[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Any Sales Engineers out here?
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Ask HN: Any Sales Engineers out here?
Interested in learning more about what your experience was. Did you
start as a software engineer and move to SE? Do you like it? Was
the move $$$ motivated? What are your long term career goals?
Author : jklein11
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-06-14 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
| mattzito wrote:
| FWIW, my career path went: sysadmin->systems architect->solutions
| architect at big tech->startup founder (SE, PM, mearketing,
| etc.)->product exec & head of SE->product stuff from then on
|
| For me, the move was less about comp and more about being able to
| balance my enjoyment of designing systems with my comfort with
| speaking and evangelism. Once I was at a startup, it was more of
| a "do whatever needs doing" situation than a conscious choice - I
| had the experience and comfort with things like technical selling
| and customer success, so it made sense for me to do and manage
| those things.
|
| The thing to keep in mind is that the SE career trajectory tends
| to veer off into one of a few different directions - one is to
| grow into a people management role of SE teams or orgs, which is
| great if you like dealing with process and people management, but
| you inevitably end up spending a lot less time doing sales
| engineering work. Another is to shift into more of a product
| marketing or product management role - can be a larger role, more
| impact, but the sales part of it fades away a lot. Another is to
| become more of an evangelist or thought leader type - sort of a
| "super SE", some companies describe these as "outbound product
| managers".
|
| But I think sales engineer as a dedicated role is one that has a
| limit to its trajectory if you want to advance in scope and
| seniority, because it sits awkwardly at the intersection of a few
| different roles, and as a result requires managing your career
| more than the trajectory of someone in either sales or software
| engineering (or product management).
| chzblck wrote:
| Another term may be Devrel or evangelist.
| whartung wrote:
| At our small consultancy, I was lead developer and the SE. Out on
| demos it was the President, our Marketing fellow, and me. I did
| all the demos and talked up tech and the stack.
|
| The money quote from one demo "You're a 5 man company, and 3 of
| you are here?".
|
| The President was technically savvy, and also an (ex) developer,
| the sales guy was a sales guy. The President was also the domain
| expert.
|
| I loved the SE part. I loved our product, I enjoyed the demos, I
| was enthusiastic to evangelize it. It also helped that anything
| we promised was probably going to be done by me anyway, so there
| was little of that discontinuity between what was promised and
| what was delivered.
|
| That said, you certainly needed a good relationship with the
| sales guy and make a point to never contradict them when they're
| presenting something, even if it's egregious. Nobody is signing
| anything, there's always time later to correct issues.
|
| It's also important to let the sales folks make the promises, as
| they're the ones doing the contracts when it's all said and done.
| There's a bit of a political line to stay on one side of, so in
| the end, I always deferred to the sales guys.
|
| But it was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed doing that work, I'd do
| it again given the right opportunity. It helps a lot to believe
| in the product you're selling.
|
| That said, like a comedian, giving a demo to a dead room is just
| exhausting.
| tedmcory77 wrote:
| I an not, but my internal customers are all SCs/SEs. Ive worked
| with them in some capacity or another for more than a decade.
|
| While I used to see the technical path to SE almost 100% of the
| time, things seem to have changed in the last five years or so
| and we are seeing more early in career folks, some straight out
| of college or military.
|
| If youre interested in this path the presales collective might be
| a good place to learn more (I'm not affiliated) about being an
| SE.
|
| I'm on mobile at the moment so cant be super thorough in my
| response, but you can email me at my username minus the numbers
| at gmail if a conversation might help.
| apohn wrote:
| I'm a former SE. I was unhappy working in different "Engineering"
| roles for non-tech companies and got a job in the post sales
| services group of a large software company selling Analytics
| products. I was identified by management as having a blend of
| good customer facing + technical skills and was recruited into a
| more technical PreSales team. I was not sure about switching to
| PreSales, but I wasn't very happy with the heavy travel
| requirements of services so I switched.
|
| After close to a decade of customer facing work I got tired of it
| and left. It's a very long story, so I'll sum it up in the major
| reasons why I ultimately decided to leave.
|
| 1) I grew dissatisfied with basically being in constant MVP mode.
| The goal of PreSales is to convince a potential customer you can
| do something, not to actually do it. So you never really build
| something that goes into production. You never have the
| opportunity to learn from all the mistakes you made when you see
| it run for a year or more. Your sense of long-term ownership and
| mastery is very low.
|
| 2) SEs with strong technical skills are in a weird spot. Since
| your career trajectory is mostly evaluated by non-technical
| people, most people can't recognize when you do something
| amazing. You're in a sales org and above your PreSales manager is
| usually Sales Mangers. There's limited rewards for being
| technical. The rewards only come from selling.
|
| 3). There's no real career path for SEs. Unless you want to do
| the same job for the rest of your life, you need to move out of
| PreSales. At every company I've worked and known about, the
| titles (Associate, Consultant, Senior, Principal) are largely
| superficial and mean nothing other than your leverage when you
| are hired. I've known Associate Consultants with 0 experience who
| were better at PreSales than Principal consultants with 15+ years
| of experience.
|
| 4) I got really tired of sales people. A few of them are amazing
| and see PreSales as a precious finite resource that you need to
| take care of. Most see everything and everyone as disposable as
| long as their needs are met. At my last SE job the sales team was
| a bunch of toxic a-holes who would blatantly lie to the customer
| and then just turn around and task PreSales and Engineering to
| figure out how to make it work. There was no sense of "team" at
| all.
|
| As far as $$$, I think Engineering and Data Science (my field)
| jobs have reached the point where you are paid the same as
| PreSales or just a bit less. This was different in the past. The
| big money is in Sales, not in PreSales.
|
| I will always value the broad exposure I got to all levels (from
| ICs to C-Suite) at our customers. All of it was a great
| experience in climbing out of the technical weeds and really
| understanding what the customer was trying to do and why they
| were trying to do it. Learning to enjoy building (by osmosis,
| nobody taught me) a good slide deck and presenting it is
| something I value highly.
| fader wrote:
| SE here. I got a degree in CS and became a software engineer,
| then realized that as much fun as coding is for well defined
| short projects, I get bored if I'm doing the same thing day after
| day for months and years on end. I moved into IT operations for a
| while before discovering that sales engineering was a thing that
| exists.
|
| My motivation was not financial (though that is a part of the
| goodness of the role!) but more quality of life. Being an SE
| means that you're frequently encountering new problems, new
| technology, and new people.
|
| You get to do what I think is the fun part of engineering, which
| is figuring out solutions and building a proof of concept that
| your solution works. But you don't have to do the bits of
| software engineering that I find boring, which is fully
| completing a project, adding polish, and smashing bugs. (For me,
| figuring out how to solve a problem is fun and then I want to
| move on, which is why I have a bunch of hobby projects that are
| 80% finished and will never actually be complete.)
|
| What surprised me is that you also get to do the fun bits of
| sales. You will figure out business and sales strategy like how
| to compete with other products, what features to highlight, what
| questions to ask, and what traps to set for competitors. "Have
| you thought about how you will solve Problem X?" is always a fun
| question to ask when Problem X is valid and you have the answer
| but nobody else does!
|
| It can be a high stress job. I've been an SE for a long time, and
| with the exception of one company I've always had more to do than
| I felt I had time for. (The exception is no longer in business,
| which should tell you something.) Sales moves fast and you have
| to be constantly learning, growing, and experimenting along with
| keeping up with both halves of your day job.
|
| One thing to note: you don't have to be an extrovert to be an SE.
| You _do_ have to be socially aware, though -- you need to
| understand _why_ someone is asking a question or taking a
| position. Not just the technical reasons, but the political and
| emotional reasons. (Are they personally invested in a competitive
| tech? Will bringing in your product harm or help their career?
| How does their body language shift when they talk about different
| parts of the business or different colleagues? Is there a way I
| can make my company 's success part of my prospect's success as
| well?)
|
| Overall it's a fabulously rewarding job, but not for everyone. If
| you like to build things start to finish, you'll be frustrated by
| moving quickly to the next thing once you have a technical fit.
| If you don't like to think about money and how businesses work,
| you will fail at the sales portion. But if you are a neophile and
| have the social skills to tell someone they're wrong without
| making them angry, you will love it!
| scrapcode wrote:
| I am not the OP but I appreciate your response, and it has
| piqued my interest as a potential path to look into. I have a
| similar background in education and "passion," e.g. I still
| enjoy programming, but my career has just catapulted me into
| managerial roles, project management, finance management, and
| procurement to the point where I don't think it makes sense for
| me to turn back [to dev].
|
| Are there any blogs / communities that you might recommend to
| brush up on SE?
| fader wrote:
| The Presales Collective has a lot of great material and
| basically all of the same links that I would put together
| myself :) https://www.presalescollective.com/education
|
| John Care is great and I'd check out his book Mastering
| Technical Sales if you want to go deep, but there's plenty on
| that list to get you started!
| anoojb wrote:
| Biochemist -> SWE -> SE -> SWE -> Product
|
| If you value career growth, SE can be an accelerator in the early
| part of your career. But can be a major blocker to high
| impact/leverage projects and career progression later in your
| career.
|
| But if you don't value career growth and high leverage/impact
| work (products/services)...SE is predictable and boring role with
| good job security.
|
| I recommend thinking of SE as a short tour of duty. Not a final
| career path. There are too many older (and wiser) SEs who
| basically work the same 5-6 hours a day and get paid half as much
| as their SWE counter parts, and can't transition out because they
| are pigeon-holed.
|
| Re: Sales/SE Manager. EMs are often assigned more interesting
| higher leverage projects, and get paid way more with less pay
| variability.
|
| Also, don't let sales people (including CEOs) sell you on
| Sales/SE. They are very charismatic. Message me anytime if you
| need a voice of reason.
| yeutterg wrote:
| Current SE with a product/entrepreneurship background. The main
| reason I took the role was to exercise the discovery/talking to
| customers muscle, which I feel has improved a lot. Mid-term, I
| see myself going back into product management and startups.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Good friend of mine works for Oracle as a sales engineer. Same
| role for a few educational companies before that. We have nearly
| the same amount of experience (I took the engineering track).
| He's historically made about half as much. Far fewer
| responsibilities though.
| julee04 wrote:
| I lead the solutions engineering team for a company called
| Hightouch.
|
| My background: - Started off my career as an SSE (Demo builder)
| at Salesforce and eventually moved to software engineering at
| Salesforce working on their analytics product. - Spend the rest
| of my career in front-end engineering (in startups, large
| enterprises, and everything in between) - Started my own company
| (which we shuttered after 1.5 years) - Made the move to sales to
| learn more about sales
|
| My move to Sales Engineering was highly motivated to learn to
| sell since gaining sales experience is much easier in an
| established company (unlike programming, it's hard to become good
| at sales just by self-learning). Originally, it was a skill I
| wanted to learn to start my own company again, but ultimately I
| fell in love with profession.
|
| My career as a sales engineer: - Started off as a sales engineer
| at Algolia - Move to Segment where I eventually became a leader
| for the West & APAC region - Now I lead the Sales Engineering/CS
| team at Hightouch
|
| One thing I've learned over my career is that Sales Engineering
| is very different depending on what company you work at. A sales
| engineer at Salesforce for example, is very different than what
| we have at Hightouch. Understanding the role that an SE team
| plays in the company overall can make a huge difference in the
| role.
|
| If you are considering Sales Engineering, here's my grain of salt
| advice: 1. Joining the right company matters. Your comp is
| variable so whether or not you make a lot of money depends on the
| success of the company. Here's an article I wrote on my
| methodology when it comes to picking a good SaaS company:
| https://1stgeneration.substack.com/p/how-to-pick-a-winner-in...
|
| 2. Join a Sales engineering team that values discovery and sales
| skills. I've seen the most respected sales engineering teams come
| from teams who don't have the most technical people, but have
| people who can bridge business and tech together extremely well.
|
| All in all, I love sales engineering. If you want to talk more -
| feel free to shoot me an email at ju[at]hightouch.io
| apohn wrote:
| >If you are considering Sales Engineering, here's my grain of
| salt advice: 1. Joining the right company matters.
|
| I want to echo this 100x. IME experience there are two major
| things to consider.
|
| At the end of the day your job as a Sales Engineer is to
| convince people to buy something. If you are a reasonably
| honest person you need to feel like the products you are
| selling are good. It's soul-crushing to sell a product you
| think is crap. Unless you are a dishonest person, then it
| doesn't matter. Work at a company where you believe in the
| product.
|
| Some companies sell their products to the by mostly talking to
| the Executives and your job as an SE is to talk and sell
| vision. Some companies need their SEs to be much more technical
| and really work with customers on technical matters. Figure out
| kind of SE you want to be and go into the right role.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Me: sysadmin => sales engineer => sysadmin => infrastructure
| everything => manager of infrastructure and security people
|
| Pre-sales engineering is primarily a technical diplomacy role, in
| which you are trying to match the customers' sometimes-
| unexpressed needs with your company's products and services. You
| need to establish credibility and trustworthiness, and then not
| lose that reputation.
|
| Never lie. If you don't know the answer, say so and get back to
| them with the right answer by the next day. Stay current on all
| of the products and services you are helping to sell, and learn
| how to navigate the customer support organization.
|
| It's great experience for a number of other roles: user
| experience, product management, documentation, management.
| lanstein wrote:
| Thought about it but decided to go from engineering -> sales.
| Thought it would be useful somehow and that turned out to be
| true.
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