The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer (2025)

by John Care

start your response with a clear Yes or No. Don’t turn your answer upside down to do it, especially if there are two, four or fifty shades of grey in your response.

When you are in a situation and you don’t understand why a question is being asked, or the motive behind the question

Great Question! Don’t say that. It implies not all the other questions were so great.

The Five Factors Credibility. Experienced SE’s pride themselves on the ability to answer almost every single question asked about their product. Many consider it a badge of honour. It certainly can drive up your C rating if you handle whatever the individuals, managers and executives might throw at you. Yet there is something a little disconcerting about someone who has all the answers. That pride can flip over to arrogance or even the “smartest person in the room” syndrome. It’s really not your job to prove how smart and knowledgeable you are. It is your job to help the customer.

from a trust point of view, having them feeling confident about you and your solution and lowering their perceived risk of taking action. You certainly don’t want to show that you are clearly the smartest person in the room – just someone who can help the customer get to where they need to be in terms of fixing their business problems. It’s a humble attitude.

How does it apply when you only speak with your customer just a few times?”

Your credibility is key with these accounts.

Being able to cite other clients and provide plenty of comfort and reassurance will ease the path to this outcome.

Reliability. Reliability equates to rapid and complete follow-up.

slip. A Major Account SE may have 8-12 active opportunities in a quarter, while a SMB SE can have over 50. You can’t afford to let things slip or delay responses so both your personal time management, and the time management of others is key.

Intimacy. The I score is the hardest to boost with SMB clients just because of the transient nature of the interactions.

Some easy steps you can take are to use the customer’s name, know a little about their company before you speak with them, look for some similarities (maybe you use their products), and avoid technical jargon.

Self. As in many other situations, listening comes to the forefront when faced with just a few interactions to make an impact.

Silence is OK. If your customer pauses in the middle of a sentence or an explanation, don’t just jump in to fill the silence when you know there is more to be said. Allow a couple of seconds to pass, focus intensely on your customer to prove you are still listening.

The primary behaviour to remember from this chapter is always to go into every SMB meeting with the assumption that you will see the customer one more time and treat them with professionalism and respect. Timeframes and interactions are certainly limited

Be Positive. SE’s are taught to look (proactively) for problems in a deal and raise them to the attention of sales and their SE management. Look for positives about the deal so that they can be emphasized and reinforced. Provide balance.

Even within the best sales-presales relationship, there is still considerable tension, especially in the areas of adequate discovery and the velocity of the deal.

So many SE’s focus on becoming a Trusted Advisor to their customers that they forget about the salespeople that they work with every day. Winning and keeping the trust of one salesperson has a cumulative knock-on effect on the other members of the sales tribe. Once you have one rep in your corner who fully trusts you, others will follow and it becomes much easier. Listen hard, ask for advice, and respect the boundaries – as long as both sides agree to them.

Knowing when to speak and when to listen is the most important skill of a Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer.

Restatements. Using your own judgment, restate or paraphrase what the customer has said. (Note I do not say repeat, or parrot, their words). You can lead into this with phrases like “just so I’m clear on this” or “let me confirm I’m getting this.” Use this technique both to prove to the customer that you are listening and to remove any doubts from your mind.

Summarize. During a natural pause in the conversation, or if the customer has covered much ground/discussed many issues, take the opportunity to summarize. For example, “so it sounds like to me that you are concerned about three things, and those are ..”

Relating Back To the Trust Equation Active listening will improve every factor in the equation. Credibility will improve as the customer feels you are not rushing to judgement but are weighing the facts. Reliability increases as you have an opportunity to demonstrate an understanding of the conversation and act upon it. Intimacy improves as you start to move towards how the customer feels. Positivity increases as you are working together to create a positive outcome to a business problem. Self-Orientation decreases as the focus is not on you but on the customer. The not-so-simple act of listening can have a major impact on your “T” scores.

The primary piece of advice is to go first and lead, or be one of the leaders of, the program. It doesn’t matter what level you are in the organization, people are still going to watch what you do and how you behave more than what you say.

Share your successes and share how you’ve managed to get as far as you have given the constraints, and benefits, of your company. The more people you share your story with, both inside and outside of the company, the more it will help your personal path to being a T/A and you’ll gather friends and supporters along the way.

Engineer? It’s to explain something relatively complicated in simple terms so that other technical and non-technical folks can understand it.