Startup founder => sales engineer ? #

Is a sales engineering role a good fit for a startup founder transitioning to BigCo?

This is the question I have been exploring and figured others might benefit from sharing what I’ve learned. Below is my synthesis of conversations with some of the best sales engineers in the industry.

The role #

Firstly, sales engineering roles vary greatly. Even the name of the role is variable including synonyms “solutions engineer”, “pre-sales engineer”, and “forward deployed engineer”.

What seems to be common is:

Pre-sales: Sales engineers support the sales team helping to close deals with new customers. The sales engineer is actually part of the sales process itself.
Technical expert: The sales engineer is the technical expert on how the company’s product actually works, and can architect solutions for the customer’s needs.
Trusted advisor: The sales engineer gains trust through technical accuracy, including admitting when the product does not do what the buyer is requesting. They are less schmoozy.
Liaison between sales and product: Because sales engineers are constantly talking to potential customers, they are in a position to identify product gaps that could potentially help close more sales. Because they have engineering and technical backgrounds, they often are more trusted by product managers to distill useful insights to inform the product roadmap. Therefore, they are often the de-facto liaison between sales and product.

Responsibilities #

Responsibilities also vary highly by company, but most commonly:

Sales engineers are brought into sales meetings on the 2nd or 3rd call, after the account executive has qualified the lead.
The sales engineer is responsible for understanding the technical needs of the customer, suggesting how the company product might be able to solve the customer’s problems, and handling technical objection handling
Often these sales calls require product demos. In some companies, this is the key part of the role, requiring polish and charisma. In other companies, this is much less important because AEs can close deals without a demo.
For potentially large deals, sales engineers can be asked to create a Proof of Concept (POC) for the customer. This can be architecture documents or actually working code.
Some customers require security checklists as part of their standard purchase process. In some companies, sales engineers are responsible for filling out these checklists, whereas other companies centralize this job to a specialized person on the team who handles security checklists for all deals. As a sales engineer, you prefer having someone else fill out these checklists ;)

Compensation #

The two big variables in sales engineer compensation are:

Percent split between base salary and variable
What the variable comp is measured against

Most commonly, sales engineers seem to be 80% base with 20% variable. Some companies do 70/30. Companies with very large deals ($10M+) and long sales cycles (1 year+) sometimes do 100% base because commission structures don’t really make sense when a single deal per year is considered success.

Sales engineers usually prefer to have their variable comp tied to the performance of the entire sales organization rather than just the AMs they support. This is because sales engineers can’t control how good their AM is at getting leads, and they can’t control how good the territory is assigned to the AM they support. Having compensation tied to something you can’t control is additional risk to the sales engineer.

Interestingly, companies that tie sales engineer and account manager compensation to each other, often see people get hired as a package deal. If a sales engineer knows that they have a very high performing account manager, it can be beneficial to stick together from company to company.

Travel #

For enterprise sales, especially 8 figure deals, travel is required. The amount of travel seems highly variable, and you should explore this with any potential employer. I’ve heard some sales engineers have 40% travel expectations. I’ve heard others have much higher.

For small and medium deals, where the sales process is done via video and phone, travel isn’t required.

Schedule #

Sales engineering schedules seem to be spikey. When there is an active deal being worked on, it can be long hours to meet the timelines of the customer and keep the deal momentum. But when the deal moves to the later stages of legal paperwork, a sales engineer can have slack in their schedule. Learning to adapt to this sprint/rest cadence is important.

Career Growth Path #

Sales engineers have lots of options for career growth, however, they aren’t on a well defined career track ladder. You have to make the opportunities for yourself.

Sales engineers often come from engineering or PM backgrounds. You need the technical background, and you need to be able to extract and synthesize user needs into engineering requirements.

Sales engineers often go into pure engineering, PM, or AE roles, depending on what they want to specialize in.

Remaining Questions #

After my calls, I still don’t have a good understanding of the following:

Which industries require a lot of domain knowledge vs learning on the job?
What do travel requirements look like during COVID?
How do you prepare for interviews?
What are the remaining “unknown unknowns”?

References #

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good information on the web about sales engineering roles and responsibilities (hence the impetous for doing all these calls and writing this post). However, the following links are pretty helpful:

Corrections Welcome: #

If you are a sales engineer, and you think something is incorrect or missing in the above info, please reach out. My email is in the footer and my DMs are open.