Tom Mount

I've found that most live demos are too dynamic to be completely scripted, but you should still have a rough outline of things you know you need to cover. I'll usually start by saying something like "We have 30 minutes to go through the product; I have a few things I want to show you but this is your time - if you see something that you want to look at in more detail, stop me and we'll take a closer look, and if I'm boring you, tell me that too and we'll move on." It's also a good idea to know going into a demo what is most important to the prospect so you can emphasize things that they'll find relevant.

While it's important to be able to learn new things independently with whatever method is best for you - reading documentation, experimenting with new technologies, trial-and-error, etc. - it is just as valuable to be able to help others learn, too. This could mean writing your own summaries or documentation, recording how-to videos, or just sharing the things you've learned with the rest of the team so they can also benefit from what you have learned.

One way to stand out from the crowd as a sales engineer is to grow your ability to teach others what you know. Silos are dangerous in any field, both for the company and the individual. If you have a willingness and an ability to share your expertise in a way that elevates your teammates and unblocks your prospects/customers, you will provide more value to your organization than you would bring just by being an expert on your product or service.

We steer our discovery in such a way that we focus on being a holistic solution, which usually leads prospects away from point-by-point competitive analyses. We do this by exploring how the prospect is handling use cases we know our competitors have no solution for, even if the prospect didn't identify those use cases as points to consider on our call. By broadening the scope of the engagement beyond what the prospect had been considering, they often see more value in our offering, especially if it means consolidating multiple vendors.

Especially early on in the product lifecycle, it's been very helpful for me to anticipate prospect needs and independently work on demos or PoCs that aren't directly tied to specific customers, then provide feedback to Product on the bugs that I found, so they can address them before any external customers run into them. This way our product gets the benefit of real-world use case testing without putting any customers on hold.