Solutions Engineering at these early years

• Mostly done by the technical people
• First Solutions Engineers:
  • @jatorre, @saleiva, and @javisantana
• Without any formal process
• Support is provided by the Tech team
  • Teddy Bear

Solutions team duties

• Technical selling
• Integrations, prototypes
• Level 2 of Support: weekly rotation to help Support
• Trainings for partners and enterprise users
• Post-sales technical support for enterprise users
• Anything else couldn't tackled by technology folks

2016: Company reorganization

• Sales roles are better defined
• Community team is split:
  • A new Research & Data team is created
  • Pure community roles go to Marketing
  • Support is moved inside Solutions
• Technology is reorganized
  into Product and Engineering
• By the end of 2016, 105 (85/20)

2016: Solutions Engineering now also does Support

• Three functional groups:
  • technical sellers, engineering and support
• Some of us multitask over different groups
• We are a distributed team:
  • San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, NYC (2)
  • Madrid (3), Valencia, Valladolid

Responsibilities are settling

• We are the glue between our product developers
  and the rest of the company
• More focused roles and less jacks of all trades
• Support can handle L1 and most of L2 tickets
• Better trainings procedures and content
• Efforts to reduce noise and friction on communications

Responsibilities are settling

• Madrid Solutions team is leading
  some Community efforts:
  • CartoCamp Madrid
  • Participating in Geoinquietos Madrid
  • Colaborations with other local groups and entities
• Better post-sales coordination with the new Customer Success team

Locations

• Brazil: Sao Paulo
• USA: San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, Washington DC, NYC (2)
  • Tech seller in DC? Apply!
• Canada: St John’s Newfoundland (til September)
• Spain: Madrid (5), Valencia (2), Valladolid
• UK: London

Backgrounds

• Mostly with a geospatial background
• Some come with pre-sales experience,
  others from consultancy
• Pre-sales tend to be more seasoned engineers,
  while Support are younger (except me)

How we do sales eng.?

• Clear process for Sales Reps to ask for help
• Only after qualification:
  • don’t get into the opportunity too soon
• An SE is assigned for the full opportunity process
• Work closely with the Sales Rep., listen client recommendations, help on the best sales approach, assure CARTO is a good fit
• Develop proofs of concept and tailored demos

How we do support?

• Strong asynchronous focus: no phone, no chat, only e-mail to attend even our own workmates
• Synchronous communications (chat or phone) only for urgent stuff
  • Planes falling from sky
  • Most of our MRR may be in jeopardy (@santana)
• Internally we use:
  • Chat: slack
  • Audio/video: slack, google meet, goto meeting/webinar, whatever fancies our clients and our hipster sales people (Skype for what?)

How we do support?

• Inputs:
  • Mostly attending our ticketing system
  • But also GIS Stack Exchange carto tag
  • And Google Group (but this is normally attended by Engineering folks)
• Using GitHub Issues to pass tasks between us over timezones and communicate with our developers

How we do support?

Recently Engineering has developed a new procedure called Response Team (sort of Teddy Bear v2) where a group of engineers rotates every two weeks to focus only on helping to fix issues raised by us (and by proxy the full company).