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Technical Sales is like any sub-specialized role. For instance, you can have an MD who did their residency in Oncology, then sub-specialize into Radiation Onco

by anoojb 6y ago

Technical Sales is like any sub-specialized role. For instance, you can have an MD who did their residency in Oncology, then sub-specialize into Radiation Oncology/Surgery via fellowship study. They take on additional training and develop experience to fulfill demand. It can be incredibly rewarding (economically and psychologically) to be deeply sub-specialized in most domains…with Sales being one of the major exceptions. Sales is a volume/transaction game. It’s simply a matter of how much you can do to influence and transact revenue/consumption. You are not rewarded for deep mastery, your autonomy to learn and develop something impactful is only as wide as the revenue goals. If you’re still curious, I would encourage you to make it a short tour of duty, not a long-term professional path. I am personally interested in moving back into product/engineering…for one reason — Leverage. A sales engineer has only one lever to pull, her time. A product engineer is fundamentally setup (especially in SaaS and zero marginal cost products) to succeed by virtue of the company creating inherent distribution and funding mechanisms to support the development and consumption of scalable product. The economic and psychological rewards are also much greater in product/engineering roles. This is especially at technology companies. Experience: Transitioned from product/engineering. Recruited by a well known CEO for a Technical Sales role. Went through an acquisition and maintained the Technical Sales role for almost 10 years. Now looking for a Product/Engineering role.

jameshush 6y ago
Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to talk to at every school board. As long as the product is good he can (and does) bring in millions of dollars in deals with some phone calls and plane trips. I can see what you mean by the tech leverage, but in my experience unless you’re employee number is less than 10 or greater than 100,000 you don’t really get rewarded or have the power to get rewarded from engineering changes. I’ve made changes that increased the bottom line directly by $100k+ a month but still only get a 3% raise unless I have a competing offer. I think the real trick is striking off as a consultant who charges based on results in that situation.
- apohn 6y ago
  IME PreSales is not typically based on your direct sales. Your variable comp typically comes from the overall sales performance of the sales org. I was at a job where I was the reason we closed a $2M deal. I'm not bragging - even the customer said it. I got no bonus or raise that year because overall the sales org didn't hit their target. On the plus side, the base comp for PreSales tends to be quite good. So even some basic variable comp on top can give you a nice income. Plus, you can live in a low COL area and work for a company that pays higher COL salaries.
  - jameshush 6y ago
    Great insight! That makes sense. One of my sales engineer friends pulls the low COL trick too.
- anoojb 6y ago
  Personally, the product/engineering relationships are much more meaningful (absolutely and relatively) than the network of customer relationships I've cultivated over the last decade. This is again a function of who is assigned the leverage due to specialized knowledge in a technology organization. It is usually the product/engineering organization. Anecdotally, the exceptions here have been when I've sold technology that other people consume, to then sell technology (ISVs). But these are rare because often folks don't like taking inordinate platform risk/dependency if they can avoid it.
- apohn 6y ago
  >Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to talk to at every school board. As long as the product is good he can (and does) bring in millions of dollars in deals with some phone calls and plane trips. If you can pull this type of lever you should be a sales rep making sales based commissions. IME, the relationships you can build from Pre/Post-Sales are more around being an expert advisor/consultant. For example, a few jobs ago I built up a really good relationship with a few customers who trusted that I was motivated for them to be successful. I could have translated that into becoming an independent contractor by basically saying that I'd do the same job for 50% of the rate they were paying to the company I worked for. But I was horribly bored with the product I was supporting, and doing more of that just wasn't appealing. But the above is maybe 5% of the customers you work with. For the other 95%, the relationships are temporary and purely functional.
apohn 6y ago
>You are not rewarded for deep mastery, your autonomy to learn and develop something impactful is only as wide as the revenue goals. Just wanted to support this. I think a lot of people with strong technical skills make the mistake of overvaluing their own technical skills and burning themselves out in PreSales. IMO the most effective PreSales people know how to do the bare minimum to demonstrate to the customer that something can be done. So a lot of times you end up with deeper knowledge of some aspect(s) of the product you're selling, but for the most part you have very shallow knowledge of all the other technologies you work with across clients. IME a lot of people who are very strong technically get sucked into bad sales opportunities. Customer says they will buy if you do X,Y,Z custom work for them. Since you are the technical person on the team, you do the work (usually in a massive rush), then the customer says "I didn't realize to do those things were so much custom work. We're not buying." Obviously the above isn't true for every company.

by anoojb 6y ago

jameshush 6y ago

Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to talk to at every school board. As long as the product is good he can (and does) bring in millions of dollars in deals with some phone calls and plane trips. I can see what you mean by the tech leverage, but in my experience unless you’re employee number is less than 10 or greater than 100,000 you don’t really get rewarded or have the power to get rewarded from engineering changes. I’ve made changes that increased the bottom line directly by $100k+ a month but still only get a 3% raise unless I have a competing offer. I think the real trick is striking off as a consultant who charges based on results in that situation.

apohn 6y ago
IME PreSales is not typically based on your direct sales. Your variable comp typically comes from the overall sales performance of the sales org. I was at a job where I was the reason we closed a $2M deal. I'm not bragging - even the customer said it. I got no bonus or raise that year because overall the sales org didn't hit their target. On the plus side, the base comp for PreSales tends to be quite good. So even some basic variable comp on top can give you a nice income. Plus, you can live in a low COL area and work for a company that pays higher COL salaries.
- jameshush 6y ago
  Great insight! That makes sense. One of my sales engineer friends pulls the low COL trick too.
anoojb 6y ago
Personally, the product/engineering relationships are much more meaningful (absolutely and relatively) than the network of customer relationships I've cultivated over the last decade. This is again a function of who is assigned the leverage due to specialized knowledge in a technology organization. It is usually the product/engineering organization. Anecdotally, the exceptions here have been when I've sold technology that other people consume, to then sell technology (ISVs). But these are rare because often folks don't like taking inordinate platform risk/dependency if they can avoid it.
apohn 6y ago
>Wouldn’t the second lever you can pull be your relationships? E.g. a close friend of mine works as a VP of Sales for EdTech startups. He knows every person to talk to at every school board. As long as the product is good he can (and does) bring in millions of dollars in deals with some phone calls and plane trips. If you can pull this type of lever you should be a sales rep making sales based commissions. IME, the relationships you can build from Pre/Post-Sales are more around being an expert advisor/consultant. For example, a few jobs ago I built up a really good relationship with a few customers who trusted that I was motivated for them to be successful. I could have translated that into becoming an independent contractor by basically saying that I'd do the same job for 50% of the rate they were paying to the company I worked for. But I was horribly bored with the product I was supporting, and doing more of that just wasn't appealing. But the above is maybe 5% of the customers you work with. For the other 95%, the relationships are temporary and purely functional.

apohn 6y ago

>You are not rewarded for deep mastery, your autonomy to learn and develop something impactful is only as wide as the revenue goals. Just wanted to support this. I think a lot of people with strong technical skills make the mistake of overvaluing their own technical skills and burning themselves out in PreSales. IMO the most effective PreSales people know how to do the bare minimum to demonstrate to the customer that something can be done. So a lot of times you end up with deeper knowledge of some aspect(s) of the product you're selling, but for the most part you have very shallow knowledge of all the other technologies you work with across clients. IME a lot of people who are very strong technically get sucked into bad sales opportunities. Customer says they will buy if you do X,Y,Z custom work for them. Since you are the technical person on the team, you do the work (usually in a massive rush), then the customer says "I didn't realize to do those things were so much custom work. We're not buying." Obviously the above isn't true for every company.