5/27/2009

Sales Engineer Selling Skills

Many Sales Engineers feel that their responsibility is to only cover off the functional/technical requirements for a prospect's solution. True, but the buck does not stop here, it is important for Sales Engineers to also work on their sales skillset as well. Some of the best Sales Engineers that I have worked with are not the most technical in nature, but they can really spin challenging prospects questions or traps into 'non-No' answers. Tactics like pausing, paraphrasing, probing, spinning all are good strategies that need to be practiced by Sales Engineers to address difficult questions. We have even assembled a list of difficult questions that SEs need to learn to master. Often Sales Engineers maybe presenting/demo'ing 80%-90% of the time during a presentation, that means that the actual sales rep is only 'selling' approximately 10% of time, so have your SEs working prepping their demos and their selling skills