Putting Engineering in Business
As a remote employee, I am online most of the time, often much more than I would like to. And often I get asked what do I really do? Here is where I try to answer.
I am a SE: 1/2 engineer, or 1/8 engineer, or a full-time salesperson depending on the time of day. Many people think I am furiously typing code/emails or being aggressive with people around me all the time. In reality, most of my time goes in reading, quietly browsing through forums, articles, tech-news trying to understand what is being done and how. I spend a lot of time prospecting and mapping the target organization’s IT landscape.
Being a remote employee and a SE my voice is everything. These are my best tools from Sennheiser, Bose, Logitech, Plantronics, and Jabra.
Sharing a few other tenets which I have gathered throughout my life which any budding sales engineer should use.
Be Savvy and as flexible as a sponge
Learn to work in continuous ambiguity. It is hard to come for an engineer as we are used to the fixed output of computers but for any SE it is a core skill to handle uncertainty. Be ready if a customer cancels on you off after a 6hr flight or petty A/V issues. Be ready to revert to the whiteboard if things don’t work.
You will probably have a few accounts which you need to parallelly manage. Learn to say more with less. As you meet more senior people they will have even less time, be assured any mail over 200 words will not be read & any monologue over 3 minutes will make the audience delve into phones. Treat your communication as Mark Twain said
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Leave your opinions at home
Unless you work from home, in that case, leave them somewhere else. This applies to most of the other personality aspects too. Be co-opinioned with the person you are talking to, be approachable and relatable. Be apple guy with an apple fan, an android with android, scotch or wine, whatever…
Leave any sense of entitlement behind. Sales is a great leveler, no one gives a shit if you were top of your class or if you are Stanford/Harvard or if you have 35 years of experience in a field. It is what you are selling and how you are doing it at that moment. Be grateful for the 15 minutes a CIO gives you and make it count.
Be good with numbers
All deals are numbers, more so when you are talking to C-Level. This was difficult to grasp in my early years but as I became a principal with more interactions with CISO/CIOs I have learned value propositioning is everything. I will recommend doing a finance /economic course to understand the basics to be able to translate technology to $. Be a no-nonsense direct guy, have an ultimate understanding of your offering at your fingertips. You will face a lot of pushback and negativities, do not react to them. Concentrate on your A-game.
A “let me get back to you” will set you back months.
Be the trusted advisor
Put yourself in the other party’s shoes. I cannot emphasize it more. People work with people they like and if you can wield influence without having formal authority on people you are a true leader who can get things done in a target organization.
Always have a calm demeanor, in sales, your win is probably someone else’s loss. Be calm on the top but have furious calculations on what is going behind the covers. Understand the under-the-covers agenda-linking and be savvy to predict what is coming up next. As they say “Be like a duck — Calm on the surface but paddle like hell beneath the surface. If you want to see the sunshine of a successful account, you have to weather the storm of deep scrutiny and relentless competition. SEs have a wealth of information from working in cross-industry domains, “Give and share knowledge without an expectation of return”, it will go a long way!
Have a solid understanding of IT history
(Not just of computer science), you will deal with a lot of IT veterans who will have decades on you, to carry a conversation with them, you will need to know a little bit about the pre-windows era. I have frequently been told son, this is not how it works here… ( I wish I was that young) respect that emotion and work with it. People I have worked with have seen more projects fail than I have executed, it is fascinating how they open up when you ask them about their first Burroughs computer.
Also, know the future
Learn to navigate into the unknown. A reference is the Blue Ocean strategy which every SE should learn. It empowers one to venture into the uncharted and create a possibility where no apparent needs exist.
I have spent countless hours chasing the wrong people, trying to convince them to do something which either they were not comfortable doing or did not see the point. You need to sell the right value AND to the right person. Of all the qualities this one defines the Maverick SEs who find opportunity out of nowhere.
Be the Plumber
Connecting the dots is very important in the modern world, no enterprise software works by itself, It will need to integrate with the landscape. All Tech is full of defacto standards and then 100x exceptions. Every company will have a complex IT mix of systems, networks, products & people. You will need to know how to they will talk to each other and how your product or service will fit in this complex jigsaw puzzle.
Hunger for success
Process, timelines, being agile, being lean is for regular engineers, a killer SE is all of that, and then much more. No one is going to direct or spoon feed you, you have to go out there and do your thing all by yourself.
Be a master negotiator, as Chris Voss says in Never Split the Difference, negotiating wrong can be fatal. This could not be truer for a SE, agreeing to a wrong requirement or mis-projecting an opportunity can be fatal to a deal.
Be ready for the best and prepare for the worst, anything can go wrong while chasing an opportunity. A SE needs to be highly motivated and resilient in the face of multiple adversaries. The best engineers don’t work in offices, they are in the field; That’s why they say never save your best dress for the wedding
