#239 The Benefits of the Traditionally Long Path To Sales Engineering

Notes:

Sales engineering has been around for quite some time but it’s recently coming up as one of the hottest new careers in tech. And while there are multiple options for you to break into the role (many have jumped from quite non-technical roles into this very technical but customer-facing role), there is also absolutely nothing wrong with going the traditional path. In today’s episode, James Connor McCann makes a case for taking a role in support or professional services first before jumping straight into a sales engineering role, why it poses a lot of great benefits, and the transferable soft skills you can learn from a more technical role.

James Connor McCann is a Pre-sales Consultant for CyberRes which is a dedicated business unit from MicroFocus, which specializes in cyber resilience specifically. He has been with the organization for 12 years since graduating from university. He started in support before transitioning to a Solutions Consultant which is the presales role at the same company. He’s got to cover the Netherlands, Nordics, UK & Ireland and is currently based in Belfast.

Key Takeaways:

Was it James’ intention to go into support right after graduating from university?
Why support and professional services were top of mind for James and not engineering or software design
There is no hiding in the support role, you have to be able to handle the high-pressure environment
Why James decided to switch from a support role to a technical solution consultant or a sales engineering role
How he was recruited to the role of sales engineering
Is it true that “the sales team (or the presales team) have more fun”?
One of the perks of working in support is working with tons of different departments, including SEs
The extra insights you gain only if you’re coming from a support or professional services role
One thing that Ramzi doesn’t like about the support role
What the interview process for the sales engineering role was like for James
How James knew he wanted to become an SE after speaking with other SEs
Expectations versus reality about the role and working as a presales engineer
Why it’s still perfectly reasonable to go the traditional path into sales engineering
Some soft skills that are transferable from support into presales

Quotes:

“Coming from the presales side, you’re essentially working with customers who are just about to purchase the solution. They’re generally happy customers or existing customers who want to expand their footprint. So essentially, you’re selling the dream with the presales or the sales engineering landscape, whereas the post-sales support it’s a different journey, the customer has purchased the solution and your job really is to keep the dream alive… A big part of the job was trying to defuse that scenario with the customer first, before actually digging into the troubleshooting aspect.” – James Connor McCann

“As a support engineer, I had a lot of chances to do demos, I wasn’t smart enough to take them up and ask for more. But if I knew then what I know now, then I would have asked for a lot more.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“If you are working in the support team, one of the big benefits is that you get to see how customers are using the solution day to day. So you can see the support tickets coming in, and you can build up use cases for each particular customer. You can see the different sizes of the architecture they’re using, you can also build up a library based on the process and/or the throughput they’re getting. And you can build up the sort of case studies that you can reference for other customers too. So you do have that extra insight in when and how people are using the solution and if they’re not using the solution at all as well.” – James Connor McCann

“I think support has a big role to play in making sure that the customers stay. But I don’t feel like they get rewarded enough for the amount of stress that they go through.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“I think it’s a good practice, being able to handle customers. If a customer comes in and they’re frustrated, or if they’re irate, you can handle that scenario, you can develop that thick skin, and you can get to grips with how to commonly sort that issue out in terms of the management of the people before then discussing solutions. That’s a perfect sort of skill that you can bring over to use as another trait for pre-sales or any other department as well.” – James Connor McCann

‘The value selling part of that is definitely something that has to change in your mind when you’re moving over. It’s not necessarily how everything works. That’s useful to know from a pre-sales side. But what you need to describe is why it works on answering the “so what” in a sense, as opposed to just the how all the time. So yeah, just changing your mindset. And also include the storytelling aspect as well. Because if you’re in support, you’re not necessarily a storyteller, you will be able to reference some other customers if you like, but the art of storytelling, getting that value across that’s something that you need to learn when you’re making that transition.” – James Connor McCann

“In terms of the soft skills, there are tons of similarities. One of which is that deep technical knowledge that you’re going to get from the support world, so you can become an expert in a product, and you can actually be very self-sufficient as well if you’re getting the carryover that exists in products and did the other part of the business similar to what I had done.” – James Connor McCann

“If you’re not actively listening in support, you’re not going to be able to diagnose the issue. And if you’re not doing that in the pre-sales world, you’re not going to be very good in the discovery calls either. Because, you know, the big part is active listening, which then leads to the troubleshooting on finding that technical discovery, which both sides do as well.” – James Connor McCann

“A healthy body leads to better presales.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“If there is anybody interested in getting into sales engineering, keep your options open, and also consider doing that two-step process, so not necessarily going for a shortcut. Some of these people are doing two jumps in one it’s been very successful. But if you are struggling to do that, feel free to consider taking a role in support or professional services, building up your base, and then moving on (to sales engineering) if you choose to do so.” – James Connor McCann