Sales engineers play a huge role in winning enterprise accounts.

After all, they’re the ones who typically run the most critical part of the sales process: the live demo (and sometimes even a full-blown POC).

But their work doesn’t stop there.

To really seal the deal, SEs need to make sure their AEs have:

• A solid grasp of the value prospects would get from the tool, tailored to their roles and use cases.
• Clarity on what additional products or services the prospect might need.
• A set of personalizable interactive demos they can send as follow-up educational material or as a means of convincing their boss or peers.

That’s a lot when you’re working with two to six reps at a time.

Having a quick, structured handoff can help.

Below, we offer a 5-minute checklist and share insights from top SEs at companies like Dropbox, Bloomreach, Haloo, and Red Sift.

But first, a quick tip on how to understand what’s happening in your enterprise accounts, fast.

Once you’ve done your discovery and delivered your live demo, it’s time to hand off the account to your rep for quoting and negotiation.

Run through these steps to make sure you, your SE, and potentially even your CSM, are on the same page:

1. Summarize Account Context

The AE should be able to reference the account info you collected during the discovery call and demo.

In a shared drive or platform, compile a list of things they’ll want to know, like:

• Company size
• Industry
• Buying stage
• Key personas (with their titles, roles, priorities, influence)
• The decision-making structure, if you know it
• Specific requirements you heard
• Important comments, reactions, and concerns

Tip

If you don’t know much about your prospect, it’s hard to sell them.

While you can get some good data from online stalking, there’s perhaps an even better (and more accurate) way to gain context quickly – sending an interactive demo.

At the beginning of your demo, you can ask users to share what their role is and/or how interested they are in specific features.

On the back end, you can start to piece together the buying team and what they care most about ahead of your discovery meeting.

Dropbox’s SE team used structured account research combined with Navattic demos to streamline their qualification process.

By mapping key stakeholders and then customizing demos accordingly, they accelerated time-to-value and reduced back-and-forth in early conversations.

“We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in repetitive, generic live demos, freeing up time for the SE team to focus on complex enterprise deals,” says Jonathan Paredes, a Solutions Consultant at Dropbox.

2. Share Technical Insights

Next, document how your product solves their pain points.

Be sure to flag any:

• Known blockers (and how you might resolve them)
• Product roadmap questions they might have (and how to address them)
• Any other unique requests that might impact the deal (with some objection-handling ideas)

Include environment details related to integrations or other data flows if you talked about them during disco or on the demo call.

3. Attach Demo Insights & Buyer Signals

If you already sent an interactive demo as a follow-up to your live demo call, be sure to share the account engagement data with your SE.

You could pull it and drop it into a shared folder.

Or, if you’re a Navattic user, show reps how to find the demo analytics area of Launchpad, where they can see:

• Who is looking at the demo, and for how long
• Where they click the most
• Where they start to drop off

You could also provide links to other relevant interactive demos reps can personalize and send to the buying team on their own, if needed.

Per Austin Blank, an enterprise rep at Bloomreach:

“Never has sending personalized demos been so easy and fun. It’s simply the most seamless way to showcase exactly what product value you are trying to convey to your prospects. Navattic has saved time and introduced a level of efficiency I wish I discovered years ago.”

Tip: Set Up Alerts

From Launchpad, SEs can set up email and Slack alerts so reps get notified when a prospect engages with an interactive demo.

This at least shows reps that the deal is moving forward in some way – the prospect is reviewing a certain feature one more time, or one of their colleagues is taking a deeper look.

And it can give reps any other input they might need to push the deal toward closed won.

Emily at Haloo explains:

“Navattic has increased our deal probability by empowering the prospects to learn about our products before they get to that sales call, and then weeding out the ones that weren’t our true ICP after the call.

Overall, it’s decreased the length of the sales cycle because we can see, based on engagement with the post-call demo, which clients and prospects are actually interested and engaged.”

4. Define Clear Next Steps

You’ve probably discussed what should happen next with your AE. But better to get it in writing.

Confirm a mutual action plan or upcoming milestones and then list any open questions for the AE (or future CSM) to answer.

Then, make sure you or the AE sets expectations with the prospect so they’re aware of any immediate next steps and the overall timeline.

5. Align with AE and CS Teams

Before you start working your next account, host a quick sync with your AE and the potential CSM.

On the call, they can confirm:

• Access to your notes and recommended resources
• Access to the proper demos and corresponding data
• Who owns what (deeper evaluations, answering additional prospect questions, security questionnaires, onboarding, etc.)

This also leaves room for them to ask you any lingering questions.

Remember: Avoid siloed information. Always store and link materials in a shared workspace like Launchpad or a deal-specific folder.

Want more ways to speed up the transition? See how other SE Teams Are Using Navattic.

Enterprise deals are where SEs really shine. But it’s also where they get really burnt out.

Their calendar gets filled with internal and external meetings. They spend hours filling out procurement paperwork.

And they have to ask the same disco questions, rejigger the same sandboxes, and give virtually the same presentation over and over again.

AI-powered platforms can relieve your SEs of some of that repetitive work by building:

First Drafts of RFPs or Security Questionnaires

Tools like Iris learn from past RFPs, other relevant content, and current documentation to create drafts in minutes.

Plus, Iris shows exactly how it arrived at each answer, making it easy for SEs to double-check.

Class, an edtech company, uses HeyIris to complete hundreds of complex security questionnaires and RFPs every year.

“We use HeyIris to automate the tedious and mundane aspects of filling out security questionnaires, allowing Class teams to focus on more important tasks.

Now, completed questionnaires are ready for the prospect by the next day, instead of the next week, or even a month later.”

Interactive Demo Templates

In a few minutes, you can build solid interactive demos for every feature, then make them available to your AEs to send whenever they want (no reason to bother you).

With Navattic’s Copilot, all you have to do is start taking Captures, and AI follows along, crafting a demo for you, adding copy, anchors, and tooltips based on our best practices.

You can also use AI tools to spin up interactive demos based on:

• A product page URL
• A product video
• Other existing content, like Docs, blogs, and video transcripts

The team at Red Sift told us: “We won a large enterprise deal because a seller sent a short, six-step sequence immediately after the call.”

Sandbox Demos

You can use AI assistants to build sandbox demos in minutes, too.

Like a sandbox environment, sandbox demos make it seem like you’re showing prospects a real instance of your product.

In reality, you’re just clicking through an interactive demo, preconfigured to highlight the most relevant workflows and data for a prospect.

Besides saving you time (no more spinning up and maintaining multiple sandbox environments), sandbox demos alleviate the worry of bugs popping up during your demo (there’s no way they can interrupt Captures).

Eventually, you may be able to let some of your more junior SEs – or even sellers – run initial demos on their own to save you more time:

“Sellers cannot get a use case wrong with a Navattic demo,” says Billy McDiarmid, VP of Engineering at Red Sift.

“They feel like, ‘Great. I’m not going to make a mistake, I’m not going to embarrass myself in front of a prospect.’ They’ve always wanted to do demos without having a technical resource there, and now they feel empowered.”

Looking for ways to give your SE time back?

Try Navattic’s demo automation platform, or book a demo to see it live.