Welcome to The Sales Engineer!
Welcome to The Sales Engineer!
As the inaugural post in this blog, I wanted to cover a few important topics.
- Who am I?
- Why did I start this site?
- What can my future audience expect to find here? AKA: WIIFM
Who am I?
My name is Darrin, and I will be your host here on The Sales Engineer.
Beginning when I was still in grade school, I knew that somehow I was going to make a career out of technology. I feel extremely fortunate for several reasons. My parents had the means and the foresight to expose me to technology at a very young age (when basically no one had a PC), I found a rare and precious combination of being talented and excited about the same field of study, and this vocation provides me much personal satisfaction while allowing me to provide for my family.
Out of high school I went to a technical institute so that I could jump into the high tech field right away, and so I did. After various support and engineering roles I migrated my way into IT and then management. It was basically luck that brought me into my initial SE role, and I haven’t looked back since. During my current stint I have been just about every type of SE you can be from territory, public sector, top accounts, field specialist, operations, and manager. I basically enjoyed my job enough that I wanted to learn all about it from many angles. This brings me to the next question.
Why did I start this site?
Maybe I’ve sat through one too many strategic planning courses, but I simply can’t (won’t?) do anything without clarity of purpose behind it. I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a Sales Engineering site for some time and I have been jotting down relevant notes for a while. The end of calendar year (and fiscal) is a very reflective time for me and this year I decided to take the plunge. With that, my goals for this site include:
- Creating a forum that allows me to give back to a community of professionals from whom I have learned so much. This is the most altruistic one so I had to put it first
- Having a medium that forces me to get ideas out of my head and onto paper to clarify my own way of thinking. There really is very little direct analysis on our field (especially compared to sales in general) available to SEs. I’m willing to do my small part to help fix that.
- Allowing me the opportunity to be exposed to a greater sphere of influence outside my own walls by connecting directly with others in my field.
What can you expect to find here?
As my site description reads, it really is all about being an SE. We have a tough job in that we are a nexus of information for the companies and customers we support. We touch customers, sales, marketing, product management, engineering, support, services, etc. etc. Furthermore, the skills each SE needs are quite diverse. We need to skillfully navigate the continuum of relationships between our highly extroverted reps and highly technical customers, between CXOs and back office personnel, and between pushing for the sale and keeping our customers’ long-term interests at the heart of everything we do.
Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know.
Topics on this blog will deal with the day-to-day issues we face while purposefully keeping a strategic and customer-focused lens on the discussion. Topics will include best practices of managing the technical sales cycle, presentation/demonstration skills, time management, compensation, tools and resources, management strategies, book reviews, etc. I also happen to have a huge fascination with economics and finance so don’t be surprised if I sneak a few relevant bits in there too. I also believe that a great service bloggers provide is getting guest speakers to post that wouldn’t otherwise be sharing their views, so I will endeavor to line up some star appearances after things get going for a while.
I’ll be starting with a good variety of content so I think you’ll get a good feel for what you can get out of the site very quickly. I’ll start with a commitment to posting 1-2 times per week, usually on the weekend and midweek, and we’ll see where it goes from there. I’m a huge RSS fan (I use Google Reader myself) so I will make sure you can easily follow along remotely.
Finally, I look forward to getting to know some of my colleauges in other companies and industries, so please feel free to get in touch with me.
See you on the highway…
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