Question for Presales/sales/account managers

Can you make a career jump from being technical straight to being an Account Manager or do you have to do your time as a Sales Engineer first?

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Azt7

In what area are you looking ? I would assume security looking at your certs

I'm in the Security and cloud side (Endpoint Protection, Disaster Recovery, DLP, CLoud Sec .... ) and there's a huge need for qualified Sales Engineers with great personalities.

Obviously, it all depends on you profile / career evolution and if a company thinks you can get the job done. That's where your personality would be a determining factor for a company looking to hire you.

A big part of the sale cycle is for the Engineer to be able to connect to the customer so the hiring company has to see how you are able to connect to people right away.

Depending on your profile, you can become a technical account manager where you would basically be the go to person for any technical need. Of course, you will be backed by your techs should something be beyond your level.

Just my 2 cents

UnixGuy

@Azt7: yes security! Thanks for your answer!

JoJoCal19

Absolutely. At my company they hire people even from non-security and non-IT backgrounds (and even right out of college) and train them into Account Executives. Having a tech background makes it that much better as long as you have the personality and salesiness. It helps with having credible conversations with prospects.

scaredoftests

My husband is on technical side of sales (he has been on pre and post sales). High end of routers, so he has to know his stuff or else look like a fool and he hates to look like a fool.

NetworkNewb

Azt7 wrote: »

I'm in the Security and cloud side (Endpoint Protection, Disaster Recovery, DLP, CLoud Sec .... ) and there's a huge need for qualified Sales Engineers with great personalities.

Been having some vendors coming at my company to compare a few different solutions and OMG most sales engineers were pretty bad! I literally saw one person my team fall asleep during one of the presentations.

UnixGuy

Thanks good to know! I meet pre/post Sales people almost every day, and most of them have mediocre technical knowledge at best..which is fine. but even their sales/people skills is not exactly mind blowing, so I thought I'd see how to get there. Seems like a good career path

Azt7

NetworkNewb wrote: »

Been having some vendors coming at my company to compare a few different solutions and OMG most sales engineers were pretty bad! I literally saw one person my team fall asleep during one of the presentations.

I hate those guys. Literally their goal is to finish the content they prepped regardless of how the discussion goes.

First off, not many people like presentations. So, logic would suggest if you have to do one, you better make it entertaining.

Great example for you, I had a prospect who had 1 hour and I was on the call basically last minute with a Vendor country manager. The Country manager kept reading slides. After 35mn, I let him know that the customer has a hard stop in less than half an hour and I start asking questions to get a sense of what are his pain points, what is he looking for, to even see if what we offer can help him since I wasn't there early on.

The country manager literally stops me and keeps going in on the slides. Needless to say that the guy never wanted to do business with us lol

JoJoCal19

Azt7 wrote: »

and there's a huge need for qualified Sales Engineers with great personalities.

This is true!

Azt7 wrote: »

I hate those guys. Literally their goal is to finish the content they prepped regardless of how the discussion goes.

First off, not many people like presentations. So, logic would suggest if you have to do one, you better make it entertaining.

Great example for you, I had a prospect who had 1 hour and I was on the call basically last minute with a Vendor country manager. The Country manager kept reading slides. After 35mn, I let him know that the customer has a hard stop in less than half an hour and I start asking questions to get a sense of what are his pain points, what is he looking for, to even see if what we offer can help him since I wasn't there early on.

The country manager literally stops me and keeps going in on the slides. Needless to say that the guy never wanted to do business with us lol

Yea that is awful. This is why we don't even use slides in our demos, save for like one slide if people need an actual visual on the architecture. We keep the demos interactive and just show what the product can actually do. And yes you've got to get the pain points and have an SE that can quickly pivot and show how the product can take care of their pain points (if applicable).

NetworkNewb

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

This is why we don't even use slides in our demos, save for like one slide if people need an actual visual on the architecture. We keep the demos interactive and just show what the product can actually do.

Nice!

We specifically told one vendor before they came in that we didn't want to see slides at the beginning after the first couple vendors used a bunch of them. They still opened up their presentation with 15 minutes going over slides... Was insane. Getting a good demo out of some of them was a painful process!

DatabaseHead

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

This is true!

Yea that is awful. This is why we don't even use slides in our demos, save for like one slide if people need an actual visual on the architecture. We keep the demos interactive and just show what the product can actually do. And yes you've got to get the pain points and have an SE that can quickly pivot and show how the product can take care of their pain points (if applicable).

Always need the slide deck as a contingency plan however. Unplanned outages can kill your planned demo, especially if you are selling a solution to a location out in the middle of nowhere.