Blog
Notes:
Do you have plans of becoming an SE manager someday? Would you need to have years of experience in sales engineering before that happens? What if you could be the next sales engineering manager even if you only have around 3 years of experience? In this podcast, you will learn why Tanner was chosen to be the next SE manager and how he handles his team in a remote setup. He even said his former team leader was grooming him to be his successor.
Tanner Howell is the head of the sales engineering organization at a cybersecurity upskilling company, RangeForce. He is an experienced IT Professional with a demonstrated history of working in the security industry and a research environment. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering. Rather than doing implementations in SaaS solutions, their company is more about knowledge of their space. Different types of cybersecurity professionals, and being able to converse with them.
Key Takeaways:
- How cybersecurity SEs stay up to date and manage the tough industry
- Handling on-the-spot questions
- How does one become a Sherpa in Cybersecurity Sales Engineering?
- Whose responsibility is it to make sure that sales engineers are up to date?
- Preference in time management: Big blocking or half-hour daily
- How the pandemic affected how Howell’s and Ramzi’s team virtual meetings
- What should a team leader do to keep everyone’s trust and be able to hang out with each other even in a remote setup
- Useful software for managing a team online
- Helping a workaholic team member have a break
- How a team leader manages a person with more years of experience than him
- What made Tanner the SE manager even if his coworkers had more years of experience than him
- What Tanner thinks is the reason his former manager appointed him as his successor
- Does Tanner have someone in his team that he’s grooming to be his successor?
Quotes:
“So we basically take this gigantic thing because you’re right, it’s gigantic it’s ever-changing. How do you know it all? We break it into manageable chunks, and each person becomes a kind of an expert in that.” –Tanner Howell
“Every team will be run differently. That’s kind of how I run my team is I say, “We’re all adults. This is the broad vision, I’m not going to micromanage you as you execute towards it, I just care that you’re up to date on the latest threats. That’s the goal. If you want to read Reddit as your soul source, as long as you’re getting the actual, (I probably wouldn’t recommend that.) But as long as you’re getting to that goal. And then we do internal knowledge, sharing sessions on what we found.” –Tanner Howell
“There’s the phrase, “If you can be anything in this world, be the person who ends a meeting early.” If you give that person back 20 minutes of their time or 30 minutes of their time, they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, obviously, that I am not suggesting book 90-minute demos, and then always on them early.’ But like if you get given that big block of time, you’re not stuck in that call, right?” –Tanner Howell
“I find solving human problems is the hardest part of any role. Mainly because technically, technology, it always works that way, here might be some bugs. But there are rules around it. Humans are just crazy. Each one thinks differently. They were two brothers can be totally different, twins have totally different personalities.” –Ramzi Marjaba
