[lanstein]

My colleague and I started the sales team at PagerDuty. We were both engineers. Happy to meet for coffee in SoMa if anyone with revenue would like a short 1:1. I've done this a number of times over the years and hopefully those folks have found it helpful.

Sorry, no remote/phone calls. I don't do calls with clients either - face-to-face only - lesson one :)

Email is in profile.

[pc86]

Any tips for a developer who would like to move into Enterprise tech sales?

[scoot]

You might find a move into enterprise technical pre-sales easier (or perhaps that's what you meant).

Moving from tech support to pre-sales within the same organization is not uncommon - support have deep technical knowledge of the product, have customer facing (at least telephone) skills, are used to juggling multiple ongoing conversations, etc.

Moving from engineering, if you are in a role that requires you to understand the whole product, you are part way there. Communication skills perhaps less so (unless you run engineering TOI presentations for other parts of the business or within engineering), and customer facing skills possibly not so well honed.

A move from engineering to profession services (which adds a customer facing element) to pre-sales, to (if that's what you're aiming for, and is still attractive having worked with sales people while in a pre-sales role) sales, might be a better path.

Enterprise sales is less about the product, and more about developing relationships ("people by from people they trust"), constructing a deal that works for both organizations, and closing the sale.

Technical pre-sales is a question of mapping the customer's business requirements to the product's capabilities, and demonstrating that your company can solve their specific needs better than the competition.

[ghaff]

That's all good advice. I see a lot of movement among solution architects (pre-sales), support, technical marketing managers, developers (although less so), etc. Sales is, as you say, a largely orthogonal skill set, and often, personality. I won't say someone can't transition between the two worlds but I'd be hard put to name an example off the top of my head.

[lanstein]

Yup, that's exactly what I did. Your email doesn't show up (needs to be in the blurb not the email field) so just drop me a line.

[mamatta]

or if you're in Toronto, reach out :)