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Comment by kblev | Hacker News Reader

> upgrading business development

Any tips on that?

I can only tell from my experience. It's probably not applicable to everyone, nor is it the best path.

In my case, I have been involved with many startups in the AI/ML B2B space from the early days of my career as a software developer.

At one point, I recognized that if you want to build something great, it really helps to listen to the customers and the prospects. So I started to shove myself into a hybrid role of sales engineering and software engineering. To get started on the sales engineering, I reached out to all the business developers friends and asked them to share their frameworks, processes, and learning materials. Also did a lot of Googling to educate myself. Then I asked the appropriate people in the company if I can join small-stake sales call. To start with small-stake calls and learn how things work. It did not take a long time to start receiving invites from the sales to help with high-stake customers. Since in most cases, people who can build and sell (you don't have to be the best at either) are rare and needed.

This sounds really interesting. How would you define what Sales engineering is?

In my view, it's the person who is able to understand the business problem the customer is trying to solve, then evalute if the problem is something you or your company can and want to solve. If the problem is something your company want to solve, provide the technical evidences during the due diligence process to the prospects that you can solve their problems. In my case, this also bridged nicely to help out the existing customers to get new things done quickly.

Thanks, this sounds good.

In cloud software at least, sales engineers/solutions architects work with the account manager to drive adoption of services. A lot about evaluating a customer's problem space or existing architecture, and proposing possible cloud-native architectures.

Sales engineers also do educational sessions and service-specific "immersion days" for the platform, which usually tie into the customer account manager's sales and advocacy for the platform, and helps to build relationships with the customer's engineering team.

This sounds exactly my cup of tea.

I worked in a customer facing role for a while it gave me a better sense for vendor relationships. I say it's worth it if you are curious.

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