Sales Engineering in Japan

Last month I spent a few days in Fukuoka, Japan and then in Tokyo. During that time I was interviewed by Keiichi Takagi on behalf of ITPro - the biggest online tech magazine in Japan.

They were interested in learning not only about Mastering Technical Sales, but why there was such a market for specialized professional skills training for presales engineers. This kind of training is extremely uncommon in Japan, which is why it generated so much interest.

For my Japanese readers - the native text of the article is here http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/atcl/interview/14/262522/092600039/?ST=selfup&P=1

For everyone else - here is the interview in English/American.

Q: What is the Mastering Technical Sales? How is it difference from others?

Mastering Technical Sales is unique because the role of the Sales Engineer is unique. If you think about the complex technology sale, there is usually an account manager who has the relationship with the customer and discovers a sales opportunity. The salesperson then has to bring someone technical with them to present, demonstrate and generally explain how the product or service actually works and how it will fit into the customer’s environment. That person is known as a Sales Engineer.

There are thousands of companies and thousands of books which claim to train and to optimize the salesforce. They all focus on the quota-carrying salespeople. We focus exclusively on the Sales Engineers who make up between 20 and 35% of a typical high-technology sales organization. It is an growing market and the SEs we work with are always very appreciative of the services we provide.

 

Q: What is the reason you wrote MTS in 2002?

A: It really started back in 1999. As a Sales Engineering leader I was frustrated because there was no specific professional skills training for my SE (Sales Engineer) team – all we had was sales training. I was sitting in a large windowless room in Atlanta, Georgia with my team of 40 SE’s and about 100 salespeople. We had a week of sales process training. It was boring as only about 25% of the content was useful to my staff and I felt we could learn it three faster than the salespeople!

 

I sat in my chair and said “why are we doing this? Someone should write a book about being a Sales Engineer!”. One of my young engineers looked back at me and replied “if you are so smart, who don’t you write one?”  That gave me the idea and I started to write the book the next day.

Q: Then, what is the reason for having revised the book in 2009 and again in 2014? What is the difference between a decade ago and now?

A: Much has changed about the basic SE job, the technology we use and the technology we sell.

First - fifteen years ago, is you know all the technical details of your product and could explain or demo them to technical people – that made you a great SE! Now that is a basic requirement of the role. SE’s are expected to have far more business expertise and to be able to link their technology back to the business benefits. There is now as much attention paid to the “sales” as to the “engineer”.

Second – with the introduction of virtualization, the usage of webcasts and cloud-based solutions I feel the technical side of the job has become a little easier. Virtualization allows an SE organization to create and to package up demo systems which can be easily reused and distributed. Webcasts allow a sales team to be far more responsive to their customers and to handle a multi-national customer base. Many companies now have large teams of “inside SE’s” whose primary role is to discover, qualify and demo over the phone/web. And then the cloud has allowed companies like salesforce to sell SaaS based solutions. Now almost every company has some form of cloud-based system which supports public, private or hybrid cloud hosting.

Finally that cloud base makes things like Proofs Of Concepts and general installations much easier to control for the SE. You can set up a demo system for a customer in a couple of hours, compared to the days or weeks it used to take when you had to go visit the customer on premise with a bunch of CDs, tapes and manuals!

Q: I'm going to ask you to look at the future. Will the role of SE change?

A: The role of the SE is already changing very quickly within the mid to large sized vendor. Smaller single product companies still focus on their technology and the technical advantages that brings to first movers who adopt their “solution”. The larger companies are asking their SE’s to become far more business oriented because that is what their clients want. A few years ago we helped run a survey of almost 1,900 senior level IT executives across the globe. They were asked “what are the skills you value most in a vendors presales team?” The #1 answer was “someone who understand my business”, followed by “#2 - someone I can trust”, ‘#3 - someone who can design innovative solutions with my staff” and “#4 - someone who can clearly and effectively communicate with me”. The #5 answer was “someone with deep technical skills”.

The demand now is for SE’s who can put together the technical skills with the business oriented skills and be able to speak technically to the IT audience and in value terms of revenue, cost and risk to the business and IT leaders. That is a hard profile to develop and even harder to hire in the general market.

 

Q: How about your business? How will you develop MTS for the future?

 

A: Business right now is wonderful. Professional skill development for Sales Engineers is a very underserved market – not just here in Japan, but everywhere in the world. My personal mission is to improve the profession of the presales engineer and to actually start a professional organization for all 250,000 of us in the trade.

We will continue to supply the basic skills every SE needs – through Discovery, Effective Demonstrations and Presentations, Webcasts, White Boarding, Handling Questions, The Executive Connection. I don’t think that will ever change.

We have spent a lot of time over the past 18 months working on some advanced material around “The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer” – in fact that is the title of my next book. Since customers feel that SE’s contribute more value in the sales process than the Account Manager, we are focusing on the skills a SE needs to become that Trusted Advisor, to the point where we can now measure a “trust score” between an SE and her client.

We are also expanding the reach of MTS. We started in the US, expanded into Europe, and now thanks to our partnership with Up2Speed in Singapore we have a large Asian presence. We can now deliver most of our material in Mandarin, Korean and Japanese (plus Australian!). As an example, last month we ran a couple of white boarding classes here in Tokyo for a client. I saw a video of the session. I cannot speak Japanese, but it was apparent that everyone was enjoying themselves in the class and were learning new skills.

 

Q: How you see Japanese IT companies? Please give us your advice, how SE can contribute in order that a Japanese company survive in global competition.

A: I’m still learning about the Japanese market and culture. This is only my second trip to your country so I still have a lot to learn. I think you can probably teach me more than I can teach you!

That philosophy applies to Japanese SE teams as well – there is a lot they can learn from other parts of the global SE organization, and there is a lot the global SE teams can learn from Japan. As they say in the USA – you need to “share your toys”. Over the years I have seen some great ideas and tools developed within Japan – like custom demonstrations, great competitive ideas and partner enablement. I’m also learning as I conduct more research about the Trusted Advisor” that it is a well-developed concept here in Japan, perhaps more than in any other part of the world.

I think everyone needs to be more willing to share, and that is one of the advantages of being an SE – in that we tend to share far more than salespeople or development teams ever will.

Q: John, any final thoughts for us?

A:  Yes. I have two for you. First I just have to say how excited we are about the Japanese market and the opportunity to work with the entire Japanese SE community. Turing the role of the SE from a job to a profession is important to me. Secondly, (and this isn’t a very Japanese thing to do), is to encourage every SE out there to understand that they are a very valuable part of the sales process and that they “own the account” as much as the salesperson does. Don’t just sit by the phone or wait for your inbox to light up with a task and be reactive to what the salesperson wants – make your own contacts and network within the customer!

Good luck and good selling!