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The secret sauce to your sales success? It's what happens before the sale. It's the pre-sales. And it's more than demo automation. It's the work that goes on to connect technology and people in a really thoughtful way. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, pre-work centered around the human that makes the dream work, but you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what you already do best—combining your technical skills with your strategic insights. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to grow revenue. You're not just preparing for the sale—you're unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales engineers who make a difference, their challenges, their successes, and the human connections that drive us all, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to V5. This is the show where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox some of the hottest, most controversial topics, and B2B sales. Whether it's sales engineers or pre-sales, I have the pleasure. Today I'm talking to Kyle Smith, who's the Managing Partner at The Bridge Group. Kyle, I'm going to start the timer. You're going to get on your soapbox. You ready to cook?
Kyle Smith [00:00:23]:
Let's do it.
Joe Miller [00:00:24]:
All right, let's do it. What do you got?
Kyle Smith [00:00:25]:
So, for me, sales engineers, while it's an efficient use of resources, should not be pooled, meaning a men to many relationship with the account executive function and the SE function. The reason why is that oftentimes when I see the pooling of resources, the AE's and the SEs do not have a tight connection, and that just leads to a clunky experience for the customer or potential buyer. And so you have demos that run like product trainings, where we don't have logical pause points, they're not well customized and tied back to the pain points that were uncovered in the discovery process. And the reason why is because if I'm an AE and I have to use five ses over the course of this quarter, it's really inefficient for me to have to do prep calls with every single one of them. Now, if you and I are directly linked, and you are my SE, for instance, and we schedule a 30 minutes call, we can run through all of the demos we have planned for that week, so we can get on the exact same page. Here's the areas I want you to push deeper into. Here's why I want you to pause and just give me space to jump in and ask logical questions. Here's the ones where, hey, there's a landmine, a cultural landmine over here.
Kyle Smith [00:01:35]:
Don't talk about this thing with that specific prospect we have coming up, but in 30 minutes, we can run through all of them. It's just not a reasonable thing to be able to do when I have to engage with potentially five, and they have to engage with five AE resources. So not a fan of the polling, understand that it can be a requirement, but it's a no for me.
Joe Miller [00:01:56]:
This is the first time I'm hearing it from the AE's lens, and we often talk about it from the lens of the SE manager who's trying to find those efficiencies. But I think it's interesting. You say it's from the account executive's perspective, where a lot of the productivity is drained from them on having to kind of reset, set context over and over again. So really interesting take. How have you fared in that model yourself? And, you know, the SE through the AE, but where have you seen it work really well?
Kyle Smith [00:02:20]:
Anybody who's done it, we see it work really well. But I don't have to be responsible for the Roi of sales engineer headcount. Like, sure, it rolls up to the overall CAC goals of the whole go-to-market team, but I haven't seen it really break down at scale. Churn is the only one thing.
Joe Miller [00:02:40]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:02:41]:
Because Churn all of a sudden erodes it really quickly. When it's a pooling model, you really don't notice much of a difference if one person leaves. I guess you could consider a pod. If you have a pod and a pod member drops out, how do you deal with coverage? Coverage essentially means you're back to the pool. And so how do you maintain the integrity of the direct alignment through periods of churn? That's really where it's more burden on the management team to figure out how you're going to do that. That's the only downside.
Joe Miller [00:03:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Seeing pros and cons on this and even our first episode of season two, the argument was to use multiple ses in a deal to help gain efficiencies and bring multiple perspectives to the table. But again, from the account executive side, I could see and understand the trade offs that are being made here.
Kyle Smith [00:03:27]:
The multiple se one is an interesting one, as long as there are very clear lanes. Because to me, the last thing you want is a prospect who's saying, who's the voice, who's shaping the vision for what life will be like with your products and services. And if there's multiple people, and hopefully they don't contradict each other, but if they do, it can just create more uneasiness or even inject skepticism into the process on the part of the buyer. And we definitely want to avoid that.
Joe Miller [00:03:51]:
Yeah. And I can certainly see where, again, having a model where the AE is in control. The AE controls a deal from click to close, and it's there to utilize resources that make sense. It can be burdensome to have to go through this over and over again. Especially you talk about political landmines, right? So much of these things may not be technical issues in themselves, but understanding political, understanding, commercial, understanding, some of the nuances there. If the AE is not great at providing that continuity, you better dang well hope that the sales engineer is.
Kyle Smith [00:04:25]:
Yeah, 100%.
Joe Miller [00:04:26]:
So now, what would you say to folks who just say, look, I just don't have the resources to do it like we have to do pool for a variety of reasons. What would be something that you advise me help them get through that in.
Kyle Smith [00:04:36]:
The middle, dial in your management operating rhythm. Force the collaboration between the AE's and the SES, no matter what it happens more organically and naturally when you're not using the pooled resources. But even if you are, force them to actually collaborate deals and not just assume that they're going to get a, be able to jump into a demo, shift things into cruise control and be like, yeah, we're going to be able to give the customer the experience that they deserve, force the planning to make sure that the customer experience is optimized.
Joe Miller [00:05:07]:
I love account executives, but I also love it when they are accountable and driving kind of the things that needs to be done and so putting them in that position or kind of forcing the energy when you don't have the luxury of having multiple kind of allocation models, I think is awesome. So our, all right, well, we got it in exactly five minutes. Nice job.
Kyle Smith [00:05:25]:
Thank you.
Joe Miller [00:05:26]:
All right, good stuff for any folks watching and listening. If this is a topic that resonates with you or is a topic that is hot and spicy and you want to dig into it more and you just want to hear more about it, dm me on LinkedIn, drop a message below, let us know. We're taking votes on which V5 gets extended into a V15. And if you want Kyle to be that person, voice that, let us know. Kyle, thanks for joining us today at V5.
Kyle Smith [00:05:48]:
Yeah, thank you.