A Summer Break .. And Back To Work

After the effort of both releasing The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer and creating some brand new SE Leadership modules - it was time for a summer break. The break was in reality just a slow down in classes and consulting operations and now it's time to get back to speed.

With that in mind, the MTS Edge October Newsletter is being sent out this week to over 27,000 SE's around the world. This month we are featuring The Sales Engineer Career Path (which is pretty self-explanatory) and The Little Grey Dot (a neat trick to help with presenting PowerPoint builds).

"Ask John" looks at how I start the day - which might give you a few ideas about time management. I'm nowhere near perfect, but believe I do a pretty good job of getting my days started on-track and on-time. Our featured book is "Oh Great One!" by John Novak. It's a light hearted, but quite compelling, story about the power of recognition. Reading the book you'll see the ghosts of previous bosses - both the good ones and bad ones.

More to come ..

Technical Trials and Tribulations

So this has been an interesting 10 days in that a strange bug effectively killed our website. I learnt a couple of things:

1. It's an important part of the business.
2. It badly needs to be updated and modernized.
3. Yahoo (my hosting service) has terrible technical support as I spent hours on hold and they hung up on my several times.
4. The bug was ultimately the results of some poor code from Amazon which was mis-interpreted by Yahoo Site Builder.

But enough of my problems. We are back up, and the new content has finally been posted. You'll be able to read about The Sales Engineer Advantage - why we SE's should be rock stars when in front of the customer (but aren't). There is also an interesting article on The Five SE Manager Basics (which are actually good for everyone else as well!).

The MTS Book Of The Month for SE's is Marshall Goldsmith's "What Got You There Won't Get You Here".  It's been one of my favorite books for years, and I recently had the opportunity to re-read it as part of preparation for a workshop I ran. Well worth your time to pick up a copy and learn about the 20 bad habits that may be keeping you back.

I challenge anyone to read the book and NOT see themselves in there somewhere. You really do feel like you are putting the training wheels back on your career.

More to come. The 3rd Edition of Mastering Technical Sales is nearing completion and is slated for a early July publication, and The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer in now underway as a planned eBook for later in the ear.

Plus I'm going to be in Australia or a week or two in May running some seminars and giving a couple of speeches.

Good Selling!

 

Do You Feel Like A Job Description With Legs?

One of the great things about being a Sales Engineer is that you have considerable flexibility in how you perform your job. Unfortunately it takes many SE's a long, long time to come to that conclusion. Ultimately it comes down to are you building up a career or waorking at a job.

In Great Work Great Career, Stephen Covey and Jennifer Colosimo work on the premise that you will spend much of your life and your energy on your career, so doesn't it make sense eo envision and design a great career for yourself? This book, and in particular the many stories it contains, will not give you an immediate flash of blinding insight. However, it will cause you to sit down and put a little more thought into the design of your career and how you can personalize it.

As an SE there are many paths available to you. You can progress up the management path, the technical path, move across into product management and marketing, and even cross over to the dark side and carry a quota as a salesperson. If you work for a large enough company you can seek out rotational assignments in other departments, other divisions and other companies - but you do need a plan. If you don't know where you are going, you'll never know when you arrive.

Also see The Complete Recommended Reading List for the SE