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Tony Byrne

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Looking for more E in SE

16-Dec-2008

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Enterprise Search, Portals and Content Integration, Web Content Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology

Sitting through countless vendor demos to clients over the past couple of years, I've noticed a trend -- at least among Web CMS and Portal vendors -- of sales engineers ("SEs") emphasizing sales over engineering.

In the typical vendor pitch you'll see one or two vendor account reps (a.k.a., salespeople) who are mostly there to set the stage for the actual demo, given in turn by one or more SEs. Increasingly I find SEs somewhat removed from actual implementation details (except what they've customized on their own laptops). While comfortable issuing jargon about "persistence layers" and "dynamic cache invalidation," they don't always have much depth on the mechanics of how their tools actually work behind the scenes. Deeper questions frequently get added to the dreaded (and usually unfulfilled) we'll-get-back-to-you list. Or requests for details get side-tracked with a digression about successful Customer X or Customer Y -- the way a product manager would talk.

At some level the problem is us. If we don't create scenarios or specific questions that require technical depth, vendors will respond accordingly. Vendors also fear that a knowledgeable engineer (a.k.a. geek) will lose the attention of key business decision-makers in the room. Sizzle sells, and SEs with sizzle tend to get more S....if you let them.

I've often thought the best combo for a vendor demo team contains a salesperson, plus a professional services consultant (who can talk to real implementations), plus an engineer with substantial depth on the product. In any case, if your project is important, specify the type of team you want to see, and signal to the vendor very explicitly what you want them to demo and the expertise you expect them to bring. Then test, test, test. Our evaluation reports and educational seminars detail further how to create a test-based selection process.