Design Engineers Need Us Now More Than Ever

The COVID-19 situation has had unprecedented implications on how we all work. Design engineers have to find ways to work remotely, away from their critical team members, while still meeting product launch timelines, pilot build schedules and production ramps. We have an imperative as key suppliers to structure support systems to help.

Understand Their Challenges and Structure Support

The place to start as always is by understanding the challenges this situation has presented to the engineering community. The channels that were relied upon such as team brainstorm sessions and white boarding have gone virtual, which can be valuable, but can't replace being in a room together. The small moments in time - asking an opinion from a colleague as you walk by their office or a quick question of an expert in the hallway - are often critical parts of innovation / design cycles.

As a strategic supplier with specialized expertise, you to find ways to provide access and structure your support teams in a way to fill those gaps. It may mean providing access to 3D part files that can easily be downloaded by your customers or having a technical chat capability available across time zones and geographies. While you work with your customers to clearly understand their needs, below are a few recommendations based on our experiences.

Enable Your Sales and Application Engineers to Help

Understanding your internal customers is just as critical. Your sales and applications teams are the front line to your customers engineering teams. They need to have access to the right tools at the right time in order to answer questions and provide support.

Ideally you would have a world-class sales enablement platform deployed such as Seismic either as a standalone platform or embedded within your CRM tool such a salesforce.com. Whether you have an established platform or are just starting out your journey in enablement, below are a few key areas to consider as you support your front line teams.

1. Access to Expertise: The ability for your team to answer technical questions quickly is critical and establishing a team collaboration mechanism is key. Most enterprises have Office 365 deployed which means likely you have access already to configuring Microsoft Teams (for free / often included in your Office license). Relying on email is not a good strategy and extremely inefficient. You need contextual dialogue, running history of discussions and the ability to share and collaborate on files. Other options to consider are Asana, Monday, Basecamp and Slack.

2. Establish a Knowledge Library: With your own teams working remotely, it's more important than ever to create a library of application successes - when you solved a customer design challenge. To get started, use a simplified form and share folder(s) when your teams can search for related applications. As you go down your path of enablement, having related content pushed to sales / applications engineers in context will supercharge effectiveness and turn regional wins into global ones across multiple customers.

3. Clear Communication Plan & Escalation Path: Make sure your internal teams are crystal clear about their responsibilities within the account team structure. They are well-connected and understand who is responsible for engaging the customer throughout their buying journey. Provide the customer with a contact matrix and escalation path formally. It will instill confidence that your team is ready and willing to support them through these difficult times.

4. An Aligned Culture: All of the above guidance will fail if you don't have the organizational culture to execute. That means having clear communication across your teams and understanding about the goals and expectations of everyone involved. The most well-designed sales enablement platform is ineffective if your teams won't leverage it and work together.

Looking Long-Term

It is imperative that you take a hard look at your digital capabilities and make a plan for the future. While we all hope this current situation will be behind us soon, it's clear that the design cycles of OEM's will permanently be affected. From a supplier perspective, you need to be ready with a robust strategy to supply early design support across multiple channels and geographies moving forward. Benchmark your competitive landscape but more importantly have meaningful conversations with your key customer base and build a capability roadmap that will allow you to increase your interactions earlier in the design phase of their projects moving forward. Together you will be able to enable your customers to reduce their design cycle times, optimize BOM costs, and get to market faster while driving organic growth for your business.

#ESI #DesignEngineering #SalesEnablement