November 1, 2011 10 Comments
Ask any VP of Sales… high quality sales engineers can be very hard to find. Why is this? The challenge lies in the fact that great sales engineers possess skills that are often considered mutually exclusive.
So… what’s the secret formula that makes for a great sales engineer?
October 18, 2011 Leave a comment
As technical experts, sales engineers are asked questions all day long. Via phone, email, web conference or in person your typical sales engineer gets bombarded with questions from all directions.
To the layman, answering a question is easy… you just reply with the answer. As it turns out, there is an art to fielding questions and most people never learn how to do this really well.
Read more of this post
October 4, 2011 3 Comments
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
September 20, 2011 3 Comments
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
–Albert Einstein
Eventually you will find yourself at a cocktail party where someone asks you:
“So… what do you do?”
“I’m a sales engineer” is the obvious answer. This usually leads to a confused stare. Read more of this post
