In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin and guests Ed Jaffe, Tyson Goeltz, Jorge Soto, and Joe Caprio explore the evolving relationship between Account Executives (AEs) and Sales Engineers (SEs) during product demos. They argue that demo strategy should be driven by the customer’s stage in the buying journey, with AEs deploying the right resources at the right time rather than defaulting to a rigid AE‑first approach. The conversation highlights challenges in onboarding and ramping AEs in a remote, distributed workforce, emphasizing the need for accelerated, continuous education to shrink ramp times. A central theme is redefining demos as concise, value‑focused storytelling rather than exhaustive technical walkthroughs; the panel recommends using benefit‑focused language, avoiding “click‑by‑click” demos, and leveraging alternative formats such as whiteboards, videos, or website tours. They also discuss the outsized impact of SEs, positioning them as multipliers who extend AE bandwidth, and stress the importance of respecting SE calendars and investing in their development. Throughout, the guests share practical tips for scaling AE/SE collaboration, aligning demo formats with customer needs, and fostering a customer‑centric sales culture.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
You know, and I think about it and, you know, I'm curious to see if Tyson saw this, but I almost think about it like it's the difference between a pop quiz and having the answers to the test. I don't want a pop quiz. I want to know the answers going in so I know what to answer. I'm curious if Tyson is more of the revenue leader. I'm curious your perspective on this.
Yeah, I mean, if you frame it in the lens of what does the customer need at the various points of their journey in purchasing software from us or maybe purchasing software and what do they need at each of those touchpoints, then I think it becomes a lot easier, like to your point, Ed, like maybe it's not the AE solo on the first call and maybe what depends on that is what does the customer or the prospect need in that first meeting? And then how do I deploy the right resources and the right people to actually fulfill that? And then I move on to the next step too. I think we get into this kind of self-centered approach of, I'm the AE, I take the first call, I set the stage and I bring in my SE. It doesn't have to be this way. And I think if anything, the last couple of years have changed our mindset on things is how we used to do things isn't necessarily how we have to keep doing them. Like, what is best for my customer? And then if I'm a great AE, I know that I am a piece of the overall sales team, of the selling team, and I deploy, I help to deploy the right people at the right time of the journey so that customer gets value. It's not about how much of that do I own, it is about how is the customer receiving what I'm helping to provide. If you stay in that frame of mind, I think this, who does what, when becomes a lot easier.
Tyson, how do you scale this and build out an organization? I know this is maybe for a discussion for another day, but if you had some tips, because it seems to me just based on all the sales teams I've worked with, there are like some great AEs who are maybe a little more product focused, right? They know the product, they've been there for a little longer, that sort of stuff. So they're able to do, maybe that demo, you know, that might happen on first call, might happen on second call, and hold off on bringing in the SE. But then you might have an AE who's not there, right? So they have to bring in that SE a little earlier. How do you deal with those nuances?
I mean, a lot of that problem you suggest is onboarding and transfer of knowledge across an organization in a more distributed workforce. That is a key challenge today. Where we used to be able to hear our colleagues from across the desk and pick up things almost like osmosis. Now we're in a much different environment. So I think it puts a greater emphasis on onboarding and continuous education, right? You look at the standard time it takes for an AE to ramp. How do you bring that from 5 months to 2 or 3? Product knowledge, how do you bring that down to after month 1, I feel like I'm a relative product guru in relation to what I need to be. I think it's, I think it's an onboarding and continuous education piece, which has become a lot harder in the remote setup.
Yeah.
Well, I think there's a philosophical question that I have too on that, which is what is a demo? I mean, if we kind of like take a step back from that, I think people often think like a demo's gotta be a tour of the software. I can tell you the biggest deal I ever sold, we did not show live software until the very last meeting. Because there was no reason to. And it's, it's interesting. I just, I talked about kind of being a buyer and one of the tools that I just bought in the past month, the first meeting, the, it was an AE and he just started. It was funny, actually, 3 months ago we looked at this product and the AE did a very boring demo, didn't go anywhere. And the product just kind of, we were like, okay, we'll look at this later. And so we did, because we got a new rep and we took another call with the new rep, as you know, usually happens with some companies. And we get on this first call and immediately they start going into some really technical stuff. And I basically stopped them and I just said, look, I'm going to assume for this call, you can do everything you say you can do technically. Let's just work under that assumption. Let's talk about why we should buy this. Like, let's talk about what value you're gonna bring. Completely different discussion. Had he gone back into software, I think he would've definitely would not have gone anywhere. And so that kind of becomes a question of, yes, they wanna see product, but there's so many ways they can see product, whether, you know, I think, I think there's a tool out there that might help them do that. I know Joe is gonna do the plug, but I'll, I'll give you a plug after. But even, you know, of all like my fancy demo tools, like $6 whiteboard from Target, I use this more than almost anything else. 'Cause sometimes it's just, let's just have a conversation.
Yeah. And I think that's, it's just like right in line with the idea of the customer story is there to spark a dialogue, not a monologue, you know? And I actually feel the same thing about the demo. And to your point, whether it's a pre-sales call product tour you send out, a website tour, someone takes, a video they watch on YouTube, they download a free trial, and now they come in to meet the team for help after, like wherever they are in their awareness, like you're on that call to trade information, learn more, develop the use case together, and then figure out how to like parallel process their evaluation and your procurement, you know. So like whether it's a demo or slides or a tour of your website or, you know, case study description, whatever it is, it's just back and forth to get the conversation flowing. I do not understand people that give technical demos, as if I want to see the 17 steps to publish that report. That's what I'm here for. I want to literally watch 17 steps. Now I saw the 17. That's not what I'm here for. That's not the goal of a demo. So anyone that's demoing in that technique is demoing wrong no matter what. No matter what.
Totally, totally agree. I mean, I think there's a fundamental question that I think we have to ask as when we're demoing is what am I trying to do in this conversation? And I think I would argue that my job when I'm giving a demo is not to teach you how the software works.
Right.
That's what professional services deals with later. My job is to show you how it's going to be valuable. And so that's even in a demo, something that I think a lot of people don't often think about is like, what do you actually have to show? And I almost think about it like a cooking show is the example I always think about. So if you watch a cooking show, let's say they're making a chicken. They'll take the chicken, they'll, you know, put the oil and the spices and everything on it, and they'll put it in the oven. Then there's an oven next to it and the chicken's done. We don't need to sit there for an hour and watch the chicken cook. So I'm not saying, say it does stuff it doesn't do, but it's like those iPhone commercials where it's like sequences are moved faster. Of course they are. So if I can show you 2 or 3 screens to kind of get the point across, why do we need to show you, well, we have to click here and then I have to do this to trigger the API. And if I don't do this integration, then it's gonna do this well. And I guess this is what— and then you just end up talking yourself in circles. It just doesn't work.
Well, the real, the real technical reason that sales reps do that is because that's how their product works and they're demoing production environments of their product. And so they're not actually doing a demonstration. They're using their product on a Zoom call, hoping that them using their product demonstrates the value to a customer. That's why that happens, because we are demoing production environments of Software. That's, that's why sales reps do the super functional click by click by click demo. There are ways around that outside of buying a product, but like, that's the underlying reason this breaks. The sales reps are not doing a demonstration. They're using their products in real time.
Well, you know what's funny on that, Joe, is the word click. Sometimes it's something that I'll say in coaching is I want you to do this demo again, but don't say the word click. Once. And it's amazing the difference in that demo, because what it forces people to do is start to use benefit language. Look how fast it is to do this. Look how easy it is. And just taking the word click out of the demo sometimes can completely transform the message.
Absolutely. And what forces you to tell a story.
Awesome. Joe, let's, let's talk a little bit about the SE. And particularly, I know we've talked about this a bunch over the last year, year and a half. Respecting the SE's calendar. And I gotta say that, you know, we do these community roundtables with SE leaders here at Recruitiz, really just kind of learning a lot about what their day-to-day looks like. And one, like, theme that comes up pretty often is this idea, and I think we sort of alluded to it earlier, that the SE, it doesn't wanna just be demoing, demoing 24 hours a day, right? Like, they're engineers generally by trade, right? So they wanna build too. What are some reasons why we should be as revenue leaders, you know, sales folks, etc., respecting their calendar?
Well, I, in my experience over the last 5 years, I've found that SEs are probably more impactful than AEs in an organization. And again, you have to keep in mind that I'm early stage. I go 0 to, and, you know, selling co-founder or first sales hire, you know, and then an SE. And the SE is the one that can multiply that selling co-founder or that AE's ability, their bandwidth, like the number of things that they can work on. And so I think a good SE hire is like super, super critical for that, for the stage that I work in. And then I think as companies grow, like that importance doesn't go away. You know, these folks win deals. These folks are trustworthy. These folks are sturdy in the eyes of a customer. And, you know, you go to the clichés of the AE does the business part and the SE does the technical part. I don't actually think that's how it really works on calls. The AE asks the uncomfortable part. The AE, you know, needles in there and makes the meeting happen and gets the other person in there and does that part. That doesn't mean that the SE is just like a technical robot, you know, like they're an important integral part of the deal. They're often a better spokesperson than the AE is. The AE is kind of almost like the BDR bringing a meeting to an AE. Well, the AE is like a BDR bringing the meeting to the SE, you know. And so for those reasons, I just think it's like, it's hypercritical that you respect that. part of your team and you invest in it and you enable them and you let them like grow and mature and develop because half of your SEs, they're gonna leave your company, or they're gonna get promoted and do really important strategic work in other departments in your building. So that's for me, you know, as an investor in a C-suite, why the SE role is important. But, you know, for Ed and Tyson, I bet you they can talk specifically to like on deal or, you know, running a sales team why it matters. But for me, like, Build your business on the back of SEs. Like, for real, they're, they're 5-tool players, you know what I mean? Like, they're, they're technical and persuasive. Like, yeah, they're total package.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas. in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in RevGenius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.
