Sales Engineer Manager's Handbook

Most presales managers – and particularly newly-minted managers – have to learn the management part of the job the slow, hard way, bit by challenging bit, over time – with commensurate mistakes and lost opportunities. The Sales Engineer Manager’s Handbook is like having a personal mentor providing guidance, in minutes, that otherwise takes years. Presales managers start their management journeys in Stage 1 of the 4 stages of learning: Stage 1: Unconsciously incompetent – they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t have experience in team time management, developing and growing a team, coaching, hiring (and firing), HR issues, budgeting, team scheduling, setting and tracking on team goals and KPI’s, saying “no” (in many cases), working with other department managers, and a host of other functions. The Sales Engineer Manager’s Handbook helps managers move from Stage 1 to Stage 2, and then rapidly to Stage 3: Stage 2: Consciously incompetent – they now know what they don’t know but aren’t sure what to do (or how to address). Stage 3: Consciously competent – they know what to do and how to do it. The Sales Engineer Manager’s Handbook is a manual that enables new managers (and existing presales managers) to rather dramatically compress the time needed to move through these three stages – and to reduce or avoid the mistakes and missteps that otherwise take place. Once you have consumed this Handbook and have implemented and practiced the ideas for a while, you’ll find yourself entering Stage 4… What’s Stage 4 for presales managers? Stage 4: Unconsciously competent – they know what to do and do it naturally, without having the think about it. Let the journey begin!

I have been training sales engineers and sales engineering managers for years. This is a concise discussion of the unique challenges Sales engineering managers face. This should be in your toolkit.

I have been intimately familiar with the sales engineer profession for 25 years now. This book is a must read for all professionals regardless of seniority. There are some great frameworks, like MARS (Minimum Acceptable Results of Salescall) and BARS (Best Achievable Results of Salescall) that I felt were very constructive, informative and help with overall productivity. I have purchased a dozen copies of this book for friends in the profession and highly recommend this book.

For the tenured SE leaders, this book has a lot of great reminders of those best practices that you may have fallen away from and would benefit from returning to. For the future SE leader, this the user manual on how to build a great career as an SE Leader. It provides both insight and actions into the steps required to succeed or it might help you decide that the role isn't for you. Either way, time well spent.

Good book and fast and thrusted seller