Feb 21, 2023 · 41m · news
Zach Lawryk: The Ultimate Guide to Sales Engineering | E980 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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Zach Lawryk, Head of Solutions Consulting at Rippling, joins Harry Stebbings to deliver an exhaustive, practical guide on building, scaling, and operating solutions engineering teams, while modernizing B2B sales methodologies to match buyer-led market dynamics.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 24.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.6 Guest teaching 3.1 Guest disagreement 0.7 Harry pushing back 3.1
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:01 Dismissing charisma as a proxy for sales aptitude
Zach directly rejects the common assumption that charisma equates to sales ability, arguing instead that empathy and customer understanding are what drive true sales aptitude.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 10:28 Pushing on SE bandwidth constraintsHarry forcefully challenges Zach's suggestion to involve SEs earlier in the buyer journey, arguing from a CEO perspective that SEs are too scarce and valuable to deploy top-of-funnel.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:46 Introducing Forrester's sense-making conceptZach educates Harry on Forrester's 'sense-making' framework after Harry admits not knowing it, explaining how modern selling requires guiding buyers through overwhelming digital information.
Harry holds his own ▶ 9:08 Analyzing marketing's erosion of the sales funnelHarry articulates a detailed insight on how modern marketing educates prospects before reps engage, earning immediate and explicit validation from Zach.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zach's Journey to Sales Engineering | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Zach shares his career transition from computer science to law and eventually into sales engineering at Salesforce after noticing SEs having more fun than support staff. Harry keeps the introduction friendly and welcoming without technical probing. | |
| The Role of Sales Engineering and Core Career Takeaways | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Zach provides a concise definition of the SE role versus sales reps. Harry contributes his own experience on hiring pitfalls, recognizing how he gets tricked by candidates who sell themselves well. | |
| Reforming Modern Sales: Buyer Enablement and Sense-Making | 4 | 4 | 2 | 6 | Zach argues that traditional seller-centric motions are broken and introduces Forrester's 'sense-making' framework. Harry pushes back twice, questioning whether product-led growth (PLG) contradicts the seller-centric claim and asking if outbound email is dead. | |
| The Blurring Lines Between Sales and Marketing | 5 | 3 | 1 | 5 | Harry offers a strong observation that marketing is eating up the top of the funnel before reps get involved, which Zach validates. Harry then pushes back on the feasibility of bringing expensive SE resources earlier into the deal funnel from a CEO standpoint. | |
| Achieving Product-Market Fit Through Customer Empathy | 4 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Harry references a prior conversation with Zach about product-market fit and connects it to his recent interview with Marty Cagan. Zach explains how founders lack customer empathy and introduces value canvases. | |
| Selling to CFOs and Structuring Value-Based Sales | 4 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Harry highlights the macroeconomic trend of CFOs approving software purchases. Zach details how to adapt messaging to hard ROI and shares Slack's multi-year transition to value-based selling. | |
| Structuring the Team: Solutions Engineering vs. Customer Success | 4 | 4 | 1 | 5 | Harry presses Zach on ACV thresholds for hiring SEs and challenges whether handing off from a technical SE to Customer Success feels like a quality drop for buyers. Zach explains modern SE extensions and Frank Slootman's approach to account ownership. | |
| Comp Design and Timing Your First SE Hire | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Harry demonstrates knowledge of sales rep compensation incentives ('coin-operated'). Zach details standard 70/30 OTE splits for SEs and rules of thumb for adding the first SE at a 5-to-1 rep ratio. | |
| Structuring the SE Interview and Product Demonstration | 4 | 3 | 1 | 5 | Zach outlines Slack's chronological interview format and product demo tests. Harry highlights a core hiring dilemma—evaluating candidate demos on familiar versus unfamiliar products creates interviewer bias—which Zach acknowledges as an age-old debate. | |
| Evaluating Collaboration and AE-SE Relationship Dynamics | 3 | 4 | 1 | 5 | Harry roleplays a candidate giving canned answers about team collaboration to force Zach to explain how he detects genuine teamwork. Zach details probing second and third-level questions to gauge an SE's tolerance for junior AEs. | |
| Balancing Technical Expertise and Sales Acumen | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Zach gently rejects the premise that charisma equals sales aptitude, emphasizing empathy instead. He also critiques interview processes where interviewers merely justify their own biases. | |
| Domain Credibility, Deal Ownership, and Measuring SE Success | 4 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Harry probes whether domain expertise or deal size experience is more critical for early SE hires, clarifying Zach's stance. Zach explains measuring SE success via 'solution wins' rather than pure close rates. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Lawryk: Modern B2B sales must focus on buyer enablement over selling
“What has changed and what has sort of broken about most sales organizations today is they're still trying to sell, like they're in control of that process, when the truth is they're not. The buyer is in control of the process, and it's more about buyer enablem…”
Lawryk: Quality of team is a reliable proxy for company success
“I've always followed great people. And that is a good proxy for understanding whether or not the company is going to be successful and is on the right trajectory is the quality of people you're surrounded with.”
Lawryk: Learning from colleagues outweighs growth rate, tech, and TAM
“It doesn't matter how fast the company is growing, how great the technology is, how big the total addressable market. If you don't feel like you're learning from the people that you're surrounded with, then you're in the wrong spot.”
Lawryk: Outbound sales requires a multi-channel approach, not just cold emails
“I don't think outbound is dead. I think outbound has just has fundamentally changed in terms of the methods that you need to use to engage prospects. And you have to take like a multi-channel approach to that.”
Lawryk: Solutions engineering scales early engagement by productizing content
“We have to think about scale, and we think about, like, what we do on a weekly basis, how we're engaging with customers, And how we might productize some of those engagements in a way that can be scaled earlier in the process. So it's not us physically getting…”
Lawryk: Early founders fail at PMF by prioritizing themselves over customer empathy
“I think it's because the process of starting a company, developing a product is, is a very personal journey, right? You're really wrapped up in yourself, how it's going to impact your life, your friends, your family, and how this company is going to change you…”
Lawryk: Product-led growth models inherently lack early value-based selling
“One of the deficiencies of a PLG motion is that, you know, value isn't really necessarily rooted in the sales process early on.”
Lawryk: Frank Slootman eliminated customer success to enforce sales accountability
“Frank Slootman sort of championed the idea that he doesn't want to have customer success at any of his companies. But I think what he's really saying is that he wants the sales team to take more responsibility for the success of a customer.”
Lawryk: Extending solutions consultants post-sale ensures higher customer success
“And I think when you extend the solutions consultant deeper in the sales process, or even post sales, it ensures customer success.”
Lawryk: Solutions engineers should have a 70/30 comp split tied to quotas
“So, you know, typically you've got the AE was fifty-fifty you know, 50 base, 50 variable, and the SE in an ideal world is like seventy-thirty. And you want the SE, in my opinion, to have as much skin in the game As possible and be connected to the same number …”
Lawryk: Startups should hire their first solutions engineer at 5-7 sales reps
“But I would say on average across a wide variety of products, when you get to about like five to seven reps, Because, you know, you're starting your first sales team. You probably, you know, need to hire more capable multifaceted AEs for the first five, but th…”
Lawryk: Solutions engineering candidates should demo the hiring company's product
“Ultimately, where I stand today is you get them to demonstrate your product, because You know, and understand the value prop better than anybody. Like you understand the target customer and you just have to do so with the understanding that it's not going to b…”
Lawryk: Prospects trust Solutions Engineers more than Account Executives
“Even if both people can do exactly the same thing, there's a lot of value in having just two people on a call because A prospect or customer is going to answer questions differently coming from an SE than they would from an account executive, because they have…”
Lawryk: Smart, technical Solutions Engineers fail without AE collaboration
“It doesn't matter how smart or good of a presenter, Or how technical an SE is. If they can't work with their AE counterparts, they're never going to be successful.”
Lawryk: Charisma does not equate to strong sales aptitude
“I don't think that actually like charisma necessarily corresponds to sales actually. I think that there are a lot of folks that may not have like a traditionally categorized charisma that have this strong sales aptitude because they think about the benefit to …”