The Sales Engineer Manager's Handbook: Mastering Technical Sales Paperback – April 21, 2020

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

Just buy the darned book already. Stop reading the reviews and get a copy. Not only did I inhale this over a 3-day weekend, but I ordered copies for MY manager and 2 of my peers.

How can a SE not love a book that starts with "Chapter 00"? :) I was surprised at how much actionable content in this excellent guide. While this book appears to be most valuable to new SE managers, I'm certain experienced presales leaders can gain from John Care and Chris Daly's experience. Broken into 4 main sections, this book covers Managing Yourself, Developing and Serving Your People, Running Presales as a Business, and Serving Your Customers.Even though I've been in leadership positions for over 20 years, I still found the section on Managing Yourself as a leader quite valuable. SE managers often operate in "reactive" mode as they take ad hoc requests from all over the company. I love these four recommended questions to slow down and look at things more effectively: "What Happens if I Don't Do This?", "An Hour From Now, Will I Feel This Was a Good Use of My Time?", "Do We Really Need All This Time?", and "Will This Make the Boat Go Faster?" Favorite quote from this section: "Grace under pressure is a learned skill." This section also has valuable guidance on how to relate and work with sales leaders and executives.One of my favorite parts in Develop Your People is the analysis of The Cost of Keeping a Poor Performer, with this conclusion: "The surprising answer is that the overall cost of keeping a poor performer is usually remarkably close to the cost of losing an A player". And they have numbers to back it up.I recommend this book especially to any newer SE Manager, but also to experienced managers who want to look for areas of improvement. It's remarkably thorough.A few things that I'll point out as potential improvements:- There are references to former research or methodologies without specifically showing where to find them in the footnotes (but searchable on Google as a workaround)- Some topics probably need deeper treatment. They cover so much ground that a few topics get a surface treatment, but even the surface treatment is meaty, so no real complaints. Just wish we could unpack the meat truck.- The chapter on SE compensation assumes that you have a baseline of knowledge about SE compensation, which is probably fine for SE managers, but for those who want to become SE managers, I think there could be more hand holding to explain how it all worksNone of these materially take away from the overall effectiveness though, and this is a must-read for anyone managing SEs or those who want to find their way into that role.

An absolute must read for all SE leaders.