Market Understanding - Individual Industry Background & Experience

It isn't unusual for a CIO to have an office with a view. It's a little unusual for that view to look out over hundreds of acres of corn fields. Even more unusual is not seeing any of it because of white-out blizzard conditions on the other side of the glass. Early summer blizzards in central Iowa are uncommon, but not unheard of. I was a new sales engineer with three months experience and was sitting in the CIO's office in just those conditions when I learned my first lesson on the importance of Market Understanding (industry experience). Granted, my attention was split between wondering how deep the snow would get before my Jeep wouldn't make it out of the parking lot and listening to Randy talk with the CIO about upcoming projects.

Randy led our datacenter Consulting Systems Engineering (CSE) team, the guys we called in when we needed backup. He was in town to help us make inroads with the datacenter storage side of a couple of customer's business. Randy's flight was scheduled to leave in three hours, we were thirty minutes from the airport on a good day, and had to travel through a blizzard to get there. From the conversation, you'd never guess that he was worried about it. As they talked, the conversation meandered from one IT related topic to another. They must have covered the entire spectrum of datacenter topics over an hour, from methodologies of calculating storage capacity growth projections to the various benefits and drawbacks of different disaster recovery plans. Randy was a master at this type of conversation, obviously in his element. By the time we left we had an appointment to return the following week and begin scoping a new datacenter project with the CIO's top engineers; and Randy's flight had been canceled.

Prior to joining our IT consulting company Randy had spent ten years as a datacenter director and then vice-president. He thoroughly understood what it took from a leadership perspective to run a successful datacenter and could convey that understanding to customers without ever saying it directly. As I watched a master at work I realized he never spoke about any particular brand or product. All of the conversation revolved around processes, frameworks, goals, SLAs, compliance requirements, and business outcomes. He knew the lingo. He understood the industry. He had lived it. Customers knew it.

Why this is Important

Each SE should have a depth of experience similar to Randy's, in their own sphere and at their respective level. Randy could speak to CIOs and other executives; that is why he was hired. We should be able to speak intelligently, and from experience, to those at our level of the organization and one level up. In my industry, as a field SE, that would be the security or network analysts and engineers as well as their IT Managers or Directors. If I was managing a team of SEs I'd be expected to be able have meaningful conversations with customer Managers, Directors, and VPs. 

Market Understanding, for new SEs, comes from their years of hands on experience in the industry as a customer-side employee, their time in the trenches. It is only the very best among customer-side employees that should rise to the ranks of an SE.  Regardless of how good their university grades were, how much potential they have, or how good you think your internal training program is, SEs will never be as good as they can be if they come straight from college into this field.  They require industry background and hands-on experience to instill credibility and confidence when talking with customers. They need it so they feel confident in themselves. Hiring an SE who doesn't have this base level of market understanding, who can't talk the language with those he/she sits in front of, is akin to schadenfreude. I've seen this many time and made this hiring mistake myself a time or two because of the individual's 'potential'. The SE will constantly be uncomfortable, lack confidence, speak without authority, be insecure in their role, and often feel like an imposter. Some SEs may hang on for a while, often because the pay is better than when they work on the customer side, but they'll almost always be unhappy in their role. Perhaps, eventually, after several years, they'll come around and become good; but at what cost to the individual (self esteem, personal happiness, individual self worth) and to your company (lost sales, weakened relationships, loss of confidence).

How to Build an SE

Experience comes with time and exposure. It is an unfortunate contradiction of the industry that as soon as you become an SE your opportunities for real-world hands-on experience drop dramatically and yet you're still expected to be an expert years or decades after the last time you ran a production system. Good SEs, who pay attention will still increase in experience and understanding as they work with customers despite limited hands-on opportunities. This is what I call the SE Layered Onion Effect: high volumes of thin layers of experience built up over time.  An SE's exposure to customer experiences, circumstances, challenges, and successes become their own, especially if they're right there beside the customer as they happen. They can be referenced, talked about, and used as examples. They become their own. They always have a story to tell.

This is how SEs can elevate themselves in their respective industry and field. Smaller deals lead to proficiency selling bigger deals. Bigger deals lead to conversations with customer leaders. These leadership conversations are also subject to the Layered Onion Effect. Over a number of years, and with intentional effort, the SE can become skilled at talking to and presenting for managers, directors, and executives. The more they do this the more they learn what those leaders care about, how to speak their language, how they run their organizations, and how such organizations should be run. They they become a go-to resource for your company or division's largest sales opportunities. Suddenly, one day, the SE looks up to find that they spend as much of their time talking to customer leaders as they do the customer's individual contributors. They have become a leader themselves.