This week marks one year since ServiceNow sent employees home to shelter in place. During that year, the world changed and the demands and expectations of our customers forever changed with it. I’m proud that ServiceNow was there to help our customers survive and thrive.

Sales engineering is becoming increasingly more important for service-based businesses. It’s time to start paying attention to the role of technical sales in your business. The truth is, without technical sales, you cannot sell. If you want to deliver solutions that meet your target market’s needs, you must bridge the gap between internal teams and customers.

As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a busy time here at SolarWinds HQ. There is A LOT going on, not the least of which is encouraging our customers to upgrade before March 8. (Why March 8? Keep reading and I’ll explain in a moment.) First, I want to emphasize the important part of that sentence: “encouraging our customers to upgrade before March 8.”

Picture the scene – you’re a mobile mechanic helping a customer and you can’t log into your tablet. You’re on the side of the road at 11pm, and you just want to reset your password so you can finish up and send them home in the car you just fixed. The service desk is closed, so you go for the chatbot option.

Sales engineers play a significant role in bridging the gap between internal teams and customers. This shared services team has product experts who possess a sound technical background and a deep understanding of customer expectations. With that, they support several business functions like Sales, Customer Service, Research and Development, and so on. Sales engineering professionals can wear many hats because of their in-depth understanding of the products and the business itself.

For those who have been keeping up with our series on IT Service Management (ITSM) beyond IT, welcome back! If you’re new to this conversation, it isn’t like a podcast where I’ll send you back to part one, but you may find it helpful to visit the previous recommendations for other internal service providers. Reflecting on 2020, we saw how powerful collaboration in the service desk could be in maintaining users’ productivity and achieving broader business goals.