1- You don’t know what you don’t know.

Meet as many people to improve and get out of your bubble. There are so many different places you can go as a SE to learn from a lot of people. Be genuinely curious.

2- You’re not going to please everyone. 

Someone will find a reason to be mad at you – customers, colleagues, managers, etc. What’s important is if you can go to sleep with a clear conscience. 

3- There isn’t one way to do things. 

Just because you do something one way doesn’t mean another way isn’t as good or better. And that’s what we have to keep our eyes open for, to see if there’s someone doing something better and to learn from it. 

4- Not everybody is meant to be an SE.

Sales engineering is a very tough job. General sales engineers have so many different products that we have to know. And we’re not sitting and playing with these products all day. We’re doing customer meetings, we’re doing proof of concepts, we’re doing discovery calls, we’re doing product management calls. So If you are the kind of person who likes to sit down and focus on one thing for an entire day, sales engineering might not be for you. If you like to talk about technology more than you’d like to talk about how the technology solves a business problem, sales engineering might not be for you.

5- Luck plays a big part in sales engineering.

There’s a lot of luck in sales engineering, whether you’re in the right territory, given the right quota, or given the right salesperson that fits you perfectly, or given the manager who is the right fit for you, or whether you’re in the right place to find a job as a sales engineer, luck plays a huge role. 

6- Be known for something

If you want to move up the ranks, you could if you want to try other things within the company. Find that one thing that you want to be known for and get known for it, or be so good they can’t ignore you.

7- People can disagree and both be right.

Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean they’re wrong or you’re wrong, it just means that maybe you need to look deeper into it, or maybe you’re just defining things differently.

8- Practice is overlooked but is so effective.

Sales engineers are the athletes of the business world. Michael Jordan talks about making practice harder than real life. So when you’re practicing, are you practicing and everything goes smoothly? What would you do if something goes bad in a demo or discovery? What if you ask a question which, in your mind, you’ve practiced 1000 times where the customer answers a certain way, and now, during this call, the customer answered a different way? How are you going to pivot? How are you going to figure that out?

These are all things that we need to practice so that when we’re in front of a customer, we can do our jobs. Now, the more experienced of us, they just practiced more in front of customers, and they’ve seen more answers. So they formulated their thoughts around those already.

9- People are passionate about Sales Engineering

Sales engineering is a calling more than a job. A lot of people find sales engineering as their destination, whether it’s moving up the ranks, or whether it’s preparing them to move on to bigger and better things because there might be bigger and better things for each individual. Some people might think sales engineering is the end all be all, which many people might agree with, some people won’t. So it is a calling. 

10- The sales engineering community is the best community out there.

The camaraderie that I see within the sales engineering world is different. It’s just something else. 

11- You need to surround yourself with great people. 

It’s easier said than done. How do you do that? Why would people want to be around you as well? You as a human being need to surround yourself with great people. Whether it’s within sales engineering, whether it’s in other aspects of life. You can offer value, your time, advice, or you can pay for coaching or whatever service other people might offer.

12- Master the basics – then you can get yourself into strange situations

You need to know the basics inside out. I played basketball growing up, they don’t teach you to shoot three-pointers before you know how to do a layup. You need to master the basics of asking simple questions and handling simple objections, doing a simple demo before putting in a story before challenging customers on their assumptions. There are varying degrees of sales engineering, like understanding the sales cycle, and your role in it before you start trying to inject yourself in different areas of the sales cycle.

13 – Creativity with sales engineering knows no bounds.

Patrick Pissang is a perfect example where he would write a press release for his customers and he would show it to them as if this is what he intends to achieve with them in terms of their success. You can get creative by creating content online. There are so many different avenues of creativity for sales engineering. When you get into sales engineering, if you have that spark in you, you can use it and you can be very successful doing it.

14- Do something small every day (1% better)

Doing something small every day is better than doing something huge once a year. For example, it’s better to read 15 minutes a day or learn 15 minutes a day, than to study for two hours on a Friday or the weekend. Mainly because you can always manage 15 minutes a day. Also, if you improve 1% every day, it’s like the compound effect of interest rates and investment. 

15- It is a horrible job for some people

Before you take a job, make sure you interview the company that you’re working for. I’ve seen people work with bad managers in the past. 

16- There are other roles out there.

Don’t focus too much on this role. I have not been a pure SE in almost 3 years. There are other roles out there such as Customer Success, Technical Account Manager, Account Executive, Product Marketing, and Product Management. Don’t try to just open your eyes, see what else is out there. Maybe another role would be good for you just as good as sales engineer.

17- You don’t get what you don’t ask for.

If you’re looking for a salary, you won’t get it until you ask for it. If you’re negotiating for a salary, if you don’t ask for what you want, you’ll probably get less than what you want. Sometimes if you don’t ask the customer if they want a customer demo, you won’t get a customer demo. You won’t get access to new projects and new initiatives within your company unless you tell your manager that you’re looking for new projects. Before I became a sales engineer, I thought I didn’t have to ask for things that I want, I thought it should come to me. But it doesn’t work like that, you have to go get it. 

18- You need to put boundaries around your time.

Time is the most important commodity. You need to be clear on how you budget your time, what you’re prioritizing, what you’re willing to do what you’re not willing to do. 

19- You should try to control everything you can, but you cannot control everything.

You want to be prepared. You might be able to prepare what you’re gonna do if something crashed. You want to be able to control the questions that you’re gonna ask the customer leading them down a path.

20- Mentorship sucks!

Especially the mentorship provided by the company that you work for. There are some that may be good but this has been my experience and I will elaborate on this in the next episode.