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00:00:01
Engineering Success: Modern Approaches to Sales Engineering for Enterprise Teams w/Advait Deodhar
95 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Brian Dietmeyer talks to Advait Deodhar, VP America's Sales Engineering at Ping Identity, about modern alignment strategies for presales and sales in enterprise software. They delve into the importance of making sales engineers 'sticky' in deals, shifting from speeds and feeds to focusing on business value, and the key alignment points between sales and SEs to enhance customer decision-making processes.
Timestamps:
00:00 Sales engineering team's importance in selling software.
03:21 Sales engineers specialize to better serve customers.
09:24 SE value: qualify deals, shorten cycle, increase win rate
10:20 SE team strategically enhances product understanding for sales.
16:19 Vendor and customer alignment in the buying cycle.
17:48 Complex problem with buyer seller misdiagnosis.
23:15 SE less engaged; AE stays engaged, customer struggling.
24:34 Enthusiastic discussion on continuous improvement and community.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Show and Identity Security
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another edition of Close Mode, the enterprise sales show. I'm Brian Deepmeyer, CEO of Close Strong. And today I'm really lucky to be here with Advait Deodar, who is the VP America's sales engineering at Ping Identity. And if you're not familiar with Ping, Ping will champion identity security to enable secure, extraordinary digital experiences. Welcome to the show. How did I do with my voiceover, Advait?
00:00:31
Speaker
That was great, and a great summary of the company. Thanks for that, Brian. Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. And I'm not sure when this will air, but you and I just had the chat about being off after a long memorial weekend. And this is first experience for us revving up our brains on this Tuesday morning. So the subject is kind of modern alignment of pre-sales and sales. And a week or so ago, you and I had an interesting and thoughtful discussion about
00:01:01
Speaker
uh, how to, how to better align. And so that's what we're going to chat about today. So, uh, to, to jump into it, one, one of the things you talked about was not sort of parachuting an SC in and out of a deal, but, but making that more sticky. Can, can you elaborate
Sales Engineer Engagement: Parachuting vs. Consistency
00:01:16
Speaker
on that? I'll preface this Brian, by saying that there are variances when it comes to how sales engineering team works. And a lot of it depends on things like what's the market you're selling to. Is it a.
00:01:27
Speaker
commoditized market? Is it a very simple to use SaaS solution? Are you selling to small business, medium, large enterprise? Those things matter. But at the end of the day, what I've seen in my 20 years in being in the sales engineering job function is that there is really a need to have sales engineers stay sticky with at least an opportunity, if not even an account or a customer on an ongoing basis.
00:01:52
Speaker
And historically, I have seen it in talking to some of my peers, I've seen more of this parachuting in where, all right, the AE sets up a call, we figure out what needs to be done, you reach out to the SE manager and they staff it with a person. And that's not really an effective way of selling enterprise software anymore. If you look at the AE, one of the things that the account executive really benefits from is that they are sticky by the nature of their job, right?
00:02:20
Speaker
This is your customer and you're going to get to know them.
Specialization in Sales Engineering Roles
00:02:23
Speaker
And every conversation you have with them is this fantastic opportunity to get to know them more personally, build a relationship, get to know more about their business, doing kind of a constant discovery and qualification. That needs to happen on the sales engineering side as well. It really have to have that same kind of stickiness. And, you know, I see this as something that should start from the very first discovery calls that you have with the new prospect all the way through
00:02:49
Speaker
a technical win, a yes decision, and a purchase of your software. And ideally, even possibly staying with that customer, especially if you're the type of software business that has a land and expand type of approach. Yes. The thing that I think is interesting here though is that
00:03:04
Speaker
Like I said, I've been doing this for 20 years. In the past, SEs were kind of expected in a lot of cases to do it all. And if you look at what do it all actually means, there's a lot there, right? There is discovery, disqualification, there's RFXs, which is RFPs, RFIs, et cetera. There's proof of concepts, architecture sessions, business value conversations, C-level conversations. It's almost kind of unrealistic to expect every sales engineer in an organization to be able to deliver
00:03:36
Speaker
And so an interesting shift that I'm seeing.
Account SE as the Technical Quarterback
00:03:41
Speaker
Across many software companies is that they're starting to come up with more breakout. Sales engineering roles and so we're seeing things like not every company will do all of these, but we're seeing things like.
00:03:52
Speaker
sales engineers that are focused on building a demo environment. Something that the rest of their team can benefit from using as a strong starting point. We see SCs that are focused on RFXs, some that are focused on working with partners, the GSIs and resellers, some that are focused on customer value, some that are deep dive product specialists. And I think this is great, first of all, because it allows
00:04:15
Speaker
each individual sales engineer to really focus on their strengths and deliver the most that they're capable of delivering. The way that this kind of ties into the sticky idea is by having what I would call an account SC. So in the same way as an AE, I like to look at an AE as a quarterback of the deal, right? They are marshalling resources from across the company at the right time based on where you are in the sales cycle. The sales engineer, the account sales engineer,
00:04:40
Speaker
gets to play a similar role as a technical quarterback. So at any point,
Aligning SE Roles with Business Value
00:04:45
Speaker
if there's someone in another sales engineering job function within their company, or if they need to reach out to engineering or product, whatever, they're the glue that kind of makes sure they're bringing in the right people from that side of the selling perspective, leveraging the extended team, but they get to have that continuity of understanding the customer and building their own relationship.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yep. It's, it's interesting too. What did, what came to mind when you're talking about sort of that, the specialization was, you know, that's what procurement did years ago with commodity managers, right? Like let's, you guys get, you get really good at firewall protection software. You get good at, you know, something else. So that totally makes sense. You know, something else you said to me when we were last chatting is.
00:05:23
Speaker
You know, people thinking about the SC roles is speeds and speeds, right? Just by, by, by nature of their title practically. But I love this idea. You said there is an opportunity to, to keep that product focused, but to start connecting to business value, which sounds really valuable to me. Yeah. Talk
Mapping Technical Features to Business Objectives
00:05:40
Speaker
about that. What can be done to make that shift?
00:05:43
Speaker
First of all, I think it's a requirement these days. It's no longer beneficial for a software company to just have an SE going and do a product demo and show the administrative console and then walk away, right? That's not how you're going to build trust and kind of a strong relationship with an organization, a customer.
00:06:03
Speaker
The other part of this I think is interesting if you look at it from the customer's perspective and specifically their IT department. The trends that have been going on for a while is that number one, they're being asked to do more with less. IT teams are running leaner than they ever have. And then even with the spots they have on their team, it is pretty hard to get qualified, experienced IT professionals. So they're being asked to do more with less. And then also they're being asked to map the requirements that they're defining.
00:06:31
Speaker
back to the business value to the organization. And that might not be done by the individuals that are actually hands-on keyboard, right? It might be done someone up their management chain, but someone in that IT management chain is often partnering with someone on the business side within that customer's organization. And they have to map that. And so what I see as kind of where SCs live today and where good SCs and organizations kind of drive is making sure that the SCs start by understanding technology and product, obviously. Yeah.
00:06:58
Speaker
and how that relates to the customer's requirements. But also understanding along with the AE, how does that map to the business requirements? So that way, as they are going through their day-to-day job, they're constantly making sure that as they're highlighting a product or a capability or a differentiator, ideally, they're mapping it back to the value to the business, not just the technical requirements, right?
00:07:22
Speaker
If we break this down a little bit more, we can look at this in terms of the different stages that SEs typically get involved. For example, initial discovery. I think that when you have an AE and an SE, both on the initial discovery calls, it's really great and fascinating to watch because the AE and the SE are hearing the same responses, but their takeaways are slightly different. That's fine. That's actually a good thing. Why wouldn't that happen?
00:07:51
Speaker
getting that holistic view of what was heard and using that as a way to drive, well, what's the next conversation we want to have with this customer? What type of questions do we want to ask? How do we want to differentiate our product? This is where it starts. The discovery is mapping back to the value to the organization based on what both the AE and SE are hearing. But if we take it to another
Shortening Sales Cycles and Increasing Win Rates
00:08:14
Speaker
big step is an RFX. When you get to an RFX,
00:08:18
Speaker
You can get a technology or product related question as an SC and you can answer, yes, we do it or yes, and this is how we do it. Maybe here's a screenshot of our administrative console. But what's really powerful is as part of that response, you're saying also this is how it equates to what you're trying to deliver in your business.
00:08:36
Speaker
Another day, you don't know who's reading these RFXs. Realistically, there are so many different groups within an organization these days that, if they're not a decision maker, they're a heavy influencer on what vendor is selected. And you need to appeal to any audience that might be getting this across their desk. That's funny. That's like a podcast in and of itself, right? This nova, it is true, this messy,
00:08:59
Speaker
buying thing. And so one of the things you're kind of leaning into here a little bit is sort of alignment points between sales and SE and and, and, of course, those exist today. But you talked a little bit, you know, there's differentiation and alignment points. But is there shifts to a more modern thought process about traditionally what we saw those in? Like I said, you kind of just started leading into some of that. Yeah, I do think there are
00:09:26
Speaker
I think at the starting point in my mind at least is recognizing what value the SE provides to the AE in their job, right? And I think if I had to kind of
00:09:37
Speaker
put it into three major buckets. It's helping qualify the deal, helping shorten the sales cycle, and increasing the win rate. So everything around alignment should be going towards how an SE feeds into accomplishing those three goals, right? And so what I've seen is that the ideal alignment, you know, it's actually it's pretty straightforward, but it's consistent throughout the entire sales process from those initial discovery calls, through RFXs, through customer meetings, architecture sessions, POCs. It's all about making sure that
00:10:07
Speaker
the se are strongly aligned in what are we trying to accomplish who's coming to this meeting what are our goals and then how do we take what we both heard and then deliver it in a way that leads to success now i think what's what's interesting that i see something that.
00:10:27
Speaker
the way that the SE team is viewed is sometimes they're, you know, I hate to say it out loud, they're viewed as a team of no almost, right? And I think we need to take a step back and look at what the SE team is really doing. What they're doing is taking their understanding of the product capabilities, taking their understanding of the other
Tailoring Demos to Business Objectives
00:10:45
Speaker
vendors in the space that they compete against, and trying to understand how they can make
00:10:50
Speaker
are their company and their products shine, right? How they can increase their chance of winning and speeding up the sales cycle. So the feedback that, you know, I think that AE's benefit from hearing from SEs is things like, is this deal qualified or does it look like maybe a competitor has a better position? Not to say let's walk away from this, but-
00:11:11
Speaker
Can we change the conversation? Is there something we do that this customer is not aware of that we do or that they don't realize that it's really important to their success? Let's make that important. RFX is, is this an RFX that was in our favor? Can we meet everything? Does it look like it was written for someone else? There's a lot of things that SEs pick up on that
00:11:32
Speaker
strong AEs by having this title I'm in point by constantly communicating throughout the sales process. They listen, they actually listen and they say, okay, well, that makes sense. Now, what can we do about it? It's all about how do we fix what's broken. And the last bit I'll say here, Brian, is that, looks, AEs are, they can be selfish. I don't use that term negatively, right? They have to be selfish to get their job done, to get their deal done.
00:11:58
Speaker
When it comes to my job as an SE leader or the sales leaders that I partner with, we're also looking at where the SE should be spending their time.
00:12:06
Speaker
And so the last alignment point, and this is maybe a level up from the AE and the SE, is the data and the data that's collected around an opportunity going into a joint CRM. What I've seen work really well is when you start making objective decisions on how SE should be using their time, it benefits the AE to make sure that they're making the deal as qualified as possible. It benefits the company because they're making
00:12:29
Speaker
sure that SEs are spending their time on the best deals and also protects the SEs from spending too much time on Aries station. Yeah, it's so
Helping Clients Navigate Buying Cycles
00:12:38
Speaker
this leads me into sort of really tactical thing. A couple weeks ago, I read a good blog about demoing with a purpose. And, and you know, the purpose was, you know, I think we all go out there and boom, slam the demo. And it's like, can we demo tie direct
00:12:56
Speaker
to the customers' business objectives. And you and I spoke about this a little bit, making that connection. What do you think the state of the art is today? Do we do that well? How can we do it better? I see it getting better. I see that the need has been there. I mean, at one point a while ago, it was a bit of a show up and throw up, right? I've got this demo that I've built, and everyone's going to see the same demo. And maybe I'll tailor it a little bit to the audience.
00:13:23
Speaker
I mean, how effective is that really, right? It's kind of silly to try to still take that approach. And like I mentioned before also, it's an understanding that, especially when you're selling to mid-size and enterprise and large enterprise organizations, there are so many people involved in the buying decision, right? So I've seen many meetings where the audience can include a C-level person, an architect, a business owner, an app owner, a technologist, procurement, right? You're selling to everyone.
00:13:50
Speaker
We've got to change the way that we demo. We've got to make sure that it appeals and makes sense to everyone. And so a few ways that I see this happening and being effective. The first is don't focus on the technical, right?
00:14:02
Speaker
audience that needs to know the technical, they're going to need to break out deep dive session or multiple POCs, whatever, right? You will get to that. Got to start, I think, with the understanding of the business value and understanding of what that organization is going to achieve and understanding of their industry, right? If you sell software that can be sold across industries, you still want to tailor the conversation because the value that a healthcare organization gets out of it versus retail versus consumer packaged goods versus automotive, whatever, right? Or even
00:14:32
Speaker
the public sector if you sell public sector to it's a very different value prop and so we're not demoing the tailor so it looks like
00:14:41
Speaker
they can actually see where your software fits into the way they do business today and how it improves it. You're missing a huge opportunity to show them that you actually understand what their industry does, what they do as an organization, and how you specifically can help them meet their business objectives, right? Well, and you hit on something. I love it. And we use this language to the business fit and the technical fit. And often, like
00:15:04
Speaker
That also goes back to discovery, right? It's like if we do the proper discovery, then we can demo at the business fit level. And it's funny, we've done some of this too, where it's like, okay, executives can leave the roof now after the business fit, and we're going to get into the weeds and the feeds and speeds on the next level. So I really like that. And you, you, you kind of touched on something that I wanted to go back to too, which is the, again, the complex decision-making.
00:15:28
Speaker
So yeah, there's, there's numbers out there. Now there's about 67 people per by its committee by no decision is on the rise. So it really, it really has changed and organizations are struggling to make decisions in this complex environment. You know, the business is struggling. Procurement
Correcting Client Misdiagnoses
00:15:45
Speaker
maybe have been doing it for a while, but how do you, how does that impact alignment? How can we better help customers make more holistic and informed decisions and reduce complexity?
00:15:56
Speaker
Well, I think that, you know, if we look at it from the perspective of organizations are, are doing a lot more work upfront, before they even talk to a vendor, is one way that we can kind of look at that, how we slice this brine. So for example, you know, I forget the exact stats, but you know, most organizations now are doing 40 to 60% of their research before they even engage with vendors. Yeah. So in the past, you had an opportunity as a vendor to
00:16:24
Speaker
to guide an organization perspective customer through the entire process, potentially educate them on the space and then your specific technology, build a relationship over time. The reality these days is that organizations, you don't know when a customer actually approaches you as a software vendor where they are in their buying cycle. They could be still very early on and not understand the space, but they could know very well what you do, how you do it, and how your competition does it.
00:16:52
Speaker
And so I think this is another area where alignment between the SE and AE is so critical because very early in that conversation with that customer, both of those individuals should be trying very hard to understand where the customer is in their buying cycle, right? It's beyond just basic discovery and qualification. It is actually trying to understand where they are in their journey. The reality is customers
00:17:17
Speaker
they're not going to spend the time and tell you the research they've already done. In fact, most of them don't want you to know, right? They're happy with the stuff they figured out. So you need to figure out where they are. So you're not starting too rudimentary. You've got to try to understand what they know about your product, where they think you shine, and maybe where they think you're not as strong. And the same with your competition where they shine, maybe where they're not as strong. That is done a lot better when an SE and an AE are aligned and working together. Because go ahead.
00:17:46
Speaker
they're just they're getting together and talking about it. Yeah. And another thing that comes to mind that a blog I read a while back, buyer seller insights blog, a similar and I think even more complex problem is where they're screwing it up. And the whole notion of this buyer seller insights thing was
00:18:02
Speaker
They think they're at a certain point in their journey, and they may have misdiagnosed. They may have misprescribed. And what we see is oftentimes we're leaving out important things, criteria that a certain area of the business should be thinking about. Or we're emphasizing something that's near and dear to our heart, but maybe shouldn't be. And I just wonder how you see that. It feels like that's an even harder problem is we almost have to
00:18:25
Speaker
reconfigure their brain to a degree. And that was the notion of the buyer seller insights thing. They're making bad decisions, suboptimal decisions. It's a great point, right? They still look to vendors often to help them out, right? So they are willing to understand, I think, where maybe the research they've done is not accurate. And so to
SEs as Trusted Advisors
00:18:46
Speaker
your point, Brian, that's exactly right. And again, the alignment part between the season AEs
00:18:51
Speaker
some of that conversation is going to be around stuff that they, it's going to lead such as, Hey, we, we license our product with this metric and other vendors license it in a different metric. Let's just say, for example, right? Knowing that that's different and how to make sure that the way that you do it is more valuable for this customer and having that conversation versus on the SC side where it's, Hey, this, the other vendors do things a certain way. We do it a different way. Let's make sure that the customer understands how our approach is a differentiator for them. Right? So again, it comes back to,
00:19:22
Speaker
being willing to spend the time to quickly understand where they are, what they know, and then to your point, taking them back a step and saying, let's just make sure that we're talking the same thing here. Yeah. And it's this to me, you didn't ask, but if you were to ask, I think this is a core.
00:19:39
Speaker
skill in today's environment is, you know, in the old days it was we need to understand the customers by our journey. We not understand the decision process. And now I believe it's, we have to lead that. Your team, I think your team of SEs and AEs have more total experience in watching how a decision should be made for your kind of technology and leading the customer. And I feel like
00:20:03
Speaker
the industry is a little bit behind and getting prescriptive to help with that problem that no decision is on the rise and people are struggling with complexity. We're still asking, what is your broken decision process? Here's a great way to do it.
00:20:17
Speaker
And it's funny, you know, I hear a lot how SEs strive to be a trusted advisor. I don't know if you've heard that. Yes. What's interesting to me is customers, I've been in meetings where customers will actually, you know, tell the sales rep, they, hey, hold on, I don't want to hear the answer from you. I want to hear from the SEs, right? SEs are known to be a little more honest, right? They're still selling was a little more honest, but also, they're the ones that are going to answer, you know, the product capabilities. So again, mapping it back to business value,
00:20:44
Speaker
The SEs need to be armed to be able to map product all the way up to business value. Because if the customer is asking to hear from them, we can't miss that opportunity for them to hear from the SE.
00:20:53
Speaker
after asking me to pause for a second. Yeah, it's funny. I worked in the convention business for a while, you know, we had the man or woman who sold the deal and then the convention service manager, which is the equivalent of an SE. And I heard a general manager say once, they like the salesperson, they love the convention service manager, right? That that's who's gonna make them successful. And I yeah,
Improving SE and AE Alignment
00:21:14
Speaker
I think you're exactly right. So let's, let's
00:21:17
Speaker
I'd love to end with like, from your perspective, 20 years of experience in this, what are the top couple things you think organizations should be doing? Like what's the big takeaway, the low hanging fruit to make improvements today? Sure, sure. So, you know, I'll start by saying that I think just in general, having done this for a long time and seeing a lot of interactions between SEs and AEs,
00:21:43
Speaker
know, I think it starts from a point of respect that each person has a slightly different job, or a significantly different job, maybe, but they're both working towards the same goal, right? Yeah, everyone's trying to convince the customer to see how their product is the best fit when it is and then also landing the deal, right? So understanding that
00:22:04
Speaker
the goal is the same, understanding that people have different personalities. And one of my favorite parts about this job is personalities. There's so many different personalities out there. And if you don't learn how to work with different personalities, you're not going to be successful, right? So I think that that's even outside of guidance is just general good business senses. Yeah. Have that kind of background. But I guess a couple of things I can say that
00:22:22
Speaker
are kind of actionable in terms of, you know, accelerating the alignment between SEs and AEs. The first is, it's about trust, right? It is about trusting each other and agreeing to responsibilities and accountability, right? Hey, this is what you own, this is what I own. Let's hold each other accountable. Let's ultimately make sure that we are working together to deliver success for the customer and for ourselves and our company, right? And, you know, kind of coming back to something I said before, Brian,
00:22:51
Speaker
you know, again, with this kind of SEs being a team of no or kind of pushing back, I think it's important for AEs to really understand and embrace that. I think AEs have more technical risks with customers than SEs. And by that, what I mean is
00:23:06
Speaker
A customer that, you know, you're selling a software solution that maybe isn't the best fit or is going to flex the product too much. If they end up buying your product, usually the SE is less engaged, but the AE stays engaged. And so now you have a customer that right out of the gate could be struggling with the implementation, might have a failed implementation, might churn, right? These are things that are a big risk as an AE. So I think it's important to have that trust where the AE is listening to the SE and really
00:23:35
Speaker
understanding that this is something I should do wise wide open and understand, you know, if something doesn't look right, let's make it right. Or let's figure out if it's just not the right fit. And then the second alignment point, I think that's actionable is just partnering tightly each step of the way. Yeah, the most functioning account teams with an SE and AE I've ever seen are the ones that are constantly talking. So
00:23:58
Speaker
before a meeting even happens, they're planning it out. Who's coming to this meeting? What are their roles? What is our agenda? What do we want to accomplish? Then before the meeting itself, they practice, right? I'm not, I'm not saying if it's a two hour meeting, you have to do a two hour dry run. Like that's a waste of time. You've got to have a touch point and just make sure, Hey, let's show what the noise, what the slides are, et cetera, et cetera. And then ultimately a debrief yet at the end.
00:24:21
Speaker
Right? At the end, both people will hear things slightly different while it's still fresh in your minds. Ideally, you're getting on a call and saying, here's what we heard. Here's stuff we have to follow up on. Here's who owns what. Here's some risk we heard. Let's figure out how to strategize around it.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yep. I'd love that, that point you made, I was at a conference last week and having a discussion with a gentleman about this, that renewal starts at qualification, right? If we sold the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong level early, early on, and you, you made that correlation, which I really, really like. Yeah. You, you've
Continuous Improvement and Community-Building
00:24:55
Speaker
been super generous with your time and ideas and, and what.
00:24:59
Speaker
What comes to mind is the idea of continuous improvement, that this is like just keep going at it, going at it. And as we build this community within the podcast, now it's fun because we've spoken with a few folks in your role and we now have this section on the subject. And I think it's a great place to have this community where people can come to and keep fostering that continuous improvement. So thank you so much for that. No, it's great. Thank you for the time. Appreciate it.