| 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 |
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.