What Being a Champion for Dynatrace Taught Me About Pre-Sales

That time I put my name on the line for a vendor, and learned how to support a Champion from the inside out.

We were running into issues at Vectorflow. Issues that did not always trigger alerts, but were absolutely frustrating our end users. Pages were loading slowly. Sometimes the app froze without explanation. Support could not always reproduce the problem, and when they could, the logs were not enough.

So I brought in Dynatrace.

Not as a seller. As a buyer. As a Champion.

I was not evaluating Dynatrace to pitch it. I was fighting to keep it.

I knew what it could do: Real User Monitoring (RUM), waterfall charts, root cause analysis. It gave us actual visibility, not just into infrastructure, but into what users were doing before something broke.

"It is not just uptime. It is understanding what led to the downtime."

The Internal Sell Is Real

Rolling out Dynatrace meant defending it. It cost money. It required agent install coordination. And it meant adding another dashboard to teams that already felt stretched.

So I did what every good Champion does. I gathered wins:

• 🕵️I showed how we traced a bug faster using user session playback
• ⏱️I shared how we reduced incident triage time by 60%
• 🧠I used charts to walk our execs through before and after cases they remembered personally

I escalated when needed. I backed the product when others doubted it. And every time we solved something faster because of Dynatrace, I used it as internal proof.

But Let's Be Honest. I Had Self-Interest Too.

Dynatrace was not just good for the org. It was good for me. If I could prove it solved real problems, that meant:

• 📈More credibility across engineering
• 📢Visibility with leadership
• 💰A faster path to promotion, raises, or new opportunities

I was not just deploying software. I was betting my internal reputation on a tool that I believed would make everyone better.

And I did not just fight for Dynatrace. I used their own value messaging to frame the pitch: uptime, user journey insight, performance diagnostics. I was quoting them tactfully in meetings. I had basically deputized myself as their in-house Solutions Engineer.

What This Means for SEs Working with Champions

Remember: your Champion is not just advocating for your product. They are advocating for themselves.

• 🏆Help them win political capital
• 📊Make them look smart with data they can share
• 📖Give them a story they can own
• 🌱Do not just talk about the product. Talk about how it helps them grow.

If I had not seen it from the inside, I might have missed that. Now, I design every enablement move with that lens.

Being a Champion made me a better SE. Because great Champions do not happen by luck. They happen because someone made it easy for them to believe.

More from the SE Blog