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.  Having the deep understanding on customer needs and product capability makes a sales engineer highly sought after to move to other parts of the company.  Personally, I have been asked a few times in my career to join another part of the organization to bring my insights to that team.  I love sales engineering but if you are interested in transitioning to another department, sales engineering can be a great foundation.  Below are 5 of the roles I have seen sales engineers transition to:

1.  Sales Representative

The most common transition for sales engineers is to go into sales and “carry a bag” to clients.  Some of the salespeople I work with today were once sales engineers at big companies like Oracle.  Sales engineers work very closely with sales reps and get a front row seat into the art of selling (e.g. discovery, solution development & pricing).  Understanding customer needs is a big part of sales and by having this knowledge, sales engineers can transition to driving their own sales opportunities.  When considering transitioning into sales, there is a few things to consider which are:

• You are now the quarterback and as such you either win the deal or you don’t.  It’s all on you and that pressure can be intimidating.

• Get comfortable with cold calling prospects and try to make a connection

• You are no longer the smartest person in the room, your sales engineer is.

2.  Sales Enablement

Another role to consider is joining the enablement organization.  I have seen sales engineers that have a lot of best practices move to this team to help scale this across the sales engineering organization.  Moving into this role does remove you from the customers and product as enablement works primarily with presales that are field facing.  People best suited for this role are those that have amassed a lot of best practices and wants to scale those skills to the team. 

3.  Implementation Consultant

This role is ideal to the sales engineer that wants to go deep into the product and be part of implementing the product at scale.  Transitioning into this role will give sales engineers a good prospective on post sales and how the vision of the customer gets translated into the deployment of the product.

4.  Product Management

This role is ideal for the sales engineer that wants to help shape the product direction. Product management is focused on designing features that solve customer problems and sales engineers have a front row seat into the customer’s pain point.  In my experience, sales engineers can make a big impact in the product management organization by sharing many of the customer’s needs and their own learnings.

5.  Product Marketing

Finally, this role is ideal for the sales engineer that wants to help message product capability (or product solutions) to the market.  Again, similar to the product management role, sales engineers will excel in this role as they understand well what the customer pain points are, and how the product aligns to these needs. 

Let me know what other roles you have seen sales engineers transition to successfully!