. Often veteran Sales Engineers have the mindset that they are being able to jump into a deal on a moments notice, and then expect to knock it out of the park without much prep each and every time…Although this is often a gut reaction of senior SEs, it is important to always revert back to the number one principle of doing as much up-front prep as possible. Every Sales Engineer has there own pre-game checklist - or at least the good ones do ;) So, here is my abbreviated checklist:

-Collect all the Key Business Requirements/Key Business Drivers
-Understand business/technical pains and the results/consequences of these pains
-Visually map out your prospects current environment and to-be environments
-Confirm the audience for the demo, their roles, pains, level of influence etc…
-Personalize the dataset that you are going to use against your competition...Get test data, get verticalized sample data, edit your SQL statements, grab some test data off your prospects website directly...

I know…create test data?!?...I don’t have time for that! I hear you, but sometimes that will be the difference of the unique wow factor for your prospects. Remember, the SE at your competition might be creating test data for their solution, and that might be the difference whether or not you get the business…A great saying we had at a previous SE shop was, “See your business in our software…”, not sure who to quote for coming up with that one, but it was great nonetheless.

Ok…Back to the list...

-Confirm your plan of attack and demo flows with your Sales Rep/AM/AE
-Confirm your agenda and timeframes with your prospect/coach/partner/consultant
-Setup effective traps with your rep ahead of time (Avoid the 'off-the-cuff stuff'...)
-Dry-run your presentation/demo internally and/or with your coach at the prospect

Remember, just like a champion fighter, the battle/demo is almost always won or lost based on the training/demo prep one does ahead of time... So don't forget to 'hit the gym' before your next demo!

Web Based Diagramming Tool

For most Sales Engineers (both Software and Hardware based), currently mapping out current architectures/infrastructures can be a challenging task...Now add on top of that not having the ability to easily map out these environments while you are on the phone with the prospect makes it that much more difficult..For those of you with HUGE budgets to buy the latest and greatests to assist in your SEs sales cycles, this post may not be so useful for you.

But for the rest of us, if you want an easy to use, web based (I love the SAAS model) tool, that allows you to map out environments, do straight forward Flow Chart, E/R, Network, UML, BPM flows, and sequence diagrams to name a few, then it is worth a shot to testdrive Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com/). This drag and drop tool allows you to version your diagrams, snap to grid, full formatting, image upload, web image searching and a bunch of other great features. Setup a free test account and play around with it...If you like it, the price is very affordable for what you get and it will enable your Sales Engineer to better capture their prospect's requirements...Give it a try!