Transitioning from a Software Engineer to a Sales Engineer
I started my professional career 11 years ago as a Java application developer at Vision Service Plan, which is an eye insurance company based in Rancho Cordova, CA. Looking back, I would have never imagined my journey into the world of enterprise sales while I was working on monthly coding tickets. Yet, here I am today working as a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services for the northeast enterprise sales team. I meet many developers today to whom the idea of sales sounds exciting but they don't know how to switch to sales. A sales engineer or solutions engineer or solutions architect is a role that usually works for the sales organization for a company and is responsible for partnering with an account executive to help get the technical win and ultimately help close a deal. I hope this post helps software engineers and developers identify if they are cut out for sales and how to notice these signs early on in their career. And if they do identify these signs, how can they move to be a sales engineer which I will be referring to from this point on as “SE.”
5 Signs as a Developer that show you would be a great SE
1. You like to understand why you are coding something and what value would it provide to your customer.
While working as a developer you are mostly assigned tickets to be delivered in various sprints. I remember I always used to think about how something that I was working on at the moment, was relevant to the consumer. If you are a developer and in addition to choosing the best algorithm for your function, you are questioning why this problem was assigned to you, you are already thinking like a potential sales engineer. A sales engineer or a solutions architect has to focus on value for every technical aspect of the product they are selling. If a particular product feature adds a value that is directly relevant to the business you are selling to, your product is much more likely to resonate with the buyer. When you are a developer and you put yourself in the shoes on your consumer (whoever is the user of your application's code), you would be great as a sales engineer.
2. You love to demo your code/feature to your colleagues, product managers or even marketing team.
Often, as a developer I would attend code review meetings or would have to do presentations to the business or product teams to show what was being built. I remember instead of being nervous, I used to look forward to these “demo” days. If you find yourself having the same excitement to talk about your product, attend meetings and explain what you are building to a wide audience, you would do great as a sales engineer.
3. You don’t like the idea of sitting in your cube/home-office all day .
I remember as a developer, I could not sit at my cubicle all day. I liked attending meetings, talking to my colleagues even when designing a solution and I looked forward to meeting my app’s consumers (who were in a different building in the same office complex). Later in my career I transitioned into post sales which required a lot of travel which I did not mind. As a sales engineer in the NYC area, travel is not something I have to do because most of my customers are local. If you are based in a smaller city and depending on the territory you cover as a sales engineer, your job might require a fair amount of travel. The idea of physically not being behind a desk, but rather communicating and potentially traveling to a variety of customers is what I remember excited me a lot back when I was a developer.
4. You love to interact with customers, attend meetings and talk about your product.
Much like the previous point of not being at your desk all day, if you look forward to interacting with your product managers, talking about why you are building something and if you look forward to speaking with your customers, so you can understand the use cases for what you are coding for, you would do great as a sales engineer. A sales engineering role requires you to ask your customer “so what” questions such as, “if you don’t have a mass email button on the UI, so what?” The relevance of this question is that it helps you tie in a customer’s pain, where you are trying to find a relevant pain that your product can help solve. If you look forward to solving your customer’s problems while you are a developer, you would do great as a sales engineer.
5. You aren’t afraid to take risks.
Being a developer is a pretty safe job. You are assigned tickets and some companies might arrange hackathons where you are encouraged to think out of the box and show your creativity through code. A sales engineer’s job carries a certain amount of job risk with it, considering the fact that the work you do on bigger deals has very high visibility and depending on the company size, can have CEO level involvement. You have to be confident in your abilities and be comfortable with taking a certain amount of risk which comes with such a kind of responsibility. If you are one of those developer’s who usually takes a firm stand in team meetings and you are not afraid to speak your mind and you are confident in your abilities so much that you don’t mind being involved in discussions with the C level, you are usually not risk averse. This would mean you are up to challenges and you would fare well in a sales engineering role where you could carry the weight and responsibility of a seven figure deal with ease.
What now?
If while reading this article, you asked yourself “this is exactly how I feel” and the next question you ask is “but how can I become a sales engineer? I have no experience!” - that is completely okay. I had no prior sales experience and I was able to land a job at AppDynamics. All you need is some basic reading about pre-sales and a network of mentors that can help you. I founded Sales Engineers of New York for this exact same purpose, and we have been able to help two software engineers secure their first jobs as an SE. I am happy to guide anyone who’s looking for mentorship. If you are interested, you can sign up for SENY and join our slack group at salesengineersny.com/sign-up
Author Bio: Akshat Srivastava is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) working for the enterprise pre-sales team based in New York City. Prior to AWS, Akshat has worked as a sales engineer and solutions engineer at AppDynamics, Turbonomic and mParticle. Akshat started his career as a Java developer at Vision Service Plan and worked as a senior developer at IBM. Later, he worked as an IT consultant in New York City before transitioning into sales. In July, 2018 Akshat realized the need for a dedicated community for pre-sales individuals and founded Sales Engineers of New York (SENY) which has become the largest SE network in the east coast today.