Which is more important to an SE… trust or respect?

In 1997 I moved to San Francisco and joined a Java tools start-up called Infoscape. They had never hired a sales engineer, but that was ok because up until that point I had never been a sales engineer.

I learned a lot on that job, most of it the hard way. One of the easier lessons was shared with me by a more experienced sales engineer named John Kotch who joined our team about a year after I started.

One day as we we discussing the sales engineer / sales rep dynamic, John told me

“It’s important for the customer to trust the sales rep and respect the sales engineer.” Read more of this post