Tips on how SE can work with an Account Executive for the first time
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Working with a new account executive when joining a company can be scary. When I join a new company this is consistently one of my biggest fears. When meeting the sales rep for the first time, I start to ask myself questions such as "how long as he/she been a sales rep?”, “has he/she sold in this space before?” and “will he/she see me as a trusted advisory or just another resource”. Working with a bad sales rep can be disheartening and can limit your exposure and potential success across the company.
What I have seen in my experience is that sales reps can have a lot of influence on a sales engineer career. When a sales rep is doing great (aka closing huge deals), their success will propagate to you as the SE as the technical resource to help guide the deal. I have experienced this type of success many times, most recently at Pluralsight. This type of exposure has helped me to be recognized by the CEO of the company. Therefore having a great relationship, great synergy and a great cadence with the sales rep is important to both your career and the customers you support.
So, when you start a new job and meet your sales rep, here are some tips that I have used to help me work with the rep:
Meet outside of the office - I have seen that when I go and grab coffee with the sales rep, I am able to better connect with their character. These casual conversation about family, travels, food etc helps me understand what’s important to the rep.
Weekly touchpoint - Every time I start working with a new sales rep, I create weekly 1:1 in person if possible, to work together on both the pitch and my demo flow. The goal of this is to create synergy and flow on how our sales meeting will go. In addition, I even walk through the type of questions that may be ask and who should field which type of questions. As an example here is a basic outline:
Pricing Questions - Sales Rep
Product / Feature Questions - Sales Engineer
Customer Best Practices - Sales Engineer first, then Sales Rep
Company Conference - Sales Rep first, then Sales Engineer
Practice, Practice, Practice - A mentor of mine once told me that an athlete knows they are ready to play when practice seems harder than the game. I have never forgotten that advice and when I prep with the sales rep, I work with him/her through many different scenarios/what if’s to prepare for the worst.
Recap your meetings - One of the agreements that I make with the sales rep is that I expect a debrief call immediately after a customer meeting. It’s never a formal meeting, and the goal is to do a quick micro coaching on both sides on what went well and what could we do better next time. By doing this, it has helped me tweak my demos as well as helped me to understand how to better work with the sales rep.
Do you have any tips? If so, share them, I would love to know how you work with your reps!
