What happens if you can’t actually travel for your travel-dependent job?

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What happens if you can’t actually travel for your travel-dependent job?

Part of a sales engineer’s job is to travel to prospects or customers to help with their needs and meet in person.  However, what happens when you can’t travel due to personal reasons?  This is something that I’m currently facing as I am expecting to become a first-time dad in a couple of weeks (10/10/19).  As the date approaches, my ability to travel has significantly been reduced to the point now that I only travel either by car or train and no more than a few hours away from my house.  Although, it’s great to be consistency working from home more often, it has brought some challenges into the sales process and how I work with both my customers and the sales team. 

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Five ways to improve your travel as a traveling Sales Engineer

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Five ways to improve your travel as a traveling Sales Engineer

One of the several responsibilities of a sales engineer is traveling to meet with customers and/or prospects. I can still remember my first business trip to visit M&T Bank in buffalo. M&T confirmed the meeting two days before. The sales rep immediately called me and just said, ‘book your flight and hotel asap’ and I’ll meet you there. Being that this was my first business trip, I didn’t want to break any policy so I booked the flights and hotel that stayed within policy. While in Buffalo, there was a snowstorm that canceled my flight which forced me to find a hotel and re-book my flight for the next day. Overall, my first business trip didn’t go smoothly but I learned a lot of valuable lessons. Since that trip,

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Four hacks to be more productive as a remote Sales Engineer

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Four hacks to be more productive as a remote Sales Engineer

Pluralsight is the first company where I have been working in a remote environment and I don’t mean working out of a WeWork! I have been working from home for the last 2.5 years and although I have come to love working from home, it wasn’t like that in the beginning. When I graduated from college, I was introduced into the workforce with traditional practices (e.g. office building, assign desk and 8:30 am start time). Since then, I have seen companies embrace remote working in various ways through open desk policy that promotes working from home once a week, to starting a new WeWork office as a satellite office to headquarters

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My first day as a sales engineer

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My first day as a sales engineer

Since starting my career as a Sales Engineer, I have had gone through three first days in starting the role fresh. With each first day, I have learned many lessons on what I could do for the next one. My very first day as a sales engineer was a a bit of a disaster. I walked into the Qlik satellite office and I was told that my laptop wasn’t ready and to come back tomorrow. I immediately thought “great I can go home and wait there until it’s ready” which I did and spend the rest of the day hanging out in my living room. At that moment it was a great feeling to just head back home, but what I didn’t realize is that I was losing precious time in setting myself up for success in this new role. Once you are ramped up in a presales role, free time becomes a rare commodity so maximizing your free time from day one is critical. Therefore, every time I join a new company, I ask if I can start my first day at the corporate headquarters.

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