#187 Discovering Your Career Home of Years of Nomading

Notes:

How do you explain what sales engineering is to someone completely new to the organization? Are introverts better than extroverts at becoming sales engineers? Let’s find out in today’s episode with Amir Ibrahim.

Amin Ibrahim is a PreSales leader with seventeen years of experience in tech and currently helps companies smash sales targets by building strong teams and amazing careers. He is the Senior Director, Value & Solutions at Hootsuite, and is passionate about building, whether it’s new teams, roles, sales motions, or ways to use technology.

Key Takeaways:

How Amin has always been a bit of a nomad, both while growing up and also and in his career
Did living in many different countries help Iman in any way as a professional?
Different cultures? Yeah, not all the different cultures, but some, you know,
The interesting thing about being an introvert from the book The End of Average
Are introverts or extroverts better than SE’s
How diversity played a role in impacting the team whether positively or negatively
There’s more to diversity than just diversity of skin color; there are culture, background, profession, skill, even parents,
How do you know if someone’s entrepreneurial and tenacious and all that when you’re doing an interview?
Explaining demos to someone brand new who joined the company? How do you explain the role? What’s the difference between sales and SEM? What’s theirs in engineering, training, and all that?
It’s interesting how SES and marketing don’t work together more

Quotes:

“It’s why it becomes really important as part of that interview process to like, see them in action. Like you’ve got a built in steps into the interview process where people are pitching to you or demoing to you and taking feedback and coming back again.” – Amin Ibrahim

“Let them do a demo without any guidance whatsoever. Yeah, zero guidance when they do the demo, give them feedback, and then bring them back for another demo. Yeah, and see if they took that feedback.” – Ramzi Marjaba

“As SEs, we’re process-oriented, we love building great processes and all that stuff. But the best SEs break process left, right and center, just like the best salespeople do to make sure we get what needs to get done.” – Amir Ibrahim

“If you’re not getting your SEs on webinars, and you’re not getting your SES out there to talk about the great things that your product does and how it helps customers in the best way. You’re, you’re kind of missing the boat because we talked to more customers than anyone else. And there’s a lot of value that that could provide” – Amir Ibrahim

“If you’re in discovery, and you’re only focused on deep technical stuff, you’re missing the boat, because there’s a ton of value, you can be adding there.” Amir Ibrahim