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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Are there any blogs / communities that you might recommend to brush up on SE?
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!
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.