Last week I signed up for a webinar hosted by CloudShare, a company that specializes in scaling up labs for training scenarios, POCs & sales demos, that talked about the 2024 Sales Engineer. The session was delivered by John Care, author of Mastering Technical Sales. In the webinar, Mr. Care shares his thoughts and predictions on how the role of an SE will evolve by 2024. Before getting into his prediction, he starts off by talking about the current state of the sales engineering role, which he sums up with one word: confusion. He explains that at the most fundamental of this profession, the sales engineering community hasn’t agreed on an official title that describes the profession (e.g. Sales Engineer, Sales Consultant, Solution Architect). Personally, I tried to explain what pre-sales fundamentally does in my blog post titled: “What do Sales Engineers actually do?” and I agree this is an often misunderstood role.

Mr. Care points out that in the United States, the sales engineering role has made it into the Bureau of Labor statistics and the bureau breaks down the role’s pay, outlook and work environment. A few interesting facts found on their page are:

• Work Environment: "Some sales engineers may work additional and irregular hours to meet sales goals and client needs."

• Job Outlook: "Employment of sales engineers is projected to grow 7 percent from 2016 to 2026, about as fast as the average for all occupations."

Although the sales engineering community hasn’t agreed on an official title for this role, the community outlook for this role does continue to look promising.

So, Mr. Care gives his prediction centered around two key questions:

1. Will the Sales Engineering job still exist?

   Short answer: Yes. Beyond the statistics found in the Bureaus of Labor statistics, customers expect software vendors to have technical resources who can help translate the product to their business requirements.

2. What will happen by 2024?

   Millennials will be the largest workforce by 2025 both on the vendor and client side. This will change the way people buy software where millennials are self-enabled in finding information of the software prior to meeting vendors.

   1. The role of the sales engineer and account management will overlap even more.

   2. The low end of the funnel for this job will become automated (e.g. RFI, RFPs, standard demos, setup of pilots)

   3. The demo becomes experiential for the customers (e.g. Virtual Reality / Augment Reality)

   4. More trials / evaluations with zero vendor interaction

   5. “Knowing the Customer” and trust makes the difference

   6. SE’s will deal with more and more executives

What do you think about John’ prediction for 2024? Do you agree on these predictions? Are there any predictions you have that I should add to the list? Let me know!

You can watch the full webinar on Youtube: