Blog
Notes:
Job mismatch is nothing new to people. You may have graduated in Culinary but found yourself passionate about business coaching. That’s what happened to Kenneth, our episode’s guest. Kenneth has a degree in Civil Engineering but found his feet walking the sales engineering path and he has loved it ever since he stepped in. He already has over 10 years working and he is now co-founding and launching his business, Deckbuildr.io. He also said he prefers working for bigger companies rather than small ones. However, he also has his challenges managing his time, and prioritizing tasks.
Kenneth Kutyn is the Solutions Consultant for Product Analytics and Experimentation at the company, Amplitude. After finding a problem in his previous role with building brand new presentations every time he needed to talk to a customer, he built a tool to solve that problem. He has since moved and worked on making that tool available to the public.
Key Takeaways:
- Why did he decide to leave his previous job even if his manager was hands-on with him
- What were the five fives he had to perform in his previous company
- How did he feel when he was doing only one job, presales
- Why is it better for new SEs to work for a big company rather than for startups
- What are the company weaknesses did Ken see that greatly affect SEs
- How did Ken learn to code if he studied civil engineering
- What is the challenge that was hard to get when Ramzi and Ken launched their business
- What’s going on with the company that Ken has launched
- What is the feedback from the clients that surprised Ken
- What was the impact of Ken’s side hustle on his full-time job
Quotes:
“I was fortunate to have a great manager who put a lot of attention on my career and mentored me. And the benefit was that I was doing five jobs. So I got to try a lot and learn a lot. The downside was that I wasn’t getting especially good at any part of it because my day was so varied. And that’s when I ultimately decided to leave that company for a chance to get more specialized in a sales engineering role where I thought, “Okay, now I can focus on picking a craft and getting good at it, rather than being a little bit good at a lot of things.” –Ken
“It was a really good feeling. I remember that was when I joined Oracle. And I remember just going into a meeting where all of a sudden, I had 10 people on the same team as me working on the same thing. And we could share tips with each other on how to demo a new product. And it wasn’t all on my shoulders to figure out the entire go-to-market motion of a new tool.” -Ken
“A lot of companies don’t have presales enablement, and they don’t have much of a budget to take care of the presales team, they just assume that whatever they throw the A’s will be fine for the SEs as well. The SEs will figure it out, they’ll make their own messaging, they’ll build their own decks, and they’ll train themselves. So we get good at that. We forget to complain sometimes and ask for a little help.” -Ken
“I had a real problem that I’d solved for myself, I’d seen it used internally at the last company I was at. And so I thought there’s a good chance of this succeeding because I’ve already seen it succeed in the limited context. So it seemed like it was worth the investment in terms of time from that point of view.” -Ken
“ So you come up with an idea, get it as far as you can, yourself, you never know whose attention you’ll get to kind of help you take to the next stage and fill in the skills that you’re missing.” -Ken
“It’s humbling because you build something for someone like yourself. So you think you know how it should work, what it should do what people need. And between the three of us, we have quite a network of sales engineers and account executives who we think are our target users. I’ve talked to tons and tons of them, giving them demos, giving them hands-on time, get some feedback.” -Ken
“ If it doesn’t go anywhere, at the end of the day. If we never make it profitable and find people daunted by it, I’ll still feel like, ”Well, I met some cool people. I learned a little bit about coding a little bit about marketing, and I’m gonna move on in my life and try again one day.” And that’s fine to me.” -Ken
