SE 101: Working with Marketing
This is part of a series on Sales Engineering. In other posts (to come), we've established that Sales Engineering sits in the middle of bunch of teams.
This time we're focusing on Marketing.
Marketing is about explaining what you do and how it will improve prospects' lives. Here 'prospect' includes potential employees as well as customers. It's so important to get external messaging right out to build your pipeline with the right types of leads.
Sales Engineering supports Marketing by getting specific on how your solution will help your prospect. More often than not, that means saving time/effort/money or unlocking new opportunities and growth.
Getting this value across using the product is a core responsibility of Sales Engineering. Aspects of this will be ongoing, part of a regular business cadence, while others spike throughout the year.
Core responsibilities
Getting the value across
- In early-stage or founder-led companies, helping Marketing understand the value of your solution can be handled by Leadership or the Product team. As a company scales, though, Sales Engineers become more in-tune with your prospect's reasons for buying. Marketing needs to properly understand these reasons to drive interest in the market. It's critical that your Marketing team understands the value proposition of your product, since their external activity scales beyond the voice of any one person.
- For some solutions, the Marketing team may be able to directly use the product to build familiarity and see the value. This hand-on experience can help build empathy with customers and users, but it's not alway possible. For more complex, technical, or domain-specific solutions, access to the product might not make sense.
- Instead, Sales Engineering should make sure the Marketing team understand
- The reasons customers tend to buy
- The value customers get from your solutions
- How a customer's life would be worse without your solution
- This is especially important in companies with a rapid development cycle, where new features and improvements are constantly being shipped. Strong marketing teams will use each release as a mini-event.
Producing product-related content
To support these releases or to just ensure 'freshness' in your messaging, Sales Engineering help make external facing content. This can include blogs, product guides, demo videos, customer case-studies, product screenshots, and more. Note - some of these may be owned by post-sales or support teams.
Sales Engineers are your product and sales experts; the team understands prospects' biggest pain points and can easily show solutions using specific features. This team will also own the more complex product demo environments, which contains latest functionality and demos for range of use-cases and industries. This allows the team to build product outputs which will resonate with prospects. Marketing can take these to build strong external facing materials by overlaying company voice/tone, making tweaks for performance (e.g. adding keywords), and tailoring for your ICP.
Initially, this can be a lift. You may see responsibilities shift from other teams, like Product or Support, into Sales Engineering. As a company matures, making this content should become more predictable, which helps manage the team's workload. Part of this cadence should include refreshing old materials, though this is a lower priority.
Outside of this regular cadence, Sales Engineering should be heavily involved in new product launches. Similar to above, this team can use their deep product and prospect knowledge to show how new capabilities will help existing and potential customers. This often requires building new demo materials and solutions ahead of the launch, preparing external-facing videos, and gathering outputs for other materials. This can be a time of high intensity.
Supporting events, like conferences and webinars
The support for events will vary based on your overall marketing strategy. It's likely, though, your GTM approach will involve some type of event (whether virtual, in-person, or both). Some solutions, particularly for Enterprise buyers, will see a lot of pipeline generated from in-person events. Other solutions, typically with a more PLG strategy, may lean towards virtual event or pre-recorded videos. Either way, these will be times of intensity for Sales Engineering.
While Marketing handles a lot of planning and logistics, at conferences Sales Engineers are the stars of the show. These events are a significant investment of time and money, and have a huge opportunity cost. To make the investment worthwhile, the team needs to showcase the product in the best light to as many prospects as possible. This often means enabling the entire cohort (e.g. Account Executives, Leadership) with demo environments and talk tracks. To ensure Marketing attribution, lead tracking, and effective follow-ups, it's critical to log contacts and take notes from conversations.
For speaking events, in-person or virtual webinars, a combination of thought-leadership and product demos can work well. This setup helps communicate the market positioning and value proposition before jumping into a demo. This can be led by Sales Engineering or in collaboration with other teams (e.g. Leadership, Post-Sales).