My first day as a sales engineer
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Since starting my career as a Sales Engineer, I have had gone through three first days in starting the role fresh. With each first day, I have learned many lessons on what I could do for the next one. My very first day as a sales engineer was a a bit of a disaster. I walked into the Qlik satellite office and I was told that my laptop wasn’t ready and to come back tomorrow. I immediately thought “great I can go home and wait there until it’s ready” which I did and spend the rest of the day hanging out in my living room. At that moment it was a great feeling to just head back home, but what I didn’t realize is that I was losing precious time in setting myself up for success in this new role. Once you are ramped up in a presales role, free time becomes a rare commodity so maximizing your free time from day one is critical. Therefore, every time I join a new company, I ask if I can start my first day at the corporate headquarters.
I have learned that starting my first day at the corporate headquarters enables me to create the foundation to my success. One of the challenges that I mention earlier was not having my laptop ready on day “one”. By being at headquarters, IT is generally located there as well, therefore if my laptop isn’t ready, I can easily follow up with them in person. The other huge benefit of starting at corporate headquarter is to start building your internal network. One of the preparations that I do before starting a new company is I ask my hiring manager if they can broker some meetings for me while I’m at corporate headquarters (no more than 30 mins). These meetings are usually with product management, product marketing, information security, professional services, customer success manager and of course pre-sales. Each meeting has a different outcome but in general, I am trying to understand various aspects/viewpoints around the product. Below are some of the question I ask during my meetings with them:
Product Management
What are 3 features that differentiate us from the competition?
Where are you investing in the next 12 months?
How can I get my future customer plug-in to your voice of customer session?
How can I help you in my role?
Product Marketing
Who are our biggest competition and why?
How can I help you in my role?
Information Security
Do we have any Security Certs available, e.g. ISO27001? If not, will we?
How do we protect customer data?
What are some of request you receive from our customer information security team?
How can I help you in my role?
Professional Services
What is your most complex implementation and why?
Which services do you sell the most? Why?
How can I help you in my role?
PreSales (usually 60 min)
Why are customer buying the product?
What challenges are we solving for them?
What are your top 3 use cases / stories that you tell during your demo?
Can you help me set up my demo environment, ensure I have the right system access etc.
The last advantage of being at corporate headquarters is meeting people in the hall way and listening in on people talking on the phone with customers. I have heard some interesting use cases this way and when I do find one, I usually ask that person to lunch or coffee to learn more about the use case.
In summary, my goal for the first day are the following:
Have my start location be at the corporate headquarters
Have meetings lined up with specific functions of the company
Start developing my internal network by meeting people for coffee or lunch.
Let me know what are your goals are on your first day at the company.
