New March Content

The March edition of the MTS Edge will be going out on Tuesday. To get an early view of the main content you can read about Apologies and What Goes On The Last Slide?

There seems to be some unofficial rule of speaking that you should never apologize (unless you are a public figure who has been "caught"). I'm not in agreement that its 100% correct, but I do know that we, as Sales Engineers, apologize far too often when we we shouldn't. This one-sheet deals with the pros and cons of Apologizing - and maybe I should say "Sorry" right now that it is written from a US/European point of view!

What Goes On The Last Slide looks at how we end our presentations or demos. We put a lot of thought into the start, but rarely wrap the end back around to the beginning to gain closure on a topic. Read on to see why ending with a "Thank You" or a "Q&A" slide is a really bad idea. See what works instead.

Supporting Partners

One of the more interesting challenges facing small to midsize companies is how to provide technical (pre-sales) support and help to the partner community. Unless you are extremely channel-centric, partner support is usually conducted on an ad-hoc basis.

This is because, due to organizational size, you cannot afford to dedicate an SE to the partners unless there is real revenue at stake. partners can go to public classes to learn your product or services - but who teaches them how to 'sell" it? A couple of studies conducted by smaller ($50-250M) software companies found that nearly 15% of their SE time was being directed towards partner activities. That means that once you pass the point of six SE's, you should consider dedicating one of them to the channel.

But can you really afford to do that? Well - if you have anyone on the sales side who cares (and is therefore paid on) partner sell or pull-throughs they are incented to absorb as much "free" SE support as they can. In fact - it pays to have one or more partner SE's to protect the time and integrity of the rest of the SE team.

Risk And the Sales Engineer

RISK!

So technical validation, demos, presentations, answering RFPs, trials, evaluations and Proof of Concepts are all important parts of the sales process. But let's lift it up a little higher and examine what the real role of the Master Sales Engineer is in the Buying Process. I'd submit that it is all abour reducing risk - from the customers viewpoint. We are always facing competitive risk, but we also face "do nothing" risk and "alternate use of capital" risk. So our job is to reduce the risk of our solution, while raising the risk of all the alternatives.

So how does the Master SE mitigate risk and increase the winrate? Read February's MTS Talking Point about Risk And The Sales Engineer. (pdf)