The last 5 years I've found myself enjoying social interactions far more, and am intrigued to go into sales engineering. I'd love to hear from people that did this.
What are the skillsets you leverage mostly, do you like it?
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 can see what you mean by the tech leverage, but in my experience unless you’re employee number is less than 10 or greater than 100,000 you don’t really get rewarded or have the power to get rewarded from engineering changes. I’ve made changes that increased the bottom line directly by $100k+ a month but still only get a 3% raise unless I have a competing offer. I think the real trick is striking off as a consultant who charges based on results in that situation.
I was at a job where I was the reason we closed a $2M deal. I'm not bragging - even the customer said it. I got no bonus or raise that year because overall the sales org didn't hit their target.
On the plus side, the base comp for PreSales tends to be quite good. So even some basic variable comp on top can give you a nice income. Plus, you can live in a low COL area and work for a company that pays higher COL salaries.
This is again a function of who is assigned the leverage due to specialized knowledge in a technology organization. It is usually the product/engineering organization.
Anecdotally, the exceptions here have been when I've sold technology that other people consume, to then sell technology (ISVs). But these are rare because often folks don't like taking inordinate platform risk/dependency if they can avoid it.
If you can pull this type of lever you should be a sales rep making sales based commissions.
IME, the relationships you can build from Pre/Post-Sales are more around being an expert advisor/consultant. For example, a few jobs ago I built up a really good relationship with a few customers who trusted that I was motivated for them to be successful. I could have translated that into becoming an independent contractor by basically saying that I'd do the same job for 50% of the rate they were paying to the company I worked for. But I was horribly bored with the product I was supporting, and doing more of that just wasn't appealing.
But the above is maybe 5% of the customers you work with. For the other 95%, the relationships are temporary and purely functional.
Just wanted to support this. I think a lot of people with strong technical skills make the mistake of overvaluing their own technical skills and burning themselves out in PreSales. IMO the most effective PreSales people know how to do the bare minimum to demonstrate to the customer that something can be done. So a lot of times you end up with deeper knowledge of some aspect(s) of the product you're selling, but for the most part you have very shallow knowledge of all the other technologies you work with across clients.
IME a lot of people who are very strong technically get sucked into bad sales opportunities. Customer says they will buy if you do X,Y,Z custom work for them. Since you are the technical person on the team, you do the work (usually in a massive rush), then the customer says "I didn't realize to do those things were so much custom work. We're not buying."
Obviously the above isn't true for every company.
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.
- 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.
>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%.
I agree with your post overall, but I'd say there is a much wider variance in this than indicated in your post. In smaller companies with a smaller sales force technical skills is very important. In bigger companies, it's entirely possible to be a "Solution Architect" where all you do is regurgitate talking points without actually having a good practical understanding of the product you are selling.
I only say this because it's important to evaluate the type of Sales Engineering role you want to be in and how much you want to use your technical skills. Some Sales Engineers primarily interact with technical people. Others spend most of their time with slides, flowcharts (e.g. Vizio), and managers. If you want to be in one type of role but end up in the other you'll be miserable.
>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.
Here's a tough thing. If you are the Sales Engineer assigned to this type of sales rep, it's your job to peddle this crap to the customer and build demos and "solutions" that you don't even agree are good fit for the customer use case. It can really drain you if you are a generally honest person. But that's what you're paid to do.
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.
It's effectively a "retention" sales role or consulting role for SaaS companies who value recurring revenue.
It may feel less "sales-y", but ultimately your compensation is usually dependent on recurring revenue or billed hours.
The experience in these organizations will be highly dependent on the culture of the technical sales team and the kinds of customers you work to enable. Which is usually a derivative function of the kind of market your company addresses.
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.