#255 Having the Support Structure to Help Figure Out if You’ve Stagnated

Notes:

What kind of support did you receive when entering the sales engineering world?

Many of us sales engineers arrived at our careers unintentionally. As our guest in this episode said, sales engineering is not something kindergarteners would go to their teacher and say they want to be when they grow up. But this makes support in the form of communities and mentoring ever more important for us who discover sales engineering later in life.

Our guest for this episode, Adam Burgess, had a unique journey in sales engineering, which according to him started as an attempt to become a professional actor. Arriving at sales engineering with no prior experience, Adam needed somebody to teach him, an experience which he is now motivated to pass forward.

Adam Burgess is the Manager of the Sales Engineer Academy at Smartsheet. In this episode, we talk about his unique journey from acting to sales engineering, including a moment in his career when he realized he was stagnating and what he did about it.

Eight Ignored Skills That Sales Engineers Should Have:

Adam’s career trajectory
The difference between trying to go into acting and trying to be a good actor
How Adam’s training as an actor helped him be more intentional in how he communicates
Business skills involved in acting
The importance of networking in sales engineering
Why actors make good Sales Engineers
How sales engineering has changed through an entire decade based on Adam’s experience
Why Adam transitioned from a leadership role to an IC role
How Adam realized that he was no longer growing in his career and what he did about it
What the Sales Engineering Academy is
Why all new Sales Engineers must have a mentor
The qualities of ideal students for Sales Engineering Academy
The identity crisis typical among sales engineers
Available options for Sales Engineers who don’t like talking too much
The importance of learning from customers
The advantages of the Sales Engineering Academy as compared to other approaches

Quotes:

In sales engineering, we’re kind of in our own silo. We may have a team, but we don’t generally talk to our team, especially if we’re paired with account managers. It’s so important to actually reach out from within the company and outside of the company and build those networks. — Ramzi Marjaba

Commit yourself wholeheartedly to what it is that you’re doing. But provide yourself with diversity of opportunities to ensure that, you know, when you’re taking risks, you’re mitigating those risks and providing yourself with fallback opportunities. — Adam Burgess

The things that you hear much more across the industry today focus on value selling and focus on creating connections, discovery, and in really ensuring that even if you’re talking about one solution, you’re tailoring every conversation to be as personal as possible to your clients. — Adam Burgess

At a certain point, sometimes you start to feel yourself stagnate and evolve and become less engaged in the role that you can find yourself becoming less creative. And you can feel that creeping sense of insularity starts to develop, and then you know it’s time for a change. You know that you’re not your best self at that point. — Adam Burgess

One thing we’ve learned over the years, or at least I’ve learned over the years, is you can teach anybody to be a sales engineer, provided that they have a few core attributes and a desire to learn to be a sales engineer, and they’ll be happy in that role. — Adam Burgess

If you’re interviewing for a job, make sure you know what the role looks like. Because you mentioned that every job, every sales engineering job, although it’s the same title, could be completely different. — Ramzi Marjaba

Most of what you learn as an SE, comes from the customer, not from whoever trains you. — Adam Burgess