Top 7 Books for Sales Engineers
If your bookshelf looks like mine you’ve amassed quite a collection within your library over the years, Post-It notes jutting out from between pages and notes scrawled in the margins. All to learn more and get better with new approaches or beliefs, to hear from successful experiences and lessons learned in failures, or simply change the way you look at things. Each year I try to slim down the collection while fighting the urge to go digital but there’s something about the physicality of paper, to scribble notes and dog-ear a page that the Kindle can’t match. These are the texts I come back to again and again, for reference or referral. Enjoy.
Start With Why by Simon Sinek — the story book. This philosophy starts with what you or your company believe and why you exist in the first place. A good SE articulates the value of the product he or she sells, but a great SE articulates the vision. Back in 2013, my IT operations team at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online was struggling to support major BU mergers and the rapidly increasing number of product releases. Nights were often spent on war room conference calls and lunches were spent at our desks in fear of a production outage. I personally was unable to enjoy my weekend hiking because I had to be tied to a wifi signal in case PagerDuty fired an alert. So I invested heavily in a tool called AppDynamics and saw, nearly overnight, how life suddenly improved. When I later worked for AppDynamics my personal sales pitch was “We believe we will improve people’s lives.” Maybe it sounds corny but I lived it, I believed it, and that was motivation to share with others. Find yours and inspire prospects and teammates to see your vision too!
The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers by Chris White — the fundamentals book. White outlines the thought and actions of a sales engineer and how practice across these disciplines create exceptional individuals. Often viewed as an introductory text, seasoned SEs have frequently found themselves disillusioned by a failing sales partnership or lack of deal progression/conversion. In those cases even senior SEs pause to reflect back on these fundamental tenets.
Demonstrating to Win by Robert Riefstahl — the demo book. Whether you’re a seasoned SE or transitioning into the role, Riefstahl helps you identify and fix critical demo skill issues. I recommend reading the whole thing once but afterward bookmark the ‘Demo Crimes’ sections for quick reference. The most common areas SEs find room for improvement are close-ended questions (“Are there any questions?”), pausing to understand the context behind a question before answering (ref: Stop! Don’t answer that!), and shifting demo messaging to value and away from the features/functions.
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson — the scoping book. A sales engineer often spends decades in their field of study — observability, network, security, analytics, infrastructure, and more— so it should come as no surprise they exude a tremendous amount of thought leadership. Buyers should take advantage of this free consultation but often have a preconceived bias or plan. Dixon and Adamson advocate that you shouldn’t shy away from a conversation or take direction at face value. You should explore, guide, challenge, and produce a narrative that drives toward achieving the best outcome for your prospect. And if your solution isn’t that, back away. But if it is, the value of your partnership through this exercise just increased and made your POVs a hell of a lot easier!
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie — the champion-building book. In sales cycles, you should always on the lookout for pain, the people who are impacted by it, and the people who want to solve it. Building empathy, trust, and partnership with these individuals can and will be the deciding factor to get the deal. Carnegie wrote of these principles nearly 100 years ago and they hold true today but they need to come naturally and they need to be practiced! This is the mortar that turns your champion-building events — market expertise, whitepapers, education and training, competitive analysis, POVs, and demos — into a solid champion-building foundation.
The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon — the sales excellence book. Even though this article is for sales engineers, nothing can be more powerful than to be an eye-to-eye partner with your sales team. McMahon teaches how to think of your deals and your territory, as well as your team and company, as a business owner, and to speak on value, thoroughly qualify pain, and solve problems (proofs of value) not simply do technical proofs of concepts. In addition, it looks deeply at the roles of managers and how to conduct deal reviews so we don’t yell at the scoreboard. Looking at your own technical playbooks with this model in mind can remarkably improve your pedigree and partnership.
Mastering Technical Sales by John Care and Aron Bohlig — the textbook, literally. This beefy little number covers all aspects related to sales engineering, from demo skills to planning organizational structures. I’ll admit that I haven’t read its’ entirety but the nuggets of wisdom one can pluck from within its 340 pages are gold. Care and Bohlig also wrote The Sales Engineer Manager’s Handbook for if you plan on following a leadership track.
