Eps 4.0 Design Flow - Andrae SEAC Swiss Army Knife Current State 9.12.25

Andrae and I go deep into what the 3Rs are for the SEAC - Sales Engineer, Architect Consultant - 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I think this is the perfect time to pivot to the to the S E because you know or the S A, right? Which is the the sales engineer or solutions architect, solutions engineer. You'll hear them called SE's, SAs. The reality is they're the technical component. And obviously this is near near and dear to me because I've I've worn this hat for many, many years. Um, but it rides on the wave of what Kevin just mentioned. They are the ones that even though they have a comp plan, right, their comp plan is a little different than the accounting executive comp plan. But the reality is the accounting exec tends to drive their time, right? And that's a good and a bad thing, right? Generally and largely it's a bad thing because most account executives have one focus and the SEs are scattered across multiple opportunities, trying to do all the due diligence and answer all the technical questions. And in addition to doing a lot of the gaps that we're going to talk about in a minute, that the AE has left or exposed us to, right? And in the meantime, to Kevin's point, we burn a lot of calories, right? Driven by this SE or sorry, this AE behavior or misbehavior.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

So and to complement that, we we burn a lot of calories and we have no abilities to push back. Um just because the sales rep will go to the account uh leadership, sales leadership, and push back, and the sales leadership will always come down on the side of their sales rep, as you would expect, a parent and the child. Um and without pure data results, which is what the agents can provide, we have no real good data to push back on.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

That's 100%. That's a hundred percent. And very good point, because that's something that you know you and I have seen and battled long through our careers, right? I know for a fact as an SE, and I've even come to you, right? Like, Kevin, dude, this is this is not it, dude. This guy doesn't understand, right? This lady doesn't understand. This is not it. And we know very well, right, what's going on. We know what's not gonna happen, we know this is not a deal, and we go through those QBRs, quarterly business reviews. We'll talk through those those later or maybe on a different segment. But we go through all of these things, meeting preps, QBRs, different sessions, different time sucks, so to speak, um, just to know from knowing up front that it's it's going nowhere. But all of a sudden we invest eight, nine months into that just to go nowhere. And you think back and say, well, what could I have done with that if we were being productive with that eight months of time?

SPEAKER_01 2:15

So in my books, I call it C S E A C. Um, and they there's four different roles and they all have different purposes. They start from more salesy related all the way down to more architectural related, and depending upon the solutions that you're selling. For example, this technology is perfect for companies that sell platform technologies. In other words, they have five or six different pieces of technology in their platform requiring seven subject matter experts, which is what we're trying to eliminate, right? Not eliminate the roles, but eliminate the need to be having them waste their time on roles and scare the customer that it takes seven of you in order to explain the product. Um the traditional sales engineer based off its name is more features, advantages, and benefits. They're selling a single product like workday or service now, and they have uh a standard demonstration, and they go through those motions and they can ask questions that are very relevant to that one product set, whether it's a document management solution, an HRM system, or HR uh resource management system. And then it moves all the way down to let's say Elasticsearch, which is a bottom-up sales approach, which is selling to technologists. And that that's those conversations are very highly technical, very architectural level. They're not about features, advantages, and benefits, and they're really not even talking to the line of business owner. But the irony is all those companies like Elastic and Snowflake desperately want to talk to the line of business because the technologists have no money. Um so there's the gamut of you know SE, sales engineer, solution engineer, solution consultant, sales consultant, solution architect, sales architect. You don't really see sales architect out there, more as just a solution architect role. And then you have the specialist role or evangelist type role out there.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah. And I I, you know, adding to that, I I find it's funny because as you speak about it, it sounds like the Swiss Army knife. And in reality, it is why we get used the most, because we are used as a Swiss Army knife. It is that is the one role in this whole ecosystem that can truly multi-thread on its own if you have a good one, right? Like that S E or S A or whatnot, they've done this so long. And frankly, a lot of it's due to the shortcomings on the front side of the sales cycle, right? For so long, they've walked into a room thinking they're gonna have a technical conversation, which is what they should do, right? And say, hey, so you know, to your point, whether it's workday or CRM or Elasticsearch or Grafana, you're looking to say, like, how are you gonna use the system? Why are you gonna use this system? Like, why this? Like, we we all like Kevin and I, we know these very well, the why, right? Why buy why buy this solution? Why buy anything? Why buy it now, right? But the reality is you're trying to expose, like, how are they, is this a good fit? Do we truly have something for them, right? Because everything before this is kind of vaporware, right? It sounds good, we think it's there, but now we got to get tangible. We got to understand like, does this solution meet your needs? If it doesn't, is there a way for it to? It may be that's just an integration part. So, all right, cool, that's a that's a yes, we just gotta do this. And the technical component does that. The challenge is a lot of times you walk in the room ready to have that conversation, and the first question you ask is, like, oh, you know, beyond how you doing today, etc., is so, you know, heard you're interested in this solution, da-da-da-da. And it's like, well, and then all of a sudden the whole conversation changes because a lot of the qualification wasn't done up front, and it becomes the well, we weren't really looking for elastic search, but we're kind of looking, you know, what we really want, and then you got to tease out like, is there something for us? Is what they really want still something in our bailiwick, something that we can still handle, right? Or do we partner with somebody? Or so you're you become again the Swiss Army knife of trying to deal with whatever the customer is bringing in terms of further qualifying just to do your part of the job, which is to get to eventually what we call the technical win, right? Technically, we are sound solution, you know, the sound solution and the right solution for this customer.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah, to end that statement on technical win. The most critical part of a technical win is a customer has said two major things to you. Number one, yes, you are the vendor that we're selecting. We're not looking at any other vendors, and we'll sponsor you to leadership. Don't have those two answers, you don't have a technical win.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

That's a good that's a that's a 100%. Because without and without that, you people say, Well, technical win, okay, where's that coming to play? Well, when it comes up to the executive and the decision maker, these things that we pull these other metrics and details out of that, you know, in a sales cycle, they get their feedback from the quote unquote underlings, right? These people that we're having these multi-threaded conversations with, right? In other words, at the end of the day, when the budget goes up and they say, Okay, we need this, this, and this, all they're gonna go back to the line managers and ask is, is this the right solution? This is what you need. Okay, cool. Well, you put it on the table, all right, cool, we'll go with that, right? But if the answer was no, it goes nowhere. And that executive will never even see it. No one nonetheless sign off on it. So great point, Kevin.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Yeah, and in addition to that, um, since you and I are just piling out on each other because it's starting to spark some ideas here. Um, no one wants to take risks. You're a human. These are all humans, they have titles, but at the end of the day, they don't want to lose their job. You know, no one loses their job by buying Salesforce.com as or CRM. No one loses their job by getting um, you know, Deloitte or PwC involved because if the project fails, they blame it on PWC, not my fault. You know, so we are all about mitigating risks and allowing people to be able to point blame somewhere other than themselves.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

There you go. And that's 100%. I mean, I've you know, I I worked at Cisco years ago, and that was probably the easier part of the job of being an SE there is because most of the time when you walked in the room, you naturally had the whim they had already invested the year or two or three or ten before, and they're looking for just the next evolution of upgrade, et cetera, because you were what we call the quote unquote safe space, right? So to your point, whether it's Salesforce or Cisco or IBM, these are the safe space.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Adobe was the same, Adobe was the same way.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

You walked in. I mean, they used to roll the red red carpet for us, you know. That's right, that's right. At Elastic, maybe not so much.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

It was like, oh, well, and that's the thing. And I I and I always laugh because of the story that you told when I first joined Elastic, and you were talking about the guy on the plane when you walked in with the Elastic hoodie, and he was like, You work at Elastic and you got the big hug. And then if anybody knows Kevin, we brought we we've broken him in now, but before, that was that was not a thing. And so, but but to your but to your point, like when when you are the smaller organization or a smaller company, especially like especially in this day and age, we live in a day and age for years. People have said innovation, creativity, etc. And let's face it, that means you gotta take risk, right? Because if it's not in-house, it's likely to be in these smaller companies, these startups, these innovators, right? The snowflakes, the elastic searches that are you know now more prominent, but they started from somewhere, and that means there was a risk to take if you're gonna invest in them. Well, this is to your point, like that is really how you drive that business forward, right? For years you've had right the the commonplace, you've had the the big box. Now it's time to go find those other solutions that can truly help drive and transform your business. And to do that, you do have to take those risks. Uh, but you want to make sure that they're qualified and more sound-based risk. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

And just to kind of take us back a little bit to the pre-sales solution engineer CAC role, uh what one one important thing to keep understand is that by the nature of the title, sales rep is not to be trusted. Anytime you hear a sales rep, you mean you walk into a car dealership, you walk into a furniture store, and that slick person comes up to you, you're immediately turned off. But if you walk into the service room and there's a service technician at the car auto dealership and you start asking him questions, well or her, you're gonna trust that, you're gonna trust that person's conversation. We are the service department of sales, and the SE or CAC is immediately trusted, which gives us the rights and privileges, hard questions that the rep typically doesn't ask. So when we get into the agent, by the way, I changed the term from Romeo Juliet, where you have someone in the background telling you what's going on. Tomorrow the anchor uh on the news media where you have uh an earpiece in your ear and the main desk is telling you what to say and how to say it. That's what this agent is going to be. It's the earpiece in the ear, um, acting very much like the control office or providing insights. Um, and we are the trusted advisor. So we are really trusted as a C as an S E. And that gives us the power. This is why Cs are never salespeople. They don't, there's no dual role. And this is also why professional services people, these are people that actually implement the product, consultants like you all, are not there for selling as well. Because one day are you am I charge am I getting charged for you now, or am I not getting charged for you now on the professional services side? And we'll save that for later uh when we get to the implementation. Okay, so we talked about the SDR, what their role is, how they do it, why they do it, at what stage in their career that migrates to an account executive. There are three different account executives. They're mid-market, commercial, or sorry, commercial mid-market, and enterprise. They all have different capabilities. The pre-sale solution engineer falls into four categories: CAC and SE, sales engineer, solution architect, solution engineer, solution consultant. Um, and they have different requirements. And we also talked about the sales side.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

You got it. And the one thing I'll add to the account executive pot is we talk about the three. You have the commercial, mid-market, enterprise. And a lot of uh companies, as they mature and they start having these longer uh term customers, they'll have one more, and that's the strategic, right? Where they'll take, you know, there's a handful that have what we call the strategic, like the GEs of the world or the ones that are just you just they need all hands on deck at all times because they have the highest investment into what what our company's doing, right? And so they get like a strategic tier, which is above the enterprise level.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Um, and so would that be also a name to count, you think, or no?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Yeah, you can call it named accounts, absolutely. Yeah, it's a good point because when we talk, you know, as Kevin's talking about, like this the CAC, and you're like, well, so all of those roles, it depends on the company, right? Some companies, like so they have those four terms within CAC that Kevin defined, some companies, they're every their technical arm are solutions engineers, right? Some companies that's sales engineer. It's it's a title, but the reality is the role until we get to implementation. That role in this sales cycle, in other words, that role beyond the account executive is your technical arm. And generally, like I said, they are the Swiss Army knife, they are multi-threaded forward and backwards because they are gonna, like I said, the teasing out things that the SE may not have talked about, things the the account executive missed altogether, the SDR missed, uh, those gaps. But also, as we talk about further down the road in our you know, subsequent sec uh sessions where we talk about you know the CSMs or the uh customer success managers, right? Those folks that when we get to implementation, like once we've sold, now we're gonna implement the SE is still engaged because they're the ones who are sitting there giving the purview to that CSM, et cetera. So, point being this this part to Kevin's point of being trusted, a lot of that is you've earned it because you've been in the trench to expose all of these details that are necessary for the business, not just for the SE, but they're necessary for the AE. In other words, the SC drives the win for everybody. Like, you know, I know I have a bias, but the reality is they do, even up until the point where there are very often times where it's crunch time, end of quarter, we need to get a deal across. And as an SE, I've been asked, hey, can you reach out to such and such? Because to Kevin's point a few minutes ago, they've reached out. The AE has reached out, the accounting exec has reached out five times, and the customer's like not paying them no attention because they are as soon as they see the email from you know accounting executive Mario, they already know, like, oh man, they're hitting me up for something. They want one dollars, right? When the SE reaches out, those relationships are tried and true. They've been in the trench, they've probably tested some things beyond the demo, right? They've dug in to say, hey, you had these kind of key corner cases that we need to test. Let's sit down, understand what's going on in your business. And I there comes a point in time where even early days, the SE knows just as much about that business in terms of that tech as that engineer on site, because you had to immerse yourself to understand their business and how it works. And then you're called on to say, hey, can you reach out to your contact to see if they can kind of push this along to get this deal closed? And that happens way more often than people realize.