Ask HN: Senior Dev to Sales?

1 point·i_am_not_elon··1 comment

Hi HN -

Have any of you made the jump from Senior Dev to Sales, and/or do you have recommendations for how to approach this? Is there a demand for highly-technical people in sales roles that you're aware of?

Thanks!

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The most obvious direct route is to go sales engineering. This usually doesn't have a hard target/hard performance aspect to it though, so not necessarily as lucrative as $ target sales roles. Likely you'll have a set bonus based on team rev achievement or Okrs.

I'd advise trying a sales role which is focussed on retention/up selling of current customers first rather than new business - this will allow you to leverage your deep knowledge more vs new biz pitches.

Given your deeper tech knowledge you'll be more likely to pick up more responsibility(therefore better earning opportunities) vs newer salespeople transitioning from sales development (sales prospecting specialisation role).

Where sales gets tricky for newbies is prospecting and pipeline management of new business as reading customer intent is something which kinda needs to be learnt by doing(and generally you are working against time with your slaw quota - 2 bad quarters can mean you're fired) . With new biz prospects you aren't in the customers circle of trust pre sale so a lot of reluctance info or org context that could kill your deal goes unsaid. This is less of an issue with existing customers in my experience.

What options are you looking at now?

What is motivating you to make a change?

What's your area of expertise?

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