How much can an SE’s head hold?
Every software sales team that I’ve ever seen has wanted to cross train their sales engineers on as many products as possible. While on the surface this sounds great it can be more difficult than it appears and can sometimes be detrimental to a company's sales efforts. While in general I’d advocate for SE’s being cross trained as much as possible here are some gotchas that people might not realize.
The first obvious gotcha is the complexity of the product being sold. If multiple products are seriously complex then it can be harder for one person to understand all the nuances of multiple products. Some specialization can be your friend in these situations.
A second non-obvious gotcha is that different products may be used in different verticals. Some verticals have very specific terminology and ways of doing things. While a given engineer may be knowledgeable about the product they may not know the nuances of these verticals. Now while I wouldn’t necessarily advocate for vertical specific sales engineers it can sometimes happen in practice due to the complex nature of not just the product but the vertical too. As an example, credit card batch processing systems are very different from automotive origination systems. So it’s not just the complexity of the product but the complexity/terminology of the use case too.
The third gotcha can be the technical environment from which the software may run. Is the software run as a library or a server? Will the software do its own callout to other API’s? Will it interact with a database? In other words, what the software can do depends on the environment in which it runs. A customer says, “we are thinking of having your rules engine aggregate the credit data, can you demo that?” That’s a complex question with multiple answers that depends on particular circumstances. You WANT your SE to be able to dive that deep in the presentation; they may lose that if they don’t know these other related technologies (which technically live OUTSIDE of your product but are still relevant to how your product will function in the customer’s environment).
In general, cross train as much as possible. At the very least your SEs should have some high level knowledge about all of the products in your portfolio. Besides being able to better explain things to the customer they’ll have a better ability to see how your products can synergistically work together. With that said, if you sell a complex product in a complex vertical which runs in a complex environment don’t be afraid to let your engineers specialize to some degree. Your goal is to have your engineers put on the best possible demonstration and presentation. If they can’t go deep on the customer’s issues then you lose credibility. My goal was always to have my engineers know the product at least as well as product management; that often required some specialization among my SEs. The result of course was increased sales as my engineers were more credible in front of prospects. I always felt the customer demos were precious opportunities, you don’t want to just show up. You want to hit the ball out of the park. If you have 2 or more of these gotchas then some specialization might be the way to put your best foot forward.
Please reach out to peter.j.accorti@gmail.com if you want to discuss these kinds of issues.
