Eps 4.0 Design Flow - Andrae SEAC Swiss Army Knife Current State 9.12.25

I think it's the perfect time to pivot to the SE because in the SE, right, which is the sales engineer or solutions architect solutions engineer, you'll hear them called SEs, the reality is they're the technical component and obviously this is near near and dear to me because I've worn this hat for many, many years, but it rides on the wave of what Kevin just mentioned. They are the ones that even though they have a comp plan, right, their comp plan is a little different than the account executive comp plan, but the reality is the account exec tends to drive their time, right, and that's a good and a bad thing, right, generally and largely it's a bad thing because most account executives have one focus and the SEs are scattered across multiple opportunities trying to do all the due diligence and answer all the technical questions and in addition to doing a lot of the gaps that we're going to talk about in a minute that the AE has left. The AE has left or exposed us to right, and in the meantime to Kevin's point, we burn a lot of calories, right, driven by this SE or sorry this AE behavior or misbehavior, so. Yeah, and to complement that, we burn a lot of calories and we have no abilities to push back. Just because the sales rep will go to the account leadership sales leadership and push back in the sales leadership will always come down on the side of their sales rep, as you would expect a parent and a child. And without pure data results, which is what the agents cannot provide, we have no real good data to push back on. That's 100% that's 100% and very good point because that's something that you and I have seen and battled long through our careers, right, I know for a fact as an SE and I've even come to you, right, Kevin dude, this is not it. This guy doesn't understand right this lady doesn't understand this is not it and we know very well right what's going on, we know what's not going to happen. We know this is not a deal and we go through those QBR's quarterly business reviews. We'll talk through those those later or maybe on a different segment, but we go through all of these things, meeting preps, QBR's different sessions, different time sucks, so to speak. Just to know from knowing up front that it's going nowhere, but all of a sudden we invest eight, nine months into that just to go nowhere and you think back and say, well, what could I have done with that if we're being productive with that eight months of time. So in my books, I follow it's C at SEAC and there's four different roles and they all have different purposes. They start from more salesy related, all the down to more architectural related and depending upon the solution, say, if shelling, for example, this technology is perfect for completes itself platform technology. So in other words, they have five or six technologies in their platform requiring seven subject matter experts, which is what we're trying to eliminate right not eliminate the roles, but eliminate the need to be having their waste or time on calls and scare the customer that it takes seven of you to order to explain the product. Right. So the traditional sales engineer based up saying is more features, advantageous benefits are selling a single product like work day or service now and they have a standard demonstration and they go through those motions and they can ask questions that are very relevant to that one product set, whether it's a document meant to the solution and HRM system or HR resource management system. And then they move all the way down to let's say elastic search, which is a bottom up sales approach, which is selling to technologists. Yeah. And then that's those conversations are very highly technical, very architectural level. They're not about features advantages and benefits and they're really not even talking to the line of business owner. But the irony is all those companies like elastic and snowflake desperately want to talk to the line of business because the technologists have no money. So there's the gamut of you know, SCSales engineer solution engineer solution consultant sales consultant solution architect sales architect. You don't really see sales architect out there at Morris. It's a solution architect role. And then you have the specialist role or evangelist type role out there. Yeah, and I, you know, adding to that I find it's funny because as you speak about it, it sounds like the Swiss army knife and in reality, it is why we get used the most because we are used as a Swiss army knife. It is that is the one role in this whole ecosystem that can truly multi thread on its own if you have a good one, right? Like that SE or S a or whatnot, they've done this so long and frankly, a lot of it's due to the shortcomings on the front side of the sale cycle, right? For so long, they've walked into a room thinking they're going to have a technical conversation, which is what they should do, right? And say, hey, so, you know, to your point, whether it's work day or CRM or elastic search or graphana, you're looking to say, like, how are you going to use the system? Why are you going to use this system? Like, why this? Like, we all like Kevin and I we know these very well, but why, right? Why buy? Why buy this solution? Why buy anything? Why buy it now? Right? But the reality is you're trying to expose like, how are they? Is this a good fit? Do we truly have something for them? Right? Because everything before this is kind of vaporware, right? It sounds good. We think it's there, but now we got to get tangible. We got to understand, like, does this solution meet your needs? If it doesn't, is there a way for it to it? Maybe it's just an integration parcel. All right. Cool. That's it. That's a yes. We just got to do this. And the technical component does that. The challenge is a lot of times you walk in the room ready to have that conversation. And the first question you ask is like, you know, beyond how you're doing today, et cetera, is so, you know, hard, you're interested in this solution, and it's like, well, and then all of a sudden, the whole conversation changes because a lot of the qualification wasn't done up front. And it becomes the, well, we weren't really looking for elastic surf, but we're kind of looking, you know, what we really want. And then you got a tease out like, is there something for us? Is what they really want? Still something in our Bayley week? Something that we can still handle? Right? Or do we partner with somebody? Or so you're, you become again, the Swiss Army knife of trying to deal with whatever the customer is bringing. In terms of further qualifying, just to do your part of the job, which is to get to eventually what we call the technical win, right? Technically, we are sound solute, you know, the sound solution and the right solution for this customer. Yeah, in that statement on technical win, the most critical part of the technical win is a customer has said two major things to your number one. Yes, you are the vendor that we're selecting. We're not looking at any other vendors and we'll sponsor you. Don't have those two answers. You don't have a tip. That's a 100% because without and without that, you know, people say, well, technical win. Okay, where's that coming play? Well, when it goes up to the executive and the decision maker, these things that we pull these other metrics and details out of that, you know, in a sale, sale cycle. They get their feedback from the quote, unquote, underlings, right? These people that we're having these multi threaded conversations with, right? In other words, at the end of the day, when the budget goes up and they say, okay, we need this, this and this. All they're going to go back to the line managers and ask is, is this the right solution? This is what you need. Okay, cool. You put on the table. All right, cool. We'll go with that, right? But the answer was no, it goes nowhere. And that executive will never even see it. No one nonetheless sign off on it. So great point, Kevin. And in addition to that, since you and I are just piloting the shuttle because it's starting to sparks some ideas here. No one wants to take risks. You're a human. These are all humans. They have titles, but in the end of the day, they don't want to lose their job. You know, no one loses their job by buying Salesforce promise or CRM. No one loses their job by getting out and, you know, Deloitte or PWC involved because if the project fails, they blame it on PWC, not by fault. You know, so we are all about mitigating risks and allowing people to be able to point blame somewhere other than themselves. There you go. And that's 100%. I mean, I, you know, I worked at Cisco years ago. And that was probably the easier part of the job of being an SC there is because most of the time when you walked in the room. You naturally had the win they had already invested the year or two or three or 10 before and they're looking for just the next evolution of upgrade, et cetera, because you were what we call the quote unquote, say space, right? So to your point, whether it's Salesforce or Cisco or IBM, these are the say space. Don't be was the same way. Yeah, you walked in. I mean, they used to roll the red red carpet for us. You know, that's right. That's right. An elastic maybe not so much. Well, that's the thing. And I always laugh because of the story that you told when I first joined elastic and you were talking about the guy on the plane. When he walked in with the elastic and he was like, you work at elastic and you got the big hug. And then if anybody knows Kevin, we brought, we broken him in now, but before that was not a thing. But to your point, like when, when you are the smaller organization or smaller companies, like, especially in this day and age, we live at day and age for years, people have said innovation, creativity, et cetera. And let's face it, that means you got to take risk, right? Because if it's not in house, it's likely to be in these smaller companies, these startups, these innovators, right? The snowflakes, the elastic searches that are, you know, now more prominent, but they started from somewhere. And that means there was a risk to take if you're going to invest in them. Well, this is to your point, like that is really how you drive that business forward, right? For years, you've had, right, the commonplace, you've had the big box. Now it's time to go find those other solutions that can truly help drive and transform your business. And to do that, you do have to take those risks, but you want to make sure that they're qualified and more sound based risk. And just to kind of take us back a little bit to the pre-sales solution engineer, CAC role, one important thing to understand is that the nature of the title sales rep is not to be trusted. Anytime your sales are happy, you walk into a car dealership, you walk into a furniture store, and that slick version comes up to you, you're immediately turned off. But if you walk into the service room, and there's a service technician at the car auto dealership, and you start asking him questions, well, or her, you're going to trust that you're going to trust that person's conversations. We are the service department of sales, and the SE or CAC is immediately trusted, which gives us the rights and privileges to ask hard questions that the rep typically doesn't ask. So when we get into the agent, the way I've changed the term from Romeo, Juliet, where you have someone in the background telling you what's going on. Tomorrow, the anchor on the news media, where you have an earpiece in your ear, and the main desk is telling you what to say and how to say it. That's what this agent is going to be. It's the earpiece in the ear, acting very much like the control office providing insights. And we are the trusted advisor, so we are really trusted as a CAC, as an SE, and that gives us the power. This is why C's are never sales people. There's no dual role, and this is also why professional services people, these are people that actually implement the product consultants, like you all, are not there for selling as well. One day, am I getting charged for you now, or am I not getting charged for you now in the professional services side? We'll save that for later. Okay, so we talked about the SDR, what the role is, how they do it, why they do it, at what stage in their career, that migrates to an account executive, there's three different account executives. There's the market commercial, or sorry, commercial market and enterprise. They all have different capabilities. The pre-sale solution engineer falls into four categories, CAC, and SE sales engineer solution architect or solution engineer solution consultant, and they have different requirements. And we also talked about the sales side. The one thing I'll add to the account executive pot is we talk about the three, you have the commercial market enterprise, and a lot of companies as they mature, and they start having these longer term customers, they'll have one more, and that's the strategic, right, where they'll take, you know, there's a handful that have what we call the strategic, like the GE's of the world. They're the ones that are just, they need all hands on deck at all times because they have the highest investment into what our company is doing, right, and so they get like a strategic tier, which is above the enterprise level. And so we also named the county center now. Yeah, you can call it named accounts, absolutely. Yeah, that's a good point, because when we talk, you know, as Kevin's talking about like the CAC, and you're like, well, so all of those roles, it depends on the company, right, some companies. Like so they have those four terms within CAC that Kevin defined some companies there, every technical on our solutions engineers, right, some companies that sales engineer, it's a title, but the reality is the role until we get to implementations that role in this sales cycle. Whereas that role beyond the account executive is your technical on and generally, like I said, they are the Swiss Army knife, they are multithreaded forward and backwards because they are going to, like I said, the teasing out things that the SC may not have talked about things that the account executive missed altogether, the SDR missed those gaps, but also as we talk about further down the road in our, you know, subsequent sec sessions when we talk about, you know, the CSMs or the customer success. The customer success managers, right, those folks that when we get to implementation might once we sold now we're going to implement the SC is still engaged because they're the ones who are sitting there giving the purview to that CSM, etc. So point being this part to Kevin's point of being trusted a lot of that is you've earned it because you've been in the trench to expose all of these details that are necessary for the business, not just for the SC, but they're necessary for the AE in other words, the SC drives the win for everybody. Like, you know, I know I have a bias, but the reality is they do even up until the point where they are very often times where it's crunch time, end of quarter, we need to get a deal across and as an SE, I've been asked, hey, can you reach out to such and such because the Kevin's point a few minutes ago, they've reached out. The AE has reached out, the account exec has reached out five times, and the customer is like not paying them attention because they assume they see the email from, you know, account executive Mario, they already know like, oh man, they're hitting it for something they want $1, right. When the SD reaches out, those relationships are tried and true, they've been in the trench, they've probably tested some things beyond the demo, right, they've dug in to say, hey, you've had these kind of key corner cases that we need to test. Let's sit down and understand what's going on in your business and there comes a point in time where even early days, the SC knows just as much about that business in terms of that tech and that engineer onsite because you had to immerse yourself to understand their business and how it works. And then you're called on to say, hey, can you reach out to your contact to see if they can kind of push this along to get this deal closed and that happens way more often than people realize.