“Get the customer to try out the product early on in the sales process or see the product early on in the sales process without wasting a sales engineer’s time.” – Ramzi Marjaba in today’s Tip 1016
What’s your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Ramzi!
We the Sales Engineers
Ramzi Marjaba on LinkedIn
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Ramzi Marjaba. Ramzi has been a Sales Engineer since 2014 and started the ‘We The Sales Engineers’ podcast in 2018 as the first resource that SEs can consistently turn to for weekly content. Since then he’s helped 100s of SEs improve their skills, and will help many more. Here he is:
Ramzi Marjaba: Let me start off by saying that this might be an obvious thing. Discovery is not a qualification, and some people may already know that. But I’ve been invited by so many salespeople throughout my career to a discovery call, which turned out to be a qualification call mixed with some discovery and then a forced demo towards the end. But the qualification and discoveries solve two totally different purposes. And if the salesperson is knowledgeable enough in the technology and the product, sure, they might be able to pull it off. But in my experience, more often than not, a sales engineer will be pulled into a meeting.
Now, if you need a sales engineer to be on the meeting, then being pulled into a qualification call is a waste of almost everybody’s time. A qualification call is a 15 minutes call to figure out if they have budgets, if they have influence. Are they tire pickers? If there’s a technological fit and that you can qualify or disqualify early on. And where are they in the buying process? A sales engineer should never be involved in that. I’ve been through meetings where it took us an hour of me asking technical questions, trying to figure out their business problem only to find out they don’t have any budget set aside for it, or their budget is way lower than what the solution they’re asking for.
My tip for today. If you really want to go beyond the MQL and the SQL, Marketing Qualified Leads, and Sales Qualified Leads, you need to get to what potentially could be a demo qualified lead and shout out to Garin Hess from Consensus who I first heard say that term, and the whole point of that is to get the customer to try out the product early on in the sales process or see the product early on in the sales process without wasting a sales engineer’s time.
If it’s the same demo over and over and you can just prerecorded and send it to the customer, and there are many software that do that all. I’m not affiliated with anybody. I know a lot of them. Go Consensus, Walnut, Breeze, Navtech, SnackWise. So if you’re not familiar with these, you might want to check them out. Final statement of the day. Do a proper qualification and save your SE when you really need your sales engineer versus just shoving them into every meeting because they might not show up.
Scott Ingram: For links to check out “We the Sales Engineers” and to connect with Ramzi, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1016. Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!