Unveiling the Hidden Gem: Pre-Sales Engineering: Rick Byrne

oh no it's my turn now right okay it's not what I expected and I always say it's I've been presenting for a long time but I still get the the excitement juice where the presentation it's not nervousness I call it excitement juice because it's an exciting time to get up and share information with people now I do have to hold a mic and I'm not sure how good I'm going to do but I'll promise not to toss it at anybody no Minaj moments here but let's get into it all right so the first thing is I want you guys to tell me who I am cuz I don't know I need to figure that out that's a

joke okay this is this is not a test for you guys I'm just trying to see if there's some liveliness here anybody got a bit of excitement it's not that early right York sock yeah we'll get there we'll get there so who am I I'm a husband to begin with I've been with my wife for about 23 years on that note we've generated some beautiful children so I have a boy who's 22 and I have a girl who's 17 and that's the biggest part of me however there's another little subsection of that too and I call them the little guys because these guys don't want to spend any time with me anymore because they're old they don't

care about me but my dogs still do and that's why I wear yorky socks cuz they are my fur babies okay the other part of that is I still love my human children a lot too one of that it's kind of hard to see but that's me I don't know if you can tell from the hairstyle but that is me and on my back I'm pointing to comp my son is a professional Esports player and I'm an avid Esports Watcher so that Jersey I'm wearing is actually for the Commonwealth Games and he went and represented Canada last year playing rocket League which is kind of cool when you think about it one of the sports

that didn't get impacted during the pandemic was that one then my girl she's a cheerleader on the professional side as well so I'm a cheer dead I don't do any cheers but I pay for cheer I spend a lot of time at cheer and if you'll notice something I'm wearing a lot of green here there's some green happening also green there because her cheer group also has the same colors as my company and I didn't even pick that lastly or not lastly but I've spent about two decades in it itself okay so when we start looking at it and what I've done and where I've been and where I am today that's really what this is about and

theour journey I took and I've been with v offer for 10 years in a pre-sales entity so this is going to be the most words on the slide not going to read this you can read it if you want to but I don't recommend it it's it's the definition of what pre-sales engineering is to summarize it at the simplest form it's a technical expert working with customers and products to solve a challenge that's the simple simplest form of it that's what pre-sales is now pre-sales is full of multiple different responsibilities and what I do today I'm a pre-sales engineering manager so that's what I do I work with pre-sales engineering people every single day that's my job but I was a pre-sales

engineer at one point in time and what is the responsibilities of a pre-sales engineer to begin with I'd say one of the top Parts is being a tech Tech expert or at least having a technical expertise then it gets into the ability of running through assessments and working with customers to solve challenges that's what you're really there for you're in to work and collaborate with individuals to make sure that your products can solve some type of challenge for somebody if not you're in the wrong room is what it boils down to then you start to build it out and why do we do a lot of solution designs putting those designs on paper that people can actually leverage them

and use them then it gets into demonstrations I don't know if anybody was at our Workshop yesterday but a lot of stuff sales Engineers do is demonstrations in front of people talking talking about our Solutions now I got this one up in here Darren's over in the corner taking a picture of me and he's actually an SE for VH as well and I got technical support up there what do I want to say about that we are not technical support the total opposite of that we are your as in a customer when I talk about that we are your representation that when you have a technical challenge we can help navigate our company to get you the best possible

support but we are not the best at technical support does that make sense right that's we spend time on collaborating with you hopefully building relationships and you can tell daren's pretty happy about that and we try to educate that's what I'm here even doing today is educating just on pre-sales itself lastly transitioning to post sales because post sales is that implementation think of it more like moving from operations into operational okay but the main thing what do engineers do we save a lot of salese where it comes into they've created a problem or a challenge they've done it themselves they've made the bed we have to remake the bed but we end up handling a lot of different things inside of our

organizations working with our sales entities as well as our customers so let's get into the day of the life of an SE and you'll notice I'm going to start using SE airbit now too okay instead of sales engineer because I'll be getting tripped up and I have another slide here that's interesting but the day of what do we do we get up we have coffee just like everybody else here we get up and have coffee then we go ahead and we figure out what kind of fires are out and about and all the jokes and stuff here where you know work from home being a PowerPoint expert and that's all I do is design I'm pretty much AI from creating

PowerPoints all the time battling the inbox all great but what we truly do is we get up every day and we plan we work with our customers we go ahead and figure out what we need to do to design the proper solution figure out what our use cases are for our products to deliver the challenge solutions to people to solve their challenges whether that's ransomware data protection it could be POS systems sales Engineers are everywhere but with all that pieces what do you need to be a sales engineer and that's a perfect blend of technical expertise and customer Centric Focus so you can't just be technical because in most cases technical is great but nobody speaks

technical no one we talk to each other as humans and that's what the customer Centric focus is about and that's where it comes down to key skills you need and one of those top ones being communication you need to be able to communicate appropriately and in the right sense you need to have active listening and I know I'm trying to be on time here but I mean we've all been at the point where we're sitting on the couch like day we've been traveling we've been working hard whatever and your significant other is chatting away to you and you're like uhhuh mm yeah yeah yeah what did I just say Rick I don't know I wasn't paying attention I

don't hear a word that's active listening that I was not using if I use active listening at home like I do when I'm in a business meeting I'd probably even have a better relationship with my wife than I currently do cuz I'm listening all the time and that's a major skill you need need I'd say in anything but pre-sales it's very big up there because You' got to constantly be listening to the cues and not wondering what the next response is going to be or do I have the proper answer to that question you need to see are you hearing what the customer is actually trying to tell you that's a major thing problem solving goes into play

adaptability you need to be able to adapt on the Fly just like today we're a little bit late I'll adapt to that I'll make sure I within the time frame that I'm given and we move on to hopefully get everything back on track today on top of that and again I'm not going through all of these but one of the most important I'll say here is emotional intelligence you need that EQ and that's not about yourself purely it's about looking at other people's viewpoints and what I mean by that is you deal with grumpy people some days you deal with really happy Happy People some days but everybody's going through something everyone is so remember that

as you're having those discussions and that's a piece you need in an everyday life but especially on the pre-sales engineering side when you're working with customers day in and day out because we're all humans so keep that in mind also down the bottom I actually I like this one too resilience we get said no more than we get said yes we're in sales not everybody buys V as an example I'd love if you all did that make my job hell of a lot easier but it's not the case so you have to get used to being told know from time to time right or challenges then technical proficiencies and presentation skills I know I'm lacking that but I'm working on it okay

I'm always trying to get a little bit better at those presentation skills but you'll notice there's a couple of little things here that I have shaded almost you know what one two three four one six of that entire thing is shaded out what's the difference there the difference is most people will call that soft skills I call them human skills they are human skills and that's what I agree with Simon on these are things that you do need to practice and you need to build up the skills but you would think pre- sales technical role you would need a lot of technical skills or hard skills but you don't there's not that many technical SKS there because

you already have the expertise built in most cases you're building this top part more than anything because that's where you're starting to interact with individuals and you're starting to learn how to uh non-c communicate in a uh interesting way and I I'll get into that quickly but the qualities that matter ego top one for me and what I had to learn check your ego if you're the smartest person in the room you're probably in the wrong room you want to learn from everybody and take that to heart in everything you do try to pick up new challenges and what other people are laying out because there may be something that you think does not work

that could be the solution to the challenge overall so remember always be patient with people on top of that and even yourself as you're learning those new skills and you're trying to figure out okay what's my next step let me pick one more out of this to move on I would say the biggest thing is selfawareness knowing what you are capable of and what you're not capable of because if you can't figure that out for yourself you can never figure out what the challenges you need to solve to be a little bit better I don't know this you'd almost start to think like this doesn't even sound like pre-sales engineering it's more on human nature and how you can be

a better individual and this and that and I think if you take this stuff into every single role and thing you do in life it makes life easier but why is all this matter Rick this matters because of this formula and something in pre-sales engineering that makes a lot of sense is this trust equation so what's credible credible means in my sense anyways that Rick says he's going to uh you know uh 10 + 10 equals 20 you're going to believe Rick that's the case because that's makes sense but maybe there's something that isn't as easy as that simple formula of math that there's no difference between and Rick says well my product is the best product

because and if you believe me that means I've become credible okay then we start talking about the whole fact of reliability if Rick says he's going to be at a place to pick you up I'm going to be there because you trust in me being reliable intimate and intimate in a totally professional manner but this is me brick sharing intimate information about myself and trying to build that intimate bond between two individuals now you add those three together that number should be as high as you can possibly get it because then we get down to self orientation what's self orientation well let's put it this way it's all about Rick Rick's just here today because I wanted to talk about

pre-sales engineering it's all about me I don't care what you take from it this is my presentation no not the case I want to share what I've learned so you want that number to be as low as possible and that number of course with the skills you built and hopefully the qualities that you've have entrenched in yourself allows you to get that self orientation as low as possible that top number as high as possible with your credibility your reliability and your intimacy that you've formed and it all takes time this just doesn't happen overnight this conversation we have here today like Darren I would hope I have built some trust with him because I've known him for 16 years okay a little bit

little bit of trust but all that equals trusted and a trusted advisor and that's what you want to become as a pre- sales engineer that's the end goal that is one of the Hidden pieces of it and the formulas that all those skills and qualities build out to do that but okay we're still doing good on time but what I want to kind of bring to light was my journey I started off as an IT professional I did computer science way back when on a rock called new land and that's where I was born and raised and where I did my education I moved to Alberta about 16 years ago maybe 17 now if my math is right but I got into the

community and really started enjoying it and did blogging and all these certain things where I was sharing information now as time went on this was my office when I started in it not really my office this ain't this is a a picture I stole from the internet but I had an office very similar to that and these are the people that I love talking to servers one day I get a ping on LinkedIn of all places and again I was an early adopter of VH itself right one of go back 12 13 years ago I was deploying VH in my environment and I got one from a sales guy sales guys is like Hey we're looking for an SE and I'm

like what the hell is an SE he's like sales engineer like no I'm not sales I'm not going into no sales engineering stuff because that was my impression of what sales was Wolf of Wall Street greasy just doing stuff again self-orientation wise doing everything for them and that was not me and they told me that's not the case Rick you're going to be technical this is technical sales you don't have to do anything sales at all and I'm like okay that's cool so I made the change and I went to the dark side now you're starting to think Rick are you trying to tell us not to go into pre-sales well I'm saying just watch

those sales people so I go to the dark side and again these are the people I used to talk to not people they're things they're servers that's what I did I'm an introvert by Nature that's what I am and that means I get energy from not being around people it doesn't mean I don't like people that's sometimes what people think it just means I get energy through different sources after this I'll go into a corner and cry and sleep for a little bit and then this is what I was tossed into okay so this again is what I used to deal with my first day on the job the sales guy who recruited me over picks me up first day on the job to

be clear before that these were my peeps now these are my peeps and he drops me in front of an office full of these people never presented to a soul in my life even just just the normal conversation of course I always sold because I was selling to my directors and my CIO on the products I wanted and need it but now I was selling something to somebody else and of course what did Rick do go all technical why wouldn't I it was technical that's what I did I wasn't sales right and that took some time to get used to and challenge myself then two weeks later they're like hey you got to do a presentation I'm like what do

you mean I got to do a presentation they're like yeah you got to present to it's it's it's okay it's a it's a b I'm like okay oh it's just the hotel Mac I'm like okay to how many and they're like hundreds hundreds of people and that's that was my face I didn't want to get in front of a bunch of people and talk that's not what I was doing I was a technical expert and I looked at those people and said oh my I won't say the rest of the word but it was that whole point of now I was challenged to get out of my comfort zone and I did and the hardest thing I had to

learn is I was a salesperson so what this all boils down into I had to trust the journey at the same time it was my journey that I had to trust but it's everybody's Journeys a little bit different so you got to trust your journey at the same time and as we start to talk about this sales Engineers come in multiple different forms so you got to figure out as you're becoming one what you want to do and these are all the same thing and that's why that guy's like that's just an SE right and it is that's all it is all these different titles is just technical pre-sales on top of that you need to figure out what

is your technical proficiency and this should be the easiest thing because this is what you do today so as you're becoming an se you figure out okay where do I stand do I do a lot of AI am I a platform engineer am I in Big Data that's the easy thing to pick out so what's next as you start to go through these things you want to build relationships okay and this is how you start to get into sales engineering and I got my relationships built through blogging Community funds and that's how sellers found me to actually even bring me over I didn't even know it was a real profession okay that's the challenge but

it's about reading watching listening sharing in blogs and presentations and just sharing your information out there and I'm just throwing some of these up as a quick thing and I don't know if we're sharing the decks after the fact but it'll be a recording but these are some great reads to let you know more about sales engineering because in a 30 minute slot I can't share everything that's out there and it's a constant learning experience as it is then as we go there's some blogs or sorry podcasts to keep in mind that you know just keep concreting in the information again you're not just technical you're also sales that's the biggest thing to lock in about at all and then as we start to

break out what is the Hidden Gem of it and I know that's why you all came here because that was the title the real Hidden Gem of it is all the things you can get from it it's very rewarding it's one of those things where if you like travel you can get it with this role if you don't like travel you can also get it at the same time you get to stay in an actual entire process and what I mean by that is you get to be on The Cutting Edge of Technology all the time because you're working with a company that selling products or services that constantly had to be cutting edge because if they're not

guess what they're not going to last around forever plus what I do like out of all of this myself is own your own schedule you don't have to work a 9 to5 that's what I like out of it I work from home now that's a challenge in itself and you need to build yourself into working from home because some people don't like to work from home because they need to be out but you can go to Starbucks you can go to a partner's office you can go to events like this spend time with your customers the thing is you don't have to do that Monday to Friday 9 to 5: you can do it 10 to 2 if you want just

as long as you hit quotas and do your job nobody's going to ask any questions about it now it's not all about the rainbows and unicorns there's challenges and what are those challenges so the biggest one I'd say is expectations and I'd say that's expectations you're going to put on yourself to begin with that's also expectations your sales individuals are going to put on you and also your customers customers have expectations and if they're not sure what you do they're not going to know what to expect from you top of that technical complexity technology is not getting easier people say it is because we go to the cloud yay AI does it all ha but it's

not easier now instead of racking and stacking servers not many people are going to Data Centers anymore the majority of the servers that are kicking around today are in you know three or four clouds i' say 50% of all servers live in the cloud we know where that is somebody else's Big Data Center but nonetheless we're not racking and stacking but what we are doing is delivering applications to drive business forward which is hard that's the complex piece we're part of everything now there's no more Iron Fist of it we are part of a business as you build it down there's pressure and stret now I love diamonds everybody loves diamonds and I love diamonds because how they're formed

but that's what makes people strong too is pressure and stress but at the same time you need to know how to control that and that's where you get into that whole play like Darren was on that event yesterday about the mental side of everything we do and mental health and that's where you need to bring in your own personal policies and play to make sure that that's taken care of last but not least here but is balance and I'm not talking just work life balance cool because work and life come together because we work to live but there's more balance you need to take care of your health you need to eat right you can't drink too

much I mean look at me I don't look like this no I'm joking because I don't take care of my work life balance but take care of yourself because that's the only thing in the end when you're all retired you're sitting on a be somewhere no company's going to care about you nobody is you need to take care of yourself but that is a challenge that all of these things if you're not careful can run away from you but to be clear not everybody's gem is this everybody's gem is different like I said I like diamonds somebody else might pick something else here so even though we've talked about it today in pre-sales engineering and why it

could be a good fit for you you got to make that choice for yourself you got to decide if it's something that you enjoy do you enjoy dealing with customers on a dayto day do you enjoy constantly problem solving do you enjoy the whole fact of having to spend more time in design than implementation because you'd like to think that this presentation only took me 30 minutes today because that's all I'm here standing it didn't it took a lot of time to plan prepare to actually give this session today and that's everything we do as an SE a lot of it is planning it's figuring out okay I've talked to this customer I actively listen to figure out what they need now

I need to build my use case of my product to solve their said Challenge and that could be done in a PowerPoint that could be done in a demonstration but it's got to be done in value that that customer needs it's not about me it's not about the sales engineer it's not not about the product it's not about the service it's about the customer and shifting that self-awareness and self- orientation and that emotional intelligence and taking those quantities and qualities putting it together to lay out the solution for a customer a business so in the end get involved in your community go ahead put up if it's something you really think you want to do talk to other sales engineers in the

business and like I said the lots of different names so find one they could be called anything if they work for a vendor and they happen to know technical things they're probably a pre-sales engineer then share your expertise because you all got it you all got knowledge I would love to have stuff that taken you years to build that you could I'd like to have things explained to me like I'm a kindergartener because I'm dumb so simplify it for me and you can do that same way I can simplify some things because it's common sense and common knowledge to me because I think about it every day but we use this whole common sense a lot that person didn't

have common sense they cut me off I did that this morning actually well driving here however maybe it wasn't common sense to them because they only started driving yesterday so it's not common sense to them yet it's common sense to me but it's not to them so you keep that in mind and again back to you don't know what another person is dealing with so always think about that last but not least just keep doing what you love to do that's all we can all strive for it's not work if you enjoy it happens to pay us make money from it but we actually enjoy it and love to do it because you want something that makes you jump in

the morning I heard a great Story Once Upon a Time where somebody said hey if I if I said got a million dollars for you it's like okay I'm going to give it to you like okay like no catches like no not really I'm like okay he's like how do you feel I'm like pretty excited got a million bucks he's like okay one catch it's like what's that he's like you won't wake up tomorrow like what what do you mean I won't wake up tomorrow he's like you won't wake up tomorrow it's like okay interesting I don't want that money he's like okay $100 million like I still don't want that money he's like okay so

just remember tomorrow when you wake up you turn down $100 million to wake up the next morning which is priceless so anything besides that any questions I don't know how I'm doing on time I think I did fairly well and so you've talked a lot about the customers and the products that you guys sell to the customers and yeah I want to know how you guys collaborate with your operational teams who are talking to the customers on a daily basis and they're working through the problems and supporting those solutions that s because the biggest problem that I have with sales and resales is selling a solution the customer doesn't doesn't you know support in the right capacity

based on what we're seeing in their environment or in their organization so who are you talking to and how you make it work so the way we talk and do we have a post sales organization inside of them that trains our Channel ecosystem whether that's CDW soft choices Long View Compu Jens and they are our Postell arm who have another expertise in a skill set however to back away from that for a minute in most cases if what were sold does not deliver because you see that drawing sometimes where it's like this is what we imagined this is what the engineering and the sales team did this is actually what we got that type of story the problem is you didn't have

a good sales team I'm I'm going to call that out and you didn't have a good pre-sales engineer because they are your representation they are the ones who go to bat for you I work for van but I've walked into customers and also walked out and said buy something else why because we weren't the right fit that goes back to that credibility that trusted advisor even though I make money by selling something to you right my job and what I feel and the way I'm even paid even though I do have a quot of per se and I am a sales individual if I don't sell you a good solution you're never coming back to me anyways so

question are you collaborating operations is that like kind of a no no because I want to know if that's we are from VH yes so we do our best practices from the actual field that gets filtered down to our Professional Services arm that then teaches other people so inside of yes I can't speak for other organizations that are at a different scale than us I just want to know that's you know I want to see what other organizations

are yeah and that's more on your renewal side too which is also pre-sales right or any any good

salp you as a customer a sales as a customer will never come back to us

if a good sales person is going to resolve those and if you if they don't

time customer collaboration customer advate

100% sales I I always keep the relationships with my customer even if there's sales on the table or not what I don't do is post sales and what I mean by post sales I don't do implementation so I'd still work with a customer they bought my product right I don't run away then and never talk to them again there's some customers that I sold to 11 years ago that I still talk with on a monthly basis but it's more around that technical account manager where I may have another solution that's beneficial to them and talk to them about it or they may have a challenge that I'll be like well the best practice is actually this and this product

changed to years ago you never updated but here's that feature set you could use so I would guide in that way the same sense customer coming to you using youru and say listen know we need a change need youru love youru a widget change would you be you take on that you go back to the sales

iom yeah that advate 100% like and try to be open as possible at the same time and I mean I'm speaking from V in the experience here every organization would be different but I have a direct line to our research and development team where I can bring in a feature and a function and of course we gauge that off of how many customers have asked does it make sense if somebody's like we need to back up Commodore 64s I'm just going to look at you like yeah that's great but that's not us right but if it's something that makes sense I'm going to bring that to the table right away and go for it if it

doesn't make sense that's where I may challenge the customer at the same time and go hey how about this or this or this where can we meet in the middle