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There's a job called "pre-sales engineer". I used to do it. I went out with salespeople or joined their conference calls, and assessed: - what the customer ac
by dsr_ 8y ago
There's a job called "pre-sales engineer". I used to do it.
I went out with salespeople or joined their conference calls, and assessed:
- what the customer actually needed
- whether we could do that for them
- and if so, which products or services would work
Sometimes a pre-sales engineer provided technical credibility by talking to the customer's engineers and figuring out what they are doing. Other times, I provided technical credibility by saying that we didn't have a good solution for this project. Getting to No early prevents everyone wasting their time.
- mfoy_ 8y agoI've seen projects where there was a perverse inversion of this principle... after winning a relatively nebulous contract, our own PM would say "We can do that." without consulting the developers... surprise surprise, ended up late and over-budget. I guess all this is really getting at is the need for critical thinking at all levels.
- TuringNYC 8y agoI've seen this years ago when incentive schemes were such that this made sense. Modern organizations I've seen pay sales and pre-sales engineers with some accelerated actual profit from the delivered product. This aligns incentives across the team. In fact, it over-aligns sometimes, because sales goes for low-balls they know the engineering team can deliver.
- user5994461 8y agoLow ball would be undercharging by at least half of the competitor. I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant. A shorter and smaller project is good from a sales perspective. You build trust with the client, you will continue the work with repeated contracts and increase price. It also avoids the lawsuits with massive projects having failed to deliver a thing in years.
- collyw 8y agoEven with an engineer there, its difficult to foresee all possible problems that might arise. Though I guess it will be a lot more realistic than with just sales people. (Saying that I just bought an new build apartment and speaking with the architects, we are far from the only industry to be late - we were comparing how similar projects end up in that respect).