How to Survive and Master the Economic Crisis as a Sales Engineer
Crisis mode: On.
The economy turns down.
Account Executives (AE) enjoyed a full pipe effortlessly during good times. A crisis hits those who are used to skipping steps hard. When prospecting for new deals, AEs face rejection everywhere, slammed doors, mean comments, and banned social media accounts.
And then, they meet this one client who is open to speaking with them.
Joy.
Gratefulness.
Hope arises that the AE can provide for their family and pay the mortgage.
So, they dutifully enter the opportunity into the Customer Relationship Management system to trigger its magical output: a Sales Engineer (SE).
Of course, the AE assumes that the SE knows about their painful journey to acquire this one meeting; they assume the SE knows about the opportunity’s criticality.
For the AE, it needs nothing less than crushing it.
Then confusion sets in when the Sales Engineer states: “This opportunity doesn’t seem to be qualified.”
My eyes are big because of confusion, boiling anger, and speechlessness. Should the SE be in such a powerful position?
The SE community’s discussion about the AE’s role occurs in waves. Are they more than a project manager for the deal? For a bit of relationshipping, they get big money and fly to pretty places to celebrate their success with the company’s executive club.
‘Where is the Sales Engineer in that game?’ is often asked.
It’s a power game question about who is the most meaningful person on the deal. And it’s unnecessary.
The Sales Engineer usually doesn’t experience the daily prospecting and rejection torture, so they have no idea of the AE’s emotional pain.
The discussion about the AE in the deal is probably also an indicator that the economy is doing well. Many opportunities are won, and the SE witnesses big commissions flowing to the AE.
So, let’s look at what happens when deals don’t come in effortlessly. During good times, the SE learns to only work on qualified accounts. And this leads to the question:
Is Sales Engineering wrong when asking for qualified leads, even if the time is rough?
No, they aren’t.
Is the Account Executive so wrong to ask the SE to bend the rules during difficult times?
No, they aren’t.
Sales Engineers and Account Executives are the sales dream team. And sometimes, the SE needs to follow its instincts in the same way the AE does.
But there is a tiny detail that must not be in play here.
That’s called Desperation.
If the AE acts out of desperation, neglecting discovery and qualification, then the SE must push back. Always. From a position of fear, you can’t win.
So, let’s look at some things you can do as a Sales Engineer to survive the crisis.
Always Push Back on Unqualified Deals.
If the pipeline is dry like last year’s Christmas cookie, and a new lead comes in, the sales team’s natural reaction is to jump at it.
An Account Executive who doesn’t prospect as if their life depended on it won’t be able to uncover valid opportunities. Maybe the sales team got used to inbound leads during the good times. They could skip steps in the sales cycle and still have won opportunities.
With the economic downturn, they must return to daily outbounding and fanatical prospecting.
To quote Jeb Blount in his book Selling in a Crisis:
Desperation is the enemy of qualifying better. It clouds your judgment and leads to confirmation bias. You gravitate to anyone who will talk with you, see buying signals where there are none, and waste hours of selling time with stakeholders who don’t have authority, budget, or intention to buy.
Don Carmichael also offered his perspective on this topic. It sits nicely here:
It’s both interesting and possibly misleading.
For Sales organisations, the volume of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) might seem the same as before the crisis.
BDRs are still going to keep up the same number of outbound calls (you might not even see a drop in Inbound volumes) and AEs will still have a pipe to fill, a quota to meet and a quarterly number to hit.
Everyone will be busy, but it’s just a facade.
A lot of apparent Buyer interest will just be tyre-kicking interest but without the intent to buy.
Push Back for Ethical Reasons.
A crisis is no excuse to work with whatever company still has money to buy stuff.
Make yourself aware that your decisions have an impact. Do you agree with what’s going on in the economy? Are you okay with environmental pollution, kids drinking and smoking, slavery, and water robbery?
Push back on those accounts. People will tell you that you can’t change the world. Don’t listen. Your strong principles can go a long way.
Don’t push the responsibility on your company. It doesn’t exist. You are the company, as are the AE and the CEO. If one person agrees, everybody else will think it’s okay. The person who disagrees might wake other people up.
Act Professionally.
Your clients won’t look for the great things you do but for every mistake. You risk losing the deal once you commit even the tiniest selling crime.
You have to be prepared — always do your desk research and dry run your demos and presentations.
You have to be emotionally invested. Show skin in the game at every opportunity. Make sure you understand the motivation of the people involved. Fire yourself up to become relentlessly helpful.
Be kind. No matter what happens in your life — don’t let it bleed into your sales engineering motion. Improve the buying experience with every interaction, no matter how annoying.
You don’t get many opportunities to convince people of your solution during a crisis. So make sure you prove your value concisely and easily understandable, as our brains like information to be reduced.
Prepare to prove value in the following categories for your client:
- Emotional benefits — relief, trust, happiness, excitement
- Personal benefits — career, status, relationships, time
- Technical benefits — solution, feature, applicability
- Business benefits — impact, ROI, novelty, innovation, turnover, talent
Be on top of your game.
You are in charge; you are responsible.
If you join a customer call tired, you commit a selling crime. It was your choice to have some beers and watch the whole Stranger Things season the night before. Maybe you felt like you deserved it. But that’s irresponsible toward your profession.
Your decisions led to your current situation. Take responsibility.
Do you make time for the gym or long walks, meditation, and cooking healthy meals?
Put another way:
Don’t believe everything you think (or desire.)
Growth Mindset.
A crisis will require more time and effort to achieve the same results. You can’t hide behind your job title and deflect your AE’s request for cold outreach. You must take it if it’s the only way to expand an existing account.
You might need to be bolder and master the art of the possible for your clients.
If your competitors’ sales engineers are visible on social media everywhere, that’s a significant disadvantage. Do you appear in your prospects’ feeds?
Sales psychology, business writing, video creation, editing, visionary presentations, convincing speeches, (emotional) resilience, or cold outreach are highly thought-after skills during a crisis.
Start acquiring them now when the pressure is still low. Wait too long, and you might stumble.
Whatever happens, we will become stronger if we decide to put the work in. To quote G. Michael Hopf:
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Contribute to your organization.
Your organization must be highly effective. So, it needs your contribution.
Do you have demo scripts in a drawer? Are there any pitch decks that will make things easier for colleagues? What would you improve in your onboarding and training processes?
Close process gaps, inspire struggling team members, document successful pitches, and presales knowledge.
Sharing is caring.
Rely on Proven Principles when Working Opportunities.
Use the following list as a guideline:
- Act from a position of strength
- Play to win
- Have skin in the game
- Be emotionally invested
- Be a partner, not a supplier
- Don’t lead with a solution, but your vision
- Exceed customer expectations
- Be relentlessly helpful (internally and externally)
Build your brand.
Familiarity is your most potent weapon to outperform your competitors’ Sales Engineering peers. They are the ones you meet on your prospect’s floor when you switch rooms with them to pitch your RFP.
To use familiarity as a game changer, let a social media platform like LinkedIn work for you.
Pop up on your prospect’s feed regularly. They will be reminded of you. In a crisis, your customer will be busy, always on fire, trying to get their business running. They will fear making mistakes by investing in new tools or solutions.
But you are the person who can explain their problems better than they can. Eventually, if you appear on their feed regularly, they will contact you and ask for support.
You are at an advantage in any meeting if the prospect has seen you in their feed or if you interacted.
Make sure to build your brand. Post, be a guest on podcasts, shoot and publish videos.
You will be part of a minority wielding this legendary sword of publishing. It only drops for 1–2% of the (social media) players. Consistently write and be one of them.
Lead the client with an engagement plan.
You surely have been advised to act as a lead for your prospect. VP of Sales love to speak about that strategy because it’s the best way to shape the outcome of an engagement.
You could ignore this advice during good times, which might have led to winning deals. However, in critical times, you won’t be as lucky. As a Sales Engineer, you have to control every step of the deal.
Here are some tips on how to do that:
- Stage: Assignment:
Ask your AE, “Why will we win?” Create an engagement plan outlining the steps for your client. Present it to them and say, “Those are the steps of how we make you successful.” - Stage: Discovery:
Prepare by desk researching clients and people; create a list of discovery questions; know and lead with your company’s vision; follow up with video messages. - Stage: Additional Interviews:
Don’t settle with one discovery session but request access to adjacent stakeholders; collect anecdotes and use cases; provide insights during these sessions and create relationships; connect with clients via social media. - Stage: Scoping:
Don’t assume or guess; always have the guts to clarify before solutioning, scoping, or calculating ROIs. - Stage: Economic Buyer agreement:
Get their buy-in before the custom demo, PoC, or workshop; agree on a read-out date and fix it in everybody’s calendars. - Stage: Prove of Value:
Don’t use artificial cases; be in the spotlight; get management awareness; always time box PoVs; involve the client’s team for skin in the game. - Stage: Readout/Readback:
Have the results be presented by the client’s team who helped with the PoV; include anecdotes collected in earlier stages; sharpen your presentation/storytelling skills with training.
Discount without giving a discount.
Clients will ask for discounts during a crisis because they get pushed to save money. That’s a situation where your creativity can go a long way.
You know your tool best, and you know your clients. Is there a way to achieve this with the same capacity? A different architecture or deployment could make all the difference.
Become a creative genius and help your clients cheat within the legal borders of your product.
In a managed services environment, you could point your clients to where they are overprovisioned. Find ways to help out your AE with technical magic tricks.
Sustain your company’s business and make clients happy.
Adjust to Survive.
You are a presales professional. That’s what you signed up for. With a focus on “pre.” And you want that to stay true to this without dealing with “post” work.
A crisis demands adjustments. In the same way, animals must cope with human-made environmental changes, and you can’t continue like you did in the good times. The economy is a stronger force than your will (or your wants).
If you work in a subscription/consumption business, your company is well set up to survive. Long-running contracts promise a continuous income stream if customers don’t cancel.
Here is your opportunity to be incredibly helpful. Focus less on adding new business and more on maintaining or even expanding existing customers.
Pull your presales-self to the customer success organization. Don’t push back after the sale–even if that was the norm before the crisis.
Yes, you will need to work more and differently.
Sales Engineering leaders need to readjust compensation models.
But you make yourself indispensable by supporting a stable business – retain 85% of recurring revenue, and you will get through the crisis — even without new business.
Do more with less.
A crisis is a time when humans get creative.
Do you know those kinds of people who cook the most fabulous meal with yesterday’s leftovers? The result is so tasty that you say, “Have you written down the recipe? I want to cook that again.”
Counterintuitively, you get creative when you face limits and borders. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_limitation
What can you cook with your company’s resources when everybody else gives up because they think the fridge is empty?
Consider a Sales Engineering training to broaden your perspective.
Automate Demos.
Another way of doing more with less is demo automation.
If you have already invested in a platform during the good times, great. Now, it’s time to go all in and use demo automation to its fullest potential.
If not, you should start a conversation with potential vendors. For ideas, look at the Sales Engineering map.
Work with Your Business Development Representatives.
It’s time to walk over to the long tables where your BDRs are herding. You will find them by following the noise because they will be busy on the phone.
Offer to help with their call scripts. Explain product use cases and specialties. Speak with them about prospects and give them qualification criteria.
The less time you waste on unqualified prospects that make it through the internal process, the better.
With some time investment, your deal quality will rise, and you are making new friends.
Know Your Numbers.
To justify your value and impact, start collecting your numbers. Do you understand how many opportunities turn into deals? Check your CRM and create yourself a player card, or if you are more into Dungeons&Dragons, a character sheet with the following attributes on top:
- Win rate/quarter/year
- # of demos/quarter/year
- Influenced revenue/quarter/year
Now, create your backstory like you would with your D&D character.
- What’s your data-based story?
- Why are deals bigger because of you?
Answer that and prove your relevance.
Thanks, Dave Marsh, for the information and nudge.
Unused Potential
You shape successful deals by carefully listening during discovery sessions and building stakeholder credibility.
Most Sales Engineers shy away from being visible in the prospect’s feed. Fill that gap and enjoy warm discovery calls and customers who have the highest opinion of you.
Let’s hit the crisis head-on so it makes us stronger than before.
Thanks so much for reading!
Please join me by being intentionally more grateful for our lives! Peace and happiness start with gratefulness.
Are you enjoying my stories about sales engineering? Then, get my creative non-fiction book, The Social Sales Engineer.
Do you want to work with me to build sales engineering skills that truly matter? Feel free to get in touch.