I lead the solutions engineering team for a company called Hightouch.
My background:
- Started off my career as an SSE (Demo builder) at Salesforce and eventually moved to software engineering at Salesforce working on their analytics product.
- Spend the rest of my career in front-end engineering (in startups, large enterprises, and everything in between)
- Started my own company (which we shuttered after 1.5 years)
- Made the move to sales to learn more about sales
My move to Sales Engineering was highly motivated to learn to sell since gaining sales experience is much easier in an established company (unlike programming, it's hard to become good at sales just by self-learning). Originally, it was a skill I wanted to learn to start my own company again, but ultimately I fell in love with profession.
My career as a sales engineer:
- Started off as a sales engineer at Algolia
- Move to Segment where I eventually became a leader for the West & APAC region
- Now I lead the Sales Engineering/CS team at Hightouch
One thing I've learned over my career is that Sales Engineering is very different depending on what company you work at. A sales engineer at Salesforce for example, is very different than what we have at Hightouch. Understanding the role that an SE team plays in the company overall can make a huge difference in the role.
If you are considering Sales Engineering, here's my grain of salt advice:
1. Joining the right company matters. Your comp is variable so whether or not you make a lot of money depends on the success of the company. Here's an article I wrote on my methodology when it comes to picking a good SaaS company: https://1stgeneration.substack.com/p/how-to-pick-a-winner-in...
2. Join a Sales engineering team that values discovery and sales skills. I've seen the most respected sales engineering teams come from teams who don't have the most technical people, but have people who can bridge business and tech together extremely well.
All in all, I love sales engineering. If you want to talk more - feel free to shoot me an email at ju[at]hightouch.io
Sales is incredibly hard to learn without actually doing it. It's a soft skill so it requires a lot of reps and practice.
I wanted to get great at sales after my startup failed and I decided the best way to learn would be by joining a company as a solutions engineer (being a developer, I felt like it was role that was perfect for me since it combined sales with technical skills).
It ultimately ended up being the best decision of my life, and I couldn't imagine doing anything outside of sales/go-to-market now. I'm happy to talk more about my experience over zoom if you'd like! Feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]
In terms of book recommendations, I do recommend the book "To Sell Is Human" by Daniel Pink to people deciding whether or not to get into sales. A lot of people associate sales with the "annoying car salesman", but this book gives really great insight into how sales has transformed into "consultative" in order to survive.
It might be just me - but I don't understand why any company would want to make their roadmap public. I feel like only the company's competitors ever look at it
It’s crazy how much has changed in the data space in the past few years. You can basically set up a ‘modern data stack’ by swiping a credit card and buying fivetran (EL), snowflake (warehouse), DBT (transform), and hightouch (reverse-etl) for extremely cheap and without the need of an engineer. Just need to know SQL.
I think more companies are going adopt this modern data stack earlier in their data maturity lifecycle.
I would check out http://hightouch.com/. You can easily sync data from a warehouse to SFDC. You can also sync PG -> Airtable as well!