Five ways Sales Engineers can make an impact at the end of a quarter
/
In my experience, anyone working in a sales function typically thinks that the end of the quarter is all about negotiating and closing opportunities by the sales team. However, I have seen and experienced time and time again how the sales engineers play a vital part in the closing of a deal, especially in crunch time. As an example, one of the deals that a member from my team has been working on could not have been closed without his efforts in the final hour. He was able to impact the deal by working with the prospective cybersecurity team to get Pluralsight approved to be used at the company in the timeframe we needed. In addition, he presented the executive presentation that summarized the entire engagement including the pilot program. As I reflect back on other similar opportunities where sales engineers have been critical to ensuring the deal closed by quarter-end, I list the 5 key things below to help ensure you are making an impact in your role.
Linearity (Sequence of Events)
Linearity (or sequences of the events) is a new best practice that my team and I started implementing for any opportunity that could be over a million dollars for the company. Linearity refers to the timed out planning of each task needed to ensure a deal to close in a given quarter. In other words, it’s a project plan that assigns the resource to each task. The reason why this helps both the sales engineer and the salesperson is that it helps organize the rest of the team to help support them through the deal. A few examples where I have seen this be effectively used were:
Information Security: Looping this team in early in a sales cycle to help mitigate any product risk
Product Management: Looping this team in to help with product limitation and any commitments to improving the product
Professional Services: Looping this team in early to help scope level of effort for production as well as provide “freemium services” (Prove why they are the subject matter experts)
Building a Support Team
This builds on linearity, but it focuses on ensuring you have brought the extended team into the deal. One of the best practices I am starting to adopt (from Slack) is to start creating public Slack channels with the opportunity name and add all members involved with the deal into the channel. This ensures everyone is on the same page and communication is streamlined and as timely as possible. Besides the members in the channel, we also attach a google sheet and pin it so that everyone has full transparency into the sequence of events to close this opportunity as well as their task where their help and accountability is needed.
Identifying Risk Early
This is probably the single biggest way I have found sales engineers can make an impact - when they identify risk early. As a trusted advisor to the sales team, they rely on you to help make them aware of any technical risk throughout the sales process. And if there is a technical risk during the end of the opportunity that was not brought to light early in the process, then the sales engineer risks slowing or losing the opportunity because of an avoidable lack of communication.
Activity Tracking
Those that have been in a sales engineering role for a while, know that the way we show impact to an opportunity is through the activity tracked against it. At times, activity tracking can seem pointless and/or overwhelming since it can feel like a lot of data entry to your CRM platform. However, I have seen that when opportunities are at risk to close by a specific date, sales leadership can use these pre-sales activities as a value add / investment made by the vendor to keep the deal moving forward. The spin is usually around how there are many opportunities to work on and we allocated resources to you for a duration of time because you are a valued client. Then, there is an unspoken opportunity return that we expect from the investment. This can be a powerful tool for the sales team to leverage when talking to their decision-makers.
Taking Ownership of the Deal
The last way a sales engineer can make an impact is by taking ownership of the deal. In other words, being proactive in reaching out to the salesperson and seeing how you can help with closing the deal. Don’t wait to be asked! One of the ways that I have been helpful during negotiations is when the decision-maker goes silent on the salesperson, I would reach out to the people I were working with through the pilot to grab a cup of coffee and ask them specific questions that can help the sales team close the deal. This is a great way to showcase to the sales team that you are a trusted advisor to them and are as invested in the deal as they are. After all these closed deals benefit everyone involved!
How have you impacted the quarter-end? Please share!
