Sales Engineer – Experiences

Technical Sales is like any sub-specialized role.

For instance, you can have an MD who did their residency in Oncology, then sub-specialize into Radiation Oncology/Surgery via fellowship study. They take on additional training and develop experience to fulfill demand.

It can be incredibly rewarding (economically and psychologically) to be deeply sub-specialized in most domains…with Sales being one of the major exceptions.

Sales is a volume/transaction game. It’s simply a matter of how much you can do to influence and transact revenue/consumption. You are not rewarded for deep mastery, your autonomy to learn and develop something impactful is only as wide as the revenue goals.

If you’re still curious, I would encourage you to make it a short tour of duty, not a long-term professional path. I am personally interested in moving back into product/engineering…for one reason —

Leverage. A sales engineer has only one lever to pull, her time. A product engineer is fundamentally setup (especially in SaaS and zero marginal cost products) to succeed by virtue of the company creating inherent distribution and funding mechanisms to support the development and consumption of scalable product. The economic and psychological rewards are also much greater in product/engineering roles. This is especially at technology companies.

Experience: Transitioned from product/engineering. Recruited by a well known CEO for a Technical Sales role. Went through an acquisition and maintained the Technical Sales role for almost 10 years. Now looking for a Product/Engineering role.

I was a software engineer, then I went into sales engineering for 8 years, then I went back to engineering.

The specific job role of a SE vary quite a bit by company. Some SEs are always tied to a salesperson, and some are given free rein to "sell". Another dimension that varies quite a bit is how much time you have in the office in preparation vs. meeting with customers.

(As an aside, I'm curious how Covid is impacting sales these days. I used to fly 6 plane segments a week as an SE.)

The biggest skills are speaking, listening, and thinking on your feet. Reading people and understanding whether points are landing is super important.

There's a performative aspect to sales which is quite different than a typical engineering job; it is somewhat akin to doing whiteboard interviews for a living.

The nice thing about sales is everything is tactical, and there's little long term planning. The downside is everything is about closing stuff for the quarter, and every new quarter is a clean slate.

Solution Architect here. Here are a few things you should take into account:

- You need obviously to know your stuff inside out, especially the technical side of things.

- the split between tech knowledge and business knowledge will depend on the SE position/vertical and company, but do expect at least a 50% / 50%.

- You need to develop you business skills. This doesn't include only finance/accounting jargons, but also soft skills such as presenting, talking, listening, dealing with angry customers, dealing with C-suite..etc.

- Depending on the job specs, you will spend your time doing the following: - Presentations - PoC - Demos - Design and proposal documents - Costing for the solution and putting a business case together (I do this in my current role, but it's rare that you'd need to do it) - responding to RFP/RFI - Working together with the sales team to land new accounts, or penetrate existing accounts. - Working with delivery team to estimate project costs or design feedback.

Some rookie mistakes when beginning as an SE:

- DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT talk about a solution before you listened to the customer, understood their pain points and let them speak. Unless they ask a specific question, try to ask questions and then just listen to them.

- Talk slowly and with confidence. Know who your audiance is. If they are business people, prepare yourself and talk about ROI and how the solution will help them reduce cost, increase sale or make things easier. Do not talk technical stuff if your audiance doesn't understand it. Your audiance will mostly not care about frameworks, programing language, or the latest and greatest AWS service. You need to fight the urge to talk like a nerd, unless ofcourse the situation requires it.

- Have a call/meeting with the area sales manager before you go see or talk to the customer. This is crucial for SE's. Some, and I say some Sales AM are only interested in their quarter numbers and will try to sell anything to the customer, even if the solution is not fit for purpose. Its your job to make sure the solution you are selling fits the customers requirements

I'm writing a guide for SE at the moment and might post it here. But for books I would suggest: Mastering the technical sales by John Care. Its nothing groundbreaking but its a good read.

I'm an introvert and actually enjoy working as an SE, but it's not for everyone. If you don't like dealing with customers and meetings, demos, writing a lot of documents then it's probably not for you.

The pay is generally quite good depending on the vertical/company.

You didn't ask about this, but I thought I'd tell you since you are coming from a software engineer background.

The other side of PreSales is Post-Sales Services. Basically, it's your job to build what Sales/PreSales sold to the customer.

In services you also interact a lot with clients, but it's less sales and your technical knowledge is more highly valued. You are more likely to become a trusted advisor. Your customer has already paid, so they know they want a real defined thing of value and not just have a demo. Finally, since you actually have to build something and not just an MVP, you use your technical skills. The major downside is that some jobs are very travel heavy.

A lot of people bounce between PreSales/PostSales before settling on one or the other. Which one fits best depends on your personality.

I transitioned to sales engineering last year. My software engineering opportunities had plateaued and I was not interested in management (I hate meetings). I considered going back to consulting, but health insurance prices make that impossible.

Part of the job is to make your quirky company appear to be operating smoothly from a customer point of view. You must give the customer warm fuzzy feelings about spending lots on your product. A prerequisite of this is to know and be able to communicate about your specific product domain very well.

I get paid really well for my knowledge and it's very satisfying. The workload comes in waves and is very different from the grind of coding. If I do want to code, I can code for my company or the customer.

depends inside sales or outside sales? if someone is generating the lead and all you have to do is close it, might be easier. if you have to hit the pavement and cold call to generate leads, might be tough. you should read up on sales, as someone else mentioned, there's then the post sales which might be easier, where you're pretty much running demos and helping them setup things. lot's of listening and having strong empathy for the customer to know what problem they are having, being able to communicate clearly so they can immediately understand the values you are presenting, those I'll say are the core skills.