With age comes experience.  Hopefully.  I’ve had the fortune of being in the Sales Engineering space for more than a decade now.  During that time I’ve gotten to experience or observe multiple SE onboarding for firms from 20 to over 4000 employees.  Some have worked amazingly well, others were beyond awful.  If you are early to the firm you can leverage these tips to accelerate your team.  If you are late to the game, it is never to late to incorporate these tips and have impact.  Give these items serious thought and leverage them.

Onboarding

The very first thing you need to do is to start documenting the onboarding process.  After all, you are experiencing this with fresh eyes.  Did you need to  reach out to a specific person to get access to a system?  Were there specific documents that really helped?  Write it down in an organized manner!

When I say organized, it goes farther than a document with headings and a table of contents.  There are a few important touches that take a bit more effort but pay huge dividends.

• Don’t just provide a list of 20 meeting recordings in chronological order to watch.  As you go through them or new recordings are created, put them in a curated list that is ordered properly.  Don’t try to teach me object oriented programming if you haven’t explained what a variable is.  Teach me to walk before you expect me to sprint, pole vault or high jump.
• When you do record content, do the recording with the intent that it is going to be shared.  I suggest two items here:
  • Save the questions for last.  Keep banter to a minimum.
  • Edit the recording to remove commentary that is not relevant or mistakes.  I remember watching a 15 minute training video where the first 10 minutes was the team trying to figure out how to share the presenters screen.  No joke.  This really doesn’t help learning.
• Make sure the document is shared in such a way that each new person sees the latest copy.  There should never be multiple out of sync versions that exist unless you are following the next tip.
• Bonus Tip – label the top level document as a Template.  Have each new person make a copy with the “Template” part of the title changed to their name.  As they complete steps they can line out and date the completed steps.  This helps leadership track progress.  The new person can also provide feedback to improve the Template as the process evolves.

Put the time in now, because if you don’t you’ll be too busy later and will seal a miserable fate.

Value Props

A common tenant in Sales Engineering is that Features don’t sell.  Business Value sells.  I use the term “Use Case” to mean a specific customer’s metrics.  Like Hotel Tonight having reducing their peak server load by 80%.  For that reason we often standardize internally on the term “Value Prop(osition)” when speaking of this topic.

With Fastly it was very clear early on that Visibility and Control were key differentiators. I could quickly show you how the 150ms content invalidation and 10 second configuration propagation were game changers for firms like The Guardian and Hotels Tonight.  Same with the logging and real time stats was big for The Guardian.

You want to be sure that everyone is on the “same page” when speaking about the business value you provide.  Is it a concierge white collar service where they’ll pay heavily for a quick deployment?  Or is it something where non-technical SMEs and business owners can contribute and quickly implement?

If you are so early that this specific topic is hard to discern, take a look at what stats you are already sharing.  Check out the next section . . .

Public Facing Stats

As an SE, we are there to share knowledge about what the solution can and can’t do.  That being said, there is so much more than just saying “Yes, we work with Facebook Messenger”.  If you can reference an existing customer and some other statistics related to that feature’s business value it will carry far more weight.

Start by reviewing all of the public facing use cases and testimonial videos.  Have a column for each of the following:

• Firm name
• Industry
• Value Prop
• Quote or details
• Link to document

This makes it very easy for everyone to drop these fact bombs, and also follow up with an offer to email the document after the call.  It also is critical that everyone be using the same stats.  If the document says 150ms, tests have proven it is 150ms, your SEs are secretly competing to see if they can beat a purge with a new request, then everyone needs to say 150ms.  If some say 150ms and others say “under a half second” or “under a second” it sounds like some “finger in the air” and “hard to prove” hand-wave sales number like “50% of the Internet runs through our systems.”

Note that when/if you go public, these stats will all have to be vetted and documented.  It is less painful when this document exists.  Once sales people are using a stat, it takes a shock collar or a cattle prod to get the to stop.  I’m kidding, but those of us in the trenches know how hard it is to get others to change bad habits.

Vignettes

Once you’ve picked out these Value Props, you need to decide how SEs will show them to opportunities and existing customers.  I’ve done this in the past by building out demo vignettes.  Small little stories that can be woven interchangeably into a story.  A few things are critical here too:

• It is best if they don’t depend on each other.
• Related, it is good if the order does not matter.  Let me start with Instant Purge and Real Time Config.  GeoFencing is important?  Or logging?  Oh yeah, if I click here look what happens . . . here’s how we can help you like we helped <some well known firm> . . .
• It is best if you can show them all in the same demo environment.  Switching context is a killer when explaining a complex or new technology.
• There are benefits to being able to show these vignettes in a scenario that is similar to the one of the firm you are speaking with.  My Fastly demo environment was eCommerce, but I could have easily adapted it to FinTech, User Generated Content or Streaming Media.

These need to be thought out and standardized.  You can’t be creating a custom demo for every opportunity.  This won’t scale.

Culture, Care and Feeding

Early on as the team is growing everyone will be trying to find their footing and figure out how to best work together.  There are a few things that seasoned Sales Engineers can implement early on that will help the culture be more efficient.

There are a few key expectations that are required for every public facing meeting:

• What is the goal of the call?  Discovery for the demo?  Get an introduction to someone higher up?  Schedule a POC?  Everyone needs to be on the same page here.  Once you’ve achieved your goal, shut up and give people some time back in their busy day.  You can only hurt things at this point.
• Who is leading in each role?  Often there will be two SEs on the call.  One might be shadowing and onboarding.  Either way, it is helpful to know who is leading there.  And it really needs to be the AEs call.  If they don’t feel the newer SE is a fit or ready, they need to be able to say so.  Of course if that is the case they need to understand that they are slowing down that SE coming up to speed.  And the Player/Coach will be less and less available.
• Define who is covering what.

Start to line up roles for calls – expectations (that AE lets you know goal etc.), as well as who asks what questions and what gets covered.

Yes, you can just stick to the list and tasks assigned for onboarding.  But it is an opportunity to do more and make a bigger difference.