Our next episode in FunnelStory Podcast focuses on sales engineering and the modern sales process. This is also for the first ever video podcast (in addition to the audio podcast).
Alok Shukla, in a conversation with Rishi Bhargava and Amir Khayat, to define sales engineering and figure out the relevancy of sales engineering in a product-led world.Listen now on Apple Podcast and BuzzSprout.
Or, you can watch the video podcast 👀. It is recorded in a retro-mode (just kidding, we forgot to switch on the HD recording mode)
After Demisto's success, Rishi Bhargava is onto his new startup Descope, focused on making user authentication and authorization easy for every application. You can get early access to the product here and Join the community here.
Amir Khayat is co-founder of Vorlon (in Stealth) and previously Senior Director of Sales Engineering at Palo Alto Networks and Demisto.
Rishi and Amir worked together at Demisto and kickstarted the sales engineering function. While Rishi underpinned usage of Data at Demisto, Amir focused on driving automation in Sales Engineering, something that was innovative for startups in 2017-2018 time frame. They share their journeys, their thought process and their learnings in this episode of FunnelStory Podcast.
Where to find Rishi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rishi_bhargava
Community: https://authtown.slack.com
Where to find Amir
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirkhayat/
Where to find Alok
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshukla/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/funnelstory
In this episode, we cover
0:00 Introduction
4:49 A product manager's empathy to a sales engineering role
6:19 How did you both start to work together?
7:28 Who is the ideal sales engineer?
9:01 Why the need for data in the Demisto sales engineering process?
14:31 When did you realize the data became decisive for you?
15:46 How did Demisto think about automation in the sales engineering process?
20:42 How to use data and automation in SE process?
25:08 Why too many choices in a product trial, is not a good idea?
26:05 Thinking about sales engineering in the product-led world
30:49 Who should touch the prospect/customer first? SE or CSE?
34:02 Should the first touch be human or automation?
35:11 Conclusion
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