As I was watching my son practice wrestling I overheard his coach say something quite profound. He stopped the match and demanded the attention of my son’s competitor and said “smile, this is supposed to be fun, remember?” Wow! Inspirational and for me motivational.
Sales engineering is truly an art-form. To be awesome, a sales engineer needs to invest effort into the technology, the business opportunity, and most importantly their personal style. I like to say they need to be left and right brained. Technical, creative, personable comes to mind. They also need to gain the trust of those they are partnered with and presenting to. Here are my 5 points of discussion of becoming an awesome sales engineer.
The quickest way to demotivate a sales team member is to screw with their paycheck. Yet so many times a company will build a compensation plan and commission statement that leads to this. They are outdated, vague, confusing, assuming trust with numbers, and so on. Why?
No matter how great an organization is there are always customer issues. It could be a misunderstanding, personality conflict, a service level issue, or simply customer remorse. Many times all of these at once. As the original relationship builder, the sales professional needs to be able to work with customer issues or as I like to fondly call them, customer heat.