We The Sales Engineers: A Resource For Sales Engineers, By Sales Engineers

In this episode of the Sales Engineering Podcast, my friendly chat with Gareth Jones will give a comprehensive answer to these questions and provide an insider’s peek into what happens in career transitions, specifically toward sales engineering. Gareth Jones, who describes himself as a father, husband, and comic book nerd, was an army officer for 12 years before being introduced to sales engineering through a serendipitous encounter. After leaving the military, he landed a job at Splunk, where he is now a Solutions Engineering Manager. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show252

In this episode of the Sales Engineering Podcast, we explore the different purposes of demos and discovery calls. We consider the different challenges inherent in them and the strategies we can employ to get around these challenges. Specifically, we focus on business discovery and technical discovery. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show251

Anthony Powell Moze, or simply Tony Moze, was not an SE when he first came into the podcast back in 2021. Listeners will remember him from episode 153 as the guy who was transitioning from healthcare and psychology into sales engineering. Almost two years after that episode, we bring him back to the podcast, now an SE himself, to talk about his journey in finally landing an SE job. If you are currently and actively seeking your first SE position, you will find this episode really helpful. But everyone in the sales engineering field, no matter how long we have been in our roles, will learn a few things in this episode about the importance of humility, asking for help, and networking in continuing to thrive as SEs. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show250

Are you a manager with five, ten, twenty, or more people working under you? Have you ever reflected on whether you are doing a good job developing that amount of talent and putting it to good use inside the company? This episode of the Sales Engineering Podcast is specifically only for managers, but employees working under managers could also benefit from this show by taking note of some best managerial practices so they could have something to raise to their superiors whenever there is a chance. wethesalesengineers.com/show249

In this episode of We the Sales Engineers Podcast, I share with you a talk I recently delivered at SAP Customer Experience through the invitation of Jan-Erik Jank. The talk is entitled “Never Apologize: Five Steps to Convert a Pissed Off Customer.” In this episode, I provide you with the most critical steps you could take to handle difficult and potentially frustrating customer situations with the goal of saving your partnership with your customer. wethesalesengineers.com/show248

Are you an aspiring sales engineer who wants to learn to become one without spending thousands of dollars? Or perhaps you are already thriving in your sales engineering practice and are looking for affordable ways to improve. Here, at We the Sales Engineers, we offer an affordable coaching package that could help you find a sales engineering job or improve in one. We call it the SE Hotline. In this episode of the Sales Engineering Podcast, I present to you what happens in one of these SE Hotline coaching sessions. In this particular session, I coached Jean Lubin, a Solutions Consultant at Standardtech who describes himself as “a customer-focused individual that enjoys helping people solve problems.” This episode features a 40-minute coaching call where we dive into a comprehensive discussion of the sales cycle. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show247

We kick off 2023 with a bang through an episode that answers 15 frequently asked questions from clients, podcast listeners, and YouTube viewers. Questions like these often lead to new content on the website, in the YouTube channel, and in the podcast. I encourage you to reach out to me for any questions related to sales engineering like these. I’ll be more than happy to respond. In this episode, I discuss various topics—from relationship-building and boot camps to leadership and essential books to read. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show246

Dan Caffarey returns to share several tips for keeping your customers engaged during pre-sales presentations. Dan uses his background as a Cambridge-qualified business English coach to provide tips on managing speech, body language, and voice during presentations, while I give my own advice from a sales engineer's perspective. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show245

In this episode, Aaron Moncur shares how he fell in love again with engineering through entrepreneurship. As he shares in the podcast, gaining more control over the vision of your career by building a business that allows you to realize that vision could be everything you need to give engineering another shot. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show244

Whether you’re new or seasoned in the presales world, you would have your share of both highs and lows. In this podcast, we often talk about the wins and how to become a successful sales engineer, but in this particular episode, we’re focusing on the other side of that. Along with my co-host Chris White and guests, Bill Balnave and Kerry Sokalsky, we share our very own demo and presales horror stories and the lessons we’ve learned from them. wethesalesengineers.com/show243

Michael Griego is a world-class sales trainer and sales effectiveness management consultant based in California. In the last 20 years, he’s founded MXL Partners a Silicon Valley-based sales effectiveness consulting and training firm. He’s conducted sales management consulting for companies around the world and has led sales training for thousands of salespeople in companies ranging from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 firms. His books are 42 Rules to Increase Sales Effectiveness and No Excuses! A Better Way to Sell.  David McCulley is the Senior Vice President of Sales Engineering at Provarity, a full lifecycle and continuous Proof-of-Value platform that provides enterprise sales and purchase stakeholders with real-time visibility, seamless collaboration, and AI-powered insights. Provarity’s platform combines intelligent services for workflow management and collaboration and success monitoring to transform how businesses, partners, and customers manage the enterprise customer lifecycle. https://wethesa

Before you can build a stellar product and launch it to the masses, you need to have a thorough understanding of what the product is. In this episode, I talk with Dan Hellerman of Saleo to find out why he chose to be in charge of Product, why he and his co-founder and CEO still do demos to this day, and why the role of Sales Engineers is so important in the sales cycle.  Dan Hellerman is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Saleo, which is a demo environment platform that helps software companies create great software demos to win and retain more customers. Saleo is the only platform in the market that allows you to control your actual live software demo in its live native environment. They have worked with companies like Drift and Clary and SalesLoft, and Terminus to help them power their live demos.   https://wethesalesengineers.com/show241

With me today is Kyle Brown, a sales engineer at Zscaler in the enterprise market in the Chicagoland area. Kyle is very passionate about sales engineering making the switch from a sales role. He specializes in developing new business and brand loyalty through technical discussions, product demonstrations, proof of concepts, and product training using analytic skills to discover market gaps.

James Connor McCann is a Pre-sales Consultant for CyberRes which is a dedicated business unit from MicroFocus, which specializes in cyber resilience specifically. He has been with the organization for 12 years since graduating from university. He started in support before transitioning to a Solutions Consultant which is the presales role at the same company. He’s got to cover the Netherlands, Nordics, UK & Ireland and is currently based in Belfast.   Shownotes: wethesalesengineers.com/show239

Cyrus Harbin is a sales engineer, Marine Corps veteran, content creator and host of the podcast Tech is the New Black. Before working in sales engineering, Cyrus was a full-time travelling poet and public event speaker.  With over 6+ years of experience in sales and profit optimization, customer service, IT systems security and management, and cross-functional teams leadership, Cyrus dedicate much of his personal time to my Patreon community assisting mainly black and brown men and women (basically POCs like myself) and others from under-represented groups to consider careers in the tech industry.   https://wethesalesengineers.com/show238

Sarah Halley is currently the director of solutions engineers at Ungerboeck. After she graduated, she moved to South Africa and worked as a marketing intern. Funnily enough, she fell in love with sales engineering when she came home to Germany. Sarah experienced working in an SDR position but it wasn’t her favorite later on she found what she enjoys most and it helped her grow.  

If you're interested in learning more about how to improve your discovery skills, then this episode is for you. In this episode, we walk you through the discovery process (Larson and I do a little roleplay to show you), mistakes most sales engineers and AEs make during discovery, questions to ask to better uncover your buyers’ needs and priorities, how to know whether they are qualified to purchase your product, and a little bit of how equity works for startups. Larson Stair is the CEO and co-founder of Gondola, formerly known as Demoflow, a sales enablement solution that helps to codify the sales process – whether it's discovery calls, product demonstrations with AEs and SEs, or better ways to be working together on those two parts of the sales cycle. Before starting his own company, Larson spent 10 years in the sales environment, having held multiple roles within SaaS as an SDR, SE, AE, and SC. He is deeply passionate about entrepreneurship, software start-ups, and full-cycle SaaS sales. https://wethesalese

In this episode, we discuss what sales engineering enablement means, how it’s different from sales enablement, why both can influence and improve the SE or salesperson’s role, and how if you’re interested, you can become an SE facilitator yourself. Also, it’s good to clear a lot of misconceptions I had about sales engineering enablement and look at it from someone else’s perspective. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show235

Bill Belnave has 23 years of presales gigs and now transitioned into helping folks do the job. He has been both a sales engineer and a manager for the past years working for big companies. He has degrees in both engineering and business. Rob Vanstone is currently a Sustainability Catalyst. He has worked as a consultant, director, and Vice President in sales engineering before. They both agreed that being an SE leader demands support to succeed. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show234

Kevin Naglich is the founder of Deliberate English. The company helps international sales engineers who have an intermediate or advanced level of English speak more confidently in presentations, meetings, demos, proof of concepts, and faster through active deliberate practice. He has worked as a sales engineer for 10 years in a cybersecurity company and found an issue that led him to start the company. He said communication is his strong suit and his saving grace that helped him get through the imposter syndrome. https://wethesalesengineers.com/show233