Care and Feeding of a Sales Engineer

Sales Reps and Sales Engineers often come from very different personality types. The rep is responsible for finding the leads, frequently getting told “no” multiple times before finally getting a meeting setup. They handle the relationship building, negotiations and keeping things on track. (Yes, SEs build relationships, but it isn’t…

The Best Conference Demo

There are three ways that firms create and/or maintain the environment(s) used to provide demos at tech conferences.  Each has their tradeoffs, and you must weigh them to find which is right for your company. Each for His/Her Own The most common I’ve seen since 2010 is that each SE…

The Foundational Learnings from a Serial Cable

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. Will Durant   I find it interesting that people will put more energy into questioning the reason for foundational learning then they put into immersing themselves in the lesson itself.  That lack of prioritizing energies lessen the odds that the knowledge…

Liars and Statistics . . . or Perhaps Accounting?

Early on I learned the quote that “Statistics never lie, but liars use statistics!”  Over the years I’ve gotten to see some SLAs that sure sounded good but would be impossible to ever breach.  There also are plenty of companies that use statistics to make performance sound so much  better…

But What Kind of Demo Can YOU Give?

Sales Engineers need to give demos for almost all products or solutions that are technical to any level.  The problem is that there is no standard to define what constitutes a demo.  A naive VP might be satisfied with seeing a single integration as proof that you can do a…

Is This Why the Startups Are Eating Your Lunch? Part II

My second introduction to the “start-up” advantage was with Cerent.  We started as “Fiberlane”, imploded and became several companies.  It was only the second tech company I had worked for, and the stories along the way highlighted why startups are able to take fewer people and less money to build…