Tom Wentworth

Sales Engineers Know the Customer Best

· 1 min read

Sales engineers know the customer best.

Good point of view from Matt Heinz on the future of the CMO role, which is what got me on this. Matt believes CMOs should own the entire revenue function, in part because marketing knows the customer better than anyone else in the building. Not should. Does.

I’ve spent just about 50% of my career in Sales and 50% in Marketing and my perspective is that marketing does NOT know the customer better than anyone else. Sure, we have a unique perspective at scale gathered mostly from indirect channels like reading call transcripts, reviews, etc. That view is real. You can see across more deals than one rep can. But IMHO nothing replaces what you learn on the front lines. Sitting on discovery calls, guiding customers through POVs, talking to the CFO about ROI. You can learn a lot from the transcript. It still isn’t the same as sitting on the call.

So if Marketing doesn’t know the customer the best, who does?

AEs are often unreliable narrators because while they have a ton of context, they also have a short-term memory and often their perspective is skewed by recency bias. Whatever the last prospect said is what every prospect said :) I don’t think it’s bad faith. The deal in front of them is the loud one, so it becomes the story, until the next deal replaces it. If marketing treats that as the market, the story changes every time the last deal does.

In my experience, the best source of unbiased customer intelligence is the SE organization. I was an SE for the early part of my career, and I got moved into marketing because I knew way more about the customer than the marketing team did. That’s still how I think about it. When I want a read that isn’t the last call, I ask the SEs. They sit in a lot of those conversations, technical and commercial at the same time, so the pattern shows up sooner.

So maybe the revenue function should roll into SEs :) Maybe that’s why I enjoy working so closely with my partner and former SE Mohit Bijlani.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.