Differentiation through S.P.E.E.D.
In one of my more recent podcasts (show 149 to be exact), I talked about why Sales Engineers, or any other professional, should aspire to differentiate themselves throughout their career. I'm not suggesting you do this just to tell people “Hey, look at me, I’m special”. Or maybe you are, but the point is to try to perform in ways that might increase your job security, and maybe get paid a bit more so we can take care of our loved ones a bit better. I’m not going to rehash everything I said on the podcast. I would be more than thrilled if you decide to listen to it yourself (Click here after reading this blog), but here I want to share a quick example of why we should differentiate ourselves, and then focus on how - by using my new acronym S.P.E.E.D.
I used to work in support. I had many colleagues who differed in levels of expertise, intellect, and the ability to solve problems. I also had colleagues who were great at marketing themselves, and some that sucked at it. In the example below, I will be talking about one specific person who was great at marketing himself, but he did it so wrong that he rubbed me the wrong way. If you know me, then you know that it’s hard to rub me the wrong way (yes sarcasm), so don’t do what he did, but learn from it. We had a period of time on the support team where there was a known bug that would intermittently reboot the routers. Suffice to say customers were not happy, and we had multiple critical tickets opened in the next few months. Since it was a known issue, all we had to do as support engineers was look through some logs for a specific signature and close the ticket as a known issue, to be fixed in the next release. We had so many of these tickets. Those of us who wanted to challenge themselves would know from the title of the ticket what it is and would choose to take on other, more challenging tickets. This specific colleague however would take them as soon as he sees them. Then he would brag to the manager about how he’s closing more critical tickets than anybody else on the team. On the other hand, I had 2 other colleagues, let’s call them Joe and Joey, who would pick what they thought were some of the hardest tickets. They were not always critical, but still hard to figure out. They would put their heads down for days or even weeks working on a few very hard tickets and not tell anyone about them. They would always solve the tickets and simply move on to the next interesting ones. During the performance review time, who do you think got the better reviews? Also, Joe and Joey had the worst relationship I’ve seen with a manager and they could not figure out why he was always on their case. He just didn’t see what they did. So hopefully now you see why putting your head down and working will not always yield the best results. As Sales Engineers especially, we need to market ourselves, and we have so much visibility to do so. Unlike my support colleagues, no one saw their work. Sales Engineers work with customers, product managers, sales counterparts, marketing, and so many more. We have the ability to make an impact on both our company and our careers.
Now that we’ve covered the why, let’s cover the S.P.E.E.D. I have to admit, I’ve been on an acronym tear lately. I even created the acronym B.A.D (Bad Acronym Daily). However, I felt that S.P.E.E.D is apt for Sales Engineers due to the nature of the business we’re in, the rate of technological advancement, and just how we live our lives. Pedal to the metal. S.P.E.E.D stands for:
S: Solve
P: Proactive you Are ( I feel Yoda’s wisdom in me, or Be Proactive would have ruined my acronym)
E: Educate
E: Elevate
D: Deliver
Some of these are self-explanatory, but here’s the gist. As Sales Engineers, we have to solve problems. We all focus on “Customer Problems”, but if we were to differentiate ourselves, we have to solve problems for everyone we interact with. Customers are just one of them. I mentioned earlier, we interact with Salespeople whose problem is selling the right solution to the right people. We can be their Consigilary as well as their SEs. We can help them strategize on how to approach specific customer proposals, build back-up proposals in case their budget got slashed, or advise them to use some keywords we heard their team mention so the messaging will be just right.
We can also solve problems for Product Managers who have a hard time meeting customers. We can either help them by setting up calls, relaying questions from and to the customers. We can help by providing an opinion about a product that they are working on. There are millions of ways to help. And we can go beyond that. We can help our SE Manager by doing our best to get along and improve our relationship with our sales counterpart. One time my manager told me that he feels like a marriage counselor because all he does is help Salespeople and SEs talk to each other. We should be able to do that on our own. You can come up with ideas that can improve SE performance, then implement these ideas. We also have to be proactive about finding these problems to solve, as well as be proactive to tell people that we solved such problems. You don’t have to be a douche like someone I know who didn’t actually solve any problems but still told the manager that he solved more problems than anyone else….. (I should take a deep breath here ----woooosssaaaa).
You still have to tell someone that you solved the problem since if you don’t, it never happened. You may know that you did, and great for you, but still, find a way to let your management know. It’s not douchey if you actually did the work. Part of our job as well is to educate. We are educating our sales counterparts about the proper positioning of certain solutions, educating product management about customer needs, educating fellow SEs on the proper way of doing discovery. Don’t keep that information to yourself. Have a bigger impact on your surroundings by offering that information and helping someone achieve their goals. You can also Elevate your team, customers, sales counterparts while you’re doing so. Coming up with ideas to improve performance, will improve the performance of the entire team and everyone will do well. Or if you worked with someone who did a great job, make sure to tell their manager that they did a great job. They will want to work with you more or even be open to doing work outside their job description. And D is for deliver. If you promise something, deliver. Period.
I hope this provides a good reason for you to want to differentiate yourself, and also provides a way to do so. If you’d like to hear me talk about it, then I invite you to listen to the podcast (Click here). I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this topic and you can reach out to me any time. I am on the SE-Nation (SENY) slack channel.
Author Bio: Ramzi Marjaba has been a Sales Engineer and a Hybrid Sales Engineer in the Network Test and Measurement world since 2014. After struggling to understand if he's even doing the job correctly, he founded the first consistent resource for Sales Engineers. Ramzi is the founder of We The Sales Engineers, a website dedicated to helping aspiring and experienced Sales Engineers improve their skills, careers, and life.