Four signs you are ready jump into Presales

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Four signs you are ready jump into Presales

Presales is a unique role. It is often referred to as a sales engineer or solution architect and is part of the sales organization. The U.S. Bureau of labor describes the work environment of a sales engineer as "stressful conditions because their income and job security depend on commission from successfully completing sales". Most sales engineers will work long and irregular hours to meet sales goals and client needs. However, this also describes what makes sales engineering fun and unique!

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Five Roles to consider After Sales Engineering

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Five Roles to consider After Sales Engineering

Sales engineering is a fun and exciting role in software sales however it does come with a significant level of stress and a potentially unpredictable work schedule (e.g. traveling, late night hours, fire drills, and constantly needing to learn new skills or tools).  I have worked with plenty of people who – when the craziness of Q4 hits - start to question if they want to sign up for another year of this craziness.  In my opinion sales engineering is one of the best roles that prepares you to move into a number of different roles within the company. 

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Pitfalls seen when transitioning from professional services to sales engineering

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Pitfalls seen when transitioning from professional services to sales engineering

Recently, I was interviewing a candidate that has a professional services background and during the Q&A portion of the interview, the candidate asked me one question that helped inspire me to write this blog post. The questions was “what do I need to work on to make the transition into sales engineering?”.

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A three-part plan that helped me get a promotion as a sales engineer

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A three-part plan that helped me get a promotion as a sales engineer

When applying for a sales engineer role, you will see the job titled as either sales engineer, senior sales engineer or principal engineer.  Each title is more senior than the previous one land when I started my career in this field, I came in as a sales engineer.  My first promotion came after two years working as a sales engineer where I was promoted to a senior sales engineer. 

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Five ways Sales Engineers can make an impact at the end of a quarter

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Five ways Sales Engineers can make an impact at the end of a quarter

Anyone working in a sales function immediately thinks that the end of the quarter is solely meant for negotiating and closing opportunities by the sales team.  However, I have seen and experience time and time again how the sales engineers play a vital part in the closing of a deal.  As an example, one of the deals that a member from my team has been working on has been instrumental in ensuring that the deal can close this quarter.  He was able to impact the deal by working with the prospective cyber security team to get Pluralsight approved to be used in the company.

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