I've worked in many different roles throughout my professional career: helpdesk support, product development, consultant, solutions architect, and even manager. Each role required difference skillsets, but they were all largely focused on technical tasks.
My latest role - sales engineer - is something quite different that has challenged me in new ways. In my first three years at Sitecore, I've learned that being a sales engineer requires a few key skills beyond just the technical. Being a great sales engineer requires balancing and mastering:
- Product Knowledge
- Technology Expertise
- Communication Skills
There are certainly more skills and talents to consider, of course, but these are the three core pillars of all great sales engineers.
Product Knowledge
If your company is selling a product, it goes without saying that a sales engineer should know the product inside and out. This applies to technical, functional, and value messaging. For example:
- Technical: How does the product work? What tech stack is it built on?
- Functional: What does the product do? How does it do it? Why does it do what it does?
- Value: Why does the product matter to a customer? How will it improve their business? What business problems will it solve?
It's important for a great sales engineer to have a solid depth of product knowledge and be able to have high-level and low-level conversations about all aspects of the product. This generally comes with years of experience using said product, and no amount of enablement can replace genuine experience.
Technology Expertise
This is the area where I see most sales engineers stumble.
So your product is built on a Java-based backend with a MySQL datastore, a React front-end with Tailwind for easy styling, all with a containerized deployment for simplified DevOps?
A sales engineer shouldn't be an expert in every layer of that stack (it's a lot!). However, a great sales engineer should understand enough of the underlying tech to hold intelligent conversations with all sorts of teams. On top of current technology, a great sales engineer should be an evolving technologist who keeps up with the latest changes in tech - and that's no small feat.
In my day job I routinely find myself diving into wildly varied topics, such as comparing .NET Framework to .NET 6/7/8, JavaScript oddities with React, SEO best-practices, cloud-based DevOps, best practices for building stylesheets - the list goes on and on.
While I do specialize in several core technologies, I find it best for a great sales engineer to have a wide breadth of knowledge across various technologies and be able to act as a humble semi-expert on every one of them.
Communication Skills
So far any tech-head can master a product line and (hopefully) talk about the tech powering those products. The trifecta of a great sales engineer comes together by being a world-class communicator.
In other terms, great sales engineers have to be great public speakers. Effective communication is more than just talking to people. It's a balance of several key elements:
Understand Your Audience
- Who are you speaking to (marketers, developers, IT, manager, accounting, C-level)?
- Can you effectively (and concisely) translate technical topics to your audience?
- How do you communicate your product's value to a mid-level manager vs. a CIO or COO?
- What questions do you ask to better-understand the customer's gripes and pain?
Be Approachable
- Are you welcoming with an outstretch handshake and smile?
- Do you come off as genuinely excited and upbeat about the products you're presenting?
- Is someone else always prompting you to speak up, or do you take charge of conversations?
- Do you alternate between listening to problems and answering with solutions?
- Can you make a room laugh to help set a comfortable tone?
Flexibility
- You can spend weeks preparing for a presentation, but once you're in a room with a live audience, can you pivot your presentation and message to address an organic, flowing conversation?
- Are you open to new ideas that counter your own?
- Do you see a bad presentation as a failure or a learning opportunity?
It's no accident that I speak across the country at technology conferences. The kind of audience understanding, approachability, and flexibility that comes with being a sales engineer also applies to being an effective presenter!
Do you have any feedback on what makes for a great sales engineer? Reach out to me on LinkedIn!