Sell internally to Sales AEs, before to customers!
Is it common across all product companies or is this unique to SAP only - As product owner/ Presales/ Sol Adv, I end up spending more time and energy to first convince Sales AEs, get their buy-in, and make them comfortable to let you present the idea to customer; before they actually let you onboarded! I understand Sales AE want to secure their sales quota, want yo keep their customer relationship; but, i believe as a team (or company), everyone of us wants the same - more sales! Why is sales team so paranoid to approach customers with new thoughts or new people interact??
Its the same in Microsoft also. It’s because sales ae don’t just blindly push the customer on every product, timing is very imp, they know the internal politics at each customer site how best to show your cards when needed . Best AEs stay neutral in many early customer meetings playing devils advocate and that’s how they get the confidence of the customer that they are on their side and objectively helping them to make a decision. If a customer exec feels their time is being wasted , AE loses credibility with the exec which is worse for the AE in the long term than losing a sale in the short term. Also AEs represent themselves more than their employer, personal relationships with customer execs is more important, because employer and products might change in sales, but the customers in your domain remain the same. Ex tech sales here.