Career Growth | The Sales Engineer

How to Become a Sales Engineer II

November 1, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

<EDIT>
All 3 parts are now part of a single eBook. Click below to download.
How to Become a Sales Engineer - eBook
</EDIT>

In part 1 of How to Become a Sales Engineer we laid out a foundation that will help you break into the industry. At this point you should have familiarity with the role of the SE, a good idea of your personal strengths that can be leveraged as an SE, a profile of the type of company at which you want to work, and finally a short list of 2-3 ideal companies to target for interviews.

5. Preparing to get the interview

The main point of this section is that you don’t want to be going in blind when seeking an interview. This may be quite a lengthy process so bear with me.

There are two primary approaches to take in parallel. The first is to explore the career page of your target companies. You’ll likely find a listing for an SE position on at least one of them, even if it’s not in your area. Don’t worry about finding an open position, as you’ll see this is usually a minor hurdle. Look at what the companies are looking for in a candidate. Again, these are likely “pony descriptions” as in “Mommy, daddy, I want a pony for Christmas!” Don’t worry if you don’t have some of the direct (or length of) experience they’re looking for. You are looking for themes.

The 2nd approach is to bolster that understanding of the role by learning more about them via personal contacts in the industry. If you’re an industry veteran this is probably very easy as most SEs stay inside the same industry most of their careers. For newer folks you can use services like LinkedIn to find out connections you may have to people in those companies or at least people who know people that can introduce you.

What you should now have is a pretty good idea about what skills and experience you need to posses to land your job. What are the technical skills? What type of background will they accept (it usually doesn’t have to be an existing SE)? What industry associations are desired? What about education? Though most of this is negotiable, your job is to make an honest comparison between your current self and this hypothetical perfect candidate. Start now and go become that individual to the best extent possible. I’m not saying you have to reenroll in college to go get a CS degree for example, but it might be a really good idea to take 2-3 months to hone your skill set.

During this time, take the opportunity to see about obtaining demo versions of the product if possible. If you can’t get direct access to it, spend a good deal of time online checking out product specs and reviews. At this point you only need to be able to converse at a high level about the product. Once you land the interview is when this work truly begins.

Though it may be tempting to apply for open positions, I strongly recommend waiting until you meet some of the desired qualifications before proceeding. If you interview too quickly, you may blow your chances permanently at your target companies.

6. The resume

This isn’t a section on how to write a resume, only to provide some pointers about how to hone an existing resume. Now that you know about what your target companies are looking for, you need to play up that experience as much as possible. Be sure to add anything you’ve recently done to better align yourself.

Here is probably the most important tip: Write your resume for a specific company and position. You need to throw the idea away that you are creating a generic resume for 100 different companies. That is the old way. You are going to be recreating your resume for each company you target. If it sounds daunting, don’t worry, you’ll likely only have to do this 5 times or less. To help guide your efforts, search online for other experienced SE resumes. After you’ve seen a few dozen it will give you an idea about what type of information potential employers find useful.

Remember that target company profile statement you created. Specially crafted, that might make an ideal Objective statement for your resume. Yes, you need to include one. If nothing else it shows you at least took the time to customize for them. Best case, the SE Manager/Recruiter might thing you are the perfect fit for the job.

My last tip is to make sure your resume stands out a bit from a formatting standpoint. Conventional wisdom says you need to use something boilerplate so that HR departments and job sites can consume your resume electronically. Since we won’t be taking this approach, it is more important that you go for something a little non-standard. Since you know your industry, you’ll have a sense for how far you can push it before it becomes a detractor. Need some ideas? My favorite approach is searching through existing resumes for those in graphic design, advertising, or marketing. These folks are paid to be able to standout. Take a cue from their examples.

7. Getting the interview

Armed with your understanding of the company, its products/services, ideal candidates, and a targeted resume, you’re already way ahead of the game before you ever talk to a single person at the company about a job. This will give you added confidence when contacting them.

If it’s a company of any significant size, again start with LinkedIn. Search for SE Managers, SEs, and others in your target location. Very quickly you should find people within their SE Organization. View their connections to find others in the role. The goal is to begin constructing a rudimentary org chart. This is something reps are very good at doing with new customers.

When you think you have identified the right people or are close enough (not everyone has a profile), check out the backgrounds of these folks, especially if you found the local SE Manager. This includes general web searches too. The goal isn’t to spy, just to get a better understanding of the people you’ll be speaking with and identifying common talking points.

Once you have this information, it’s finally time to make formal contact. I probably wouldn’t start with the SE Manager in question; I’d start with an SE in your area. Call the company and ask for that SE by name. SEs are usually very busy (as you know), but most are very helpful by nature. Introduce yourself and be honest with how you got their name. Express your general interest in working for the company in an SE role and maybe ask a few softball questions to demonstrate you know a lot about the company already. End by asking for or confirming the name of the regional SE Manager. Thank them for their time. If they offer to forward your resume or make a call on your behalf, politely decline. That’s your job and next step.

The goal of your next conversation is not to interview over the phone. The goal is to get them to agree to meet with you in person, regardless if there is an open position. When you make the call, again introduce yourself and the purpose of the call. You can also casually mention that you’ve spoken to Joe Smith on their team. You’ll want to express enthusiasm over wanting to work at that company and also demonstrate the amount of research you’ve put in to come to that conclusion.

When it becomes clear that you’re not someone that just pulled their company and name off of Google, they’ll be much more receptive. When you’ve reached that point, you can inquire about specific openings or ones that may be available in future. Be very prepared to hear that no openings exist right now (that’s ok!). Mention that you are patient and that a successful company like theirs will likely expand, and when they do you’d like to be considered.

If they are local, ask if you can come in to speak with them for 30 minutes or join them for lunch. After spending 10 minutes on the phone with you they are far more likely to want to get to know you. After all, one of the jobs of the SE Manager is to maintain a reserve talent pool. If they won’t agree, you can casually ask for other SE managers who may have positions in surrounding territories or verticals. Larger companies often have overlapping territories that cover specific customers that may also hire in your area.

At this point you have about a 90%+ chance of walking away with an interview, an informal meeting, or at the very least other SE Managers in the company you can contact. Rinse and repeat until you have a formal interview. While still conducting your search, make a reminder to follow up and email them every 6-8 weeks inquiring if they have heard of any potential openings. If you’ve done your homework, this will almost always eventually get you that interview. But not to worry, you have a list of several companies to try this with simultaneously. View each experience as an opportunity to hone your pitch.

This process can easily take a month if not longer before you get your interview so don’t get discouraged. We’ll cover the topic of interviewing in part 3.

Filed Under: Career Growth

How to Become a Sales Engineer

October 22, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

<EDIT>
All 3 parts are now part of a single eBook. Click below to download.
How to Become a Sales Engineer - eBook
</EDIT>

Judging from search engine traffic, many people are interested in how they can become a sales engineer. I’m going to talk about my general theories behind job hunting applied to everything I know about hiring (and being hired) for Sales Engineering positions. I’m going to make a general assumption that you aren’t already an SE, though it applies almost equally as well to those switching companies. And, in case you’re wondering, this should work well even in challenging economic times when sales organizations are being reduced.

Because this is a lengthy topic I’ll spilt the article into 3 parts. Let’s get to it.

1. Know the job

Back when I got my first SE gig, there weren’t a lot of resources for finding out about the role of an SE. Much of it had to be learned on the job. Today, there are many resources. Start here. Read the books I have listed. Subscribe and plow through the archives of each blog I recommended. You should feel like an industry veteran (sans direct experience) before you make your first job inquiry. This also ensures you know if the position is right for you, which leads me to my next point.

2. Understand your unique strengths

As I’ve mentioned previously, I am a big fan of business author Marcus Buckingham. I recommend you read two books of his for the purpose of this exercise, Now, Discover Your Strengths
and Go Put Your Strengths to Work. In the former, go through the Strength Finder to help you uncover your natural areas of talent and desire. Use the exercises in the latter to help you zero in on the types of activities you find most rewarding. This is important if your motivation in changing jobs is more intrinsic and less about a bigger paycheck—even though that never hurts.

3. Determine your employer profile

After you thoroughly understand the role (conceptually at least) of an SE from step 1, you should know fairly quickly if the role is generally a match to your personality. Most of the books mentioned in the SE Resources page even have sections that help you think through this. If you think you have what it takes, keep reading. Just don’t count yourself out too early. Speaking from personal experience, I learned I had many innate talents I could apply to the role that I never knew existed until I was forced to leverage them.

One thing in Making the Technical Sale I found very insightful was the practice of understanding your personality traits to the point of using that to target companies that played in market spaces that map to your strengths (i.e. finding the right company match). I view this as more applicable to seasoned SEs since it requires an understanding about your skills that you may not have uncovered yet—even from step 2. But I still recommend even new entrants to spend time reviewing the section to at least make an educated guess.

Once you have this understanding, you can put these pieces together to forge a profile of potential companies that 1) maximizes your chances of getting hired, 2) obtains the highest level of job satisfaction, which 3) sets you up for the best chances of succeeding as a new SE.

Your profile may be as simple as: A fast growing 100M+ enterprise software company with an established customer base selling desktop management solutions. It can get as specific as your understanding of yourself and the market allows, but even a simple profile like this one can allow you to narrow down potential employers to less than ten.

4. Research your profile companies

The goal of this step is to allow you to narrow down your potential company matches to just a few. At this point in the job hunt I am not in favor of using a job board or industry recruiters. You’ll set yourself apart by contacting these companies directly and will keep your options open (some firms are not allowed to use recruiters for example). If all else fails this can still be a fallback option.

To determine your best matches, I recommend a few approaches:

Think of the companies that best match your skill set and industry experience
Use the corporate website to find out all of the products each of them sells
Use publically available research to determine market leading companies in the space. Though not always the best fit, it’s usually better to be employed by market leaders.
Use your personal network (including social networks like LinkedIn) to find connections you may have that can provide more information about the company. More on this in part 2.

Using these basic approaches you should easily be able to find the top handful of companies in the market that best match your profile.

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In part 2 we’ll touch on the resume and getting an interview.

Filed Under: Career Growth

Creating Fans

September 19, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

This is part 2 of a 2 part post on transforming from a strategy of avoiding burned bridges to creating fans.
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Now that we’ve covered the tactical side of avoiding burned relationships in part 1, let’s take a look at how we as SEs can take it to the next level.

One of the more recent advancements in our culture around performance is the realization that studying and learning from failure is not the way to achieve high performance. It is a focus on high performance itself that is key. For the economists out there, the concept is very similar to that of comparative advantagein trade. One of the best treatments of the subject was done by one of my favorite business authors Marcus Buckingham in his book Now, Discover Your Strengths. I plan to cover this topic in depth in a separate post. All we need to know right now is that simply avoiding the problems in part 1 does not separate you from the rest of the pack.

In order to do that, we need to move from the mindset of not just avoiding common pitfalls, but how do we strengthen relationships and actually create fans out of difficult situations. This is the crux of part 2.

To accomplish this goal, there is a fairly straightforward scaffolding we use to guide our action:

Focus on what you can control
Determine how you want to react to difficult scenarios and events outside your control
Use these decisions to grow your span of control

Focus on what you can control
Many SEs (and people in general) focus on a lot of things they have no (or very little) control over. This includes product direction, marketing strategies, rep pairings, etc. When I was a junior SE I made the constant mistake of putting too much of my time into influencing product direction. What I should have been doing was not focusing on how I could change my surroundings to match my sales situations, but maximizing my effectiveness with my customers given my set of circumstances. Once I realized (with help from a rep or two) that we didn’t have to chase every opportunity, we could instead put the full force of our effort behind opportunities where we had better alignment with the customer. I was less stressful and was able to deliver a level of service to my customers that was unmatched by the competition. This level of focus allowed us to generate more than twice as many customer references than anyone else in our region.

You may also be focusing too much on other people at your company. For example, every once in a while we all get that manager that seems to bring out the worst in you. The manager may even have a critical flaw that lowers his/her level of effectiveness. Rather than focusing on how to avoid them or venting your frustrations to others, you can choose to focus on using your unique strengths to compensate for your manager’s weakness. For example if your manager insists on being involved in every opportunity and constantly asks for reports, account plans, customer data, etc., don’t focus on hiding opportunities to keep them off your back. Instead, focus on providing world class account plans to your manager before being asked. Keep your CRM records updated better than anyone. Provide detailed call records at the end of every day. In other words, be the best communicator on your team. I’ll come back to this example momentarily.

Determine how you want to react to difficult scenarios
What if you have a customer where you know your product would make a fantastic fit and would greatly streamline their operation. All of your attempts to get a hold of a key contact are ignored or returned with “I’m too busy to take on another project right now.” You have a choice to make. You can continue to pound on the customer and request meetings or you can take a different approach. You can put in the time and sacrifice to really empathize with this person to understand his/her plight. You can make a proactive decision to provide more value to this person as an outsider than any of their current vendors. You can research and provide more time-saving recommendations than anyone else, even beyond your product line. I can’t count how many times just giving more effort than the next guy was willing to give got my foot in the door and became the start of good, long-standing relationships.

Moving back to our internal customers, if you get a poor review in a certain area from your manager you have another choice to make. You can flight it, get defensive, and maybe even argue yourself up a notch on your rating. This may make you feel good and you may be thinking you won, but in fact you have lost. Not only will your manager look to more closely to document poor performance (we seem to find what we’re looking for, right?), but you’ve damaged the relationship of your manager and s/he may be less willing to provide you honest feedback. And honest feedback is an essential tool for growth. Rather than fighting criticisms, accept them. Internalize them. Really consider why you are seen this way. Not only will your manager respect you for your professional response, but you can be assured your relationship with them improved and they may be willing to be more open and honest with you.

Use these decisions to grow your span of control
Continuing with our examples, you can use your ability to choose your response to grow your span of control. You can leverage this technique over and over again to build strong references within your account base that you can use to shorten the sales cycle with new customers. Sometimes 2-3 strong local references can negate the need for a customer to perform an evaluation. Talk about leveraging up your game! Not only your customers, but I assure your rep and sales manager will become quite a fan.

You can use this approach with the over-controlling manager. Once you’ve demonstrated that you are the best communicator on the team, you can start speaking with your manager about optimizing the way s/he gets involved in the account planning process with other team members. In this sense you compensating for this weakness and making the team more effective overall. As the feedback your manager receives improves, they should be quite grateful for your efforts, not to mention your teammates.

Finally, you can use this approach directly with other SEs. Rather than see them as your competition, see them as assets. Put in the time to get to know them. When you see an email blast come out with a question, take the time to research it and provide an answer if you don’t know it initially. Offer to share references if your company doesn’t have a system in place. In short, put forth the effort to be an indispensable part of the team. Not only does that help the stock price, it builds your base of contacts so that when you need a favor, people will stop what they’re doing to try to help you.

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So in summary, while the approach seems simple, it is definitely something that you need to practice and continually refine. Results don’t happen overnight but I guarantee you will be amazed at how quickly you notice them. It’s great to avoid the common pitfalls but that just gets you to average. Using this approach is what can help separate you from the pack and take you to a much higher plain of performance.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Soft Skills Tagged With: Career Growth, Soft Skills

Burning Bridges

September 16, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

This is part 1 of a 2 part post on transforming from a strategy of avoiding burned bridges to creating fans.
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Ah the long time adage of never burning bridges. Very simple, yet sometimes very hard to practice. Even more difficult is realizing when this applies.

Most senior SEs recognize that their niche equates to a very small world. True, SEs can move to other business segments and can do so successfully. My anecdotal estimate though, based on research on Linkedin, is that at least 70% of SEs change jobs within a similar technical domain expertise. This means we oftentimes find ourselves working with the same sets of people throughout our careers. Given its importance, we can benefit from an investigation of this topic.

Let’s begin with the tactical implementation. At this point, we are concerned primarily with avoiding common missteps that directly translate into burned bridges. Here are some ways I have personally witnessed folks more or less kill their careers overnight:

Telling them how you really feel – Sending an email to the entire company pointing out the specific faults of every executive in the company the day you quit. (A subsequent policy was added that prevented anyone from sending email company wide).
Sacrificing integrity- Going to work for a competitor and then immediately divulging (non-public) critical competitive information about the inner workings of a product.
HR issues- Committing lewd acts, publicly at a sales event, that ruin your reputation as a moraled and principled person.

This is just a few examples. I’d be lying if I said my colleauges and I never got any cheap laughs at their expense over drinks. On a serious level you can empathize with these scenarios and understand how and why they may have happened. #1 probably felt as though s/he was ignored or opinions didn’t matter. Over time, unvented, this led to a large blow up. #2 was concerned about “proving” him/herself at the new company and caved into social pressure to share the information despite knowing it destroyed trust with others (even those being presented with the data). #3, either feeling pressure to demonstrate alpha male behavior or suffering from a poor relationship at home (plus alcohol), contributed to poor judgment.

With all the potential pitfalls in mind, here are a few strategies I’ve adopted over the years to keep myself from falling into common traps:

Someone is always watching- No matter how small or innocuous the group you are with, always keep in mind that your activities will eventually be outed to another. Which leads to:
There is no such thing as a secret- People love to share juicy details. Even if you trust someone, do not trust someone to keep a secret of events that transpire during corporate off sites and customer events.
Separate your values from social values – This is tough to do unless you’ve thought long and hard about who you want to be and what values you wish to stress. Once accomplished, it is very powerful to rely on your own value system to make decisions versus doing what you think will please others in the short run.
Never communicate when angry – An old email adage but equally important under stressful times with team members and customers. It’s much better to excuse yourself from a conversation than to say something you’ll regret later on.
Understand your limits – If you know yourself and understand your limits, you can devise rules that you can follow to keep you out of trouble spots. This includes diet, exercise, rest, stress management, etc.

If I had to boil it down I would focus on two long standing good pieces of advice I’ve heard over the years: “Behave as if all your loved ones we’re watching you” and “Always speak as though the person you’re speaking about were listening“.

This sets the ground rules for avoiding the major trouble spots. In the follow on post we’re going to cover moving from a more tactical strategy to a longer term and effective one involving creating true fans in the workplace.

Filed Under: Career Growth Tagged With: Career Growth

Economic Velocity and Sales

May 23, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

The current state of the economy is on a lot of peoples’ minds. I personally spend quite a bit of time attempting to identify and understand macroeconomic trends. I do this despite the overwhelming good cases made against doing so for the average person. See A Random Walk Down Wall Street as a prime example. I’ll likely continue to do so as long as I enjoy it and as long as, well, my ideas have a successful track record.

One trend of particular interest to me, especially because I make a living from technology, is the velocity of change in economic cycles caused by the increased volume and timeliness of economic data. My theory is that we’ll be experiencing increasingly exaggerated and compacted cycles from 2005 forward. In geek speak a higher frequency and amplitude.

I’m not going to cover what that means to your portfolio, even though it’s a great conversation over a beer. But, what does this mean to Sales Engineers and the companies we work for and sell to?

A good starting point comes from a very applicable book titled The Well-Timed Strategy by Peter Navarro. To paraphrase a great deal, you need to monitor business cycles because, as a professional, you should be changing jobs close to the top in order to progress faster in your career. If you think about it, talented people are most in demand during an economic boom when business investment (read: expansion) is at its height and unemployment is at its lowest. When the economy has been expanding rapidly is precisely the right time to move on if you were already planning on doing so (I’m definitely not advocating moving on just because of this fact). You’re likely to have the most negotiating power and be able to secure a higher salary and perks than you otherwise would. Keep that in mind next time you’re thinking about changing companies.

What about the companies you sell to? Depending on the size of company you work for, you may have a wide variety in the types of opportunities you pursue. Extremely mature companies have more refined territories which make it more difficult. During recessions or stagnant economies, the companies hit hardest are those reliant on growth to survive. Technology companies, many small to medium businesses, retail, etc. all qualify. Companies in these areas will be far more reticent to make investment if they are in a position of having to plow all profits into growth. Large companies and those in mature industries (and government), can be impacted quite differently. The smartest strategy for a company in a downed economy is actually to expand, assuming resources have been allocated that way. Labor and raw materials are cheaper. The competition is in retreat and less likely to exploit new markets. Companies adept at managing the business cycle will be more likely to buy from you during this time as they may count on being able to get better discounts from vendors. Knowing this in sales can help you understand these buying patterns and may even allow you to score some points with your customers’ executives if you can illustrate how this knowledge may be able to help them make the best use of budget dollars.

Inside your own company this knowledge can be immensely helpful as well. If you’re in a senior management position in the sales organization, the absolute best time to look at expanding your sales force or retooling is now when other companies are looking to pause or cut back. Not only will you be able to expand more quickly but the quality of talent you can acquire will go up as the economy goes down. Other capital investments like lab resources, educational material, laptops, etc. may be easier to come by as demand goes down across the board and vendors still have quotas to meet—not to mention the deals to be had because of business selloffs. If you can use this situation to your advantage, just think about how prepared you will be when business does pick up again. You’ll be in a clear leadership position compared to that of your competition.

It’s not just a cute catch phrase. Those that can avoid the pack and invest in contrarian fashion will outperform the rest. The biggest gains are always to be had at inflection points, and this one will be no different.

What does this mean if the business cycle becomes permanently more prone to boom and bust and moves from one to the other more quickly? Aside from it being a little scarier, it means that knowledge of this process will become even more important as more opportunities to get out in front will present themselves. As an SE or SE manager/executive, you can use this understanding to better your (and your company’s) situation. I definitely recommend you do what you can to start researching the signals of these inflection points to get a leg up on the competition. I’m sure I’ll get around to sharing what I use soon enough too

Filed Under: Career Growth, Roles & Responsibilities

Value of Certification for SEs

May 21, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

Almost all of us at one point have had to get certified in a particular product. In some industries it is job critical and others it can be seen as nice to have. I’ve run into very few certifications that have actually been a detriment to advertise—though 8-10 years ago my Microsoft certifications got me uninvited to a couple UNIX shops.

Some SEs live and die by their certifications, even though it is not a job requirement. I know some that would rather schedule a visit to the dentist than Prometric. As with most things there is not a clear answer to the debate. Here is my take.

In the workplace, everyday, big decisions are made, deals are won and lost, and events take place that hinge on the slimmest of margins. An associate of mine likes to call them tie breakers.

You can not afford to be losing the tie breakers.

There are many different types of tie breakers: your dress, your speech, your likability, reputation, trust, credibility, etc. If you take a look at ways you could influence some of these (especially the last 3), I think certification definitely plays a positive role.

There are several situations to consider. If you walk into an account right after an SE from a different company pitching the same type of solution, who might a customer believe is more credible? Someone with no industry certifications or someone with 6 acronyms after their name. If you’re vying for a promotion and it comes down between you and someone with similar credentials, the certification may be the tie breaker. The same thing will play out in a job interview. These are some big factors in your life and is why I take every opportunity to stack the deck in my favor.

Having said that, this doesn’t necessarily come down to a yes or no discussion. You can draw the line in different spots. 1 certification or 5 or 17. Here are some things to consider:

- Are you a good test taker?
- Can you breeze through technical manuals?
- Are you still early in your career?
- Are there highly respected or coveted certifications in your field?
- Will your existing company pay for classes and/or tests?

The more yeses you have the more beneficial certification will be for you and the more of them you should seek. If you’re late in your career, like where you are, and have difficulty passing tests, you’re better off just obtaining 1. The sweet spot for most people is between 3-5. Holding too many certifications might make some people think you are compensating for other weaknesses. Of course hold as many as you like, just be more particular about which ones you publicize on your business card, email signature, and resume.

One other factor I’d like you to consider is interindustry certification. What I mean by that is pursuing a certification that is well respected and recognizable but falls outside your day-to-day job function. If you’re a desktop/server guy seek some network experience and certification. I would even go so far as to recommend certifications outside technology. You’d be amazed at what happens when you can put a CPA, CFP, Esq, etc. on your card. Not only is it a conversation starter, but invariably you’ll find others now in technology who once worked in these other fields as well. This practice works best when you already posses this knowledge from school or former profession or is a hobby of yours—otherwise it’s not worth the time investment.

Finally, as a manager, I think it is good practice to encourage your people to seek certification—and pay for it within reason. Not only are you contributing to their knowledgebase, you’re also contributing to general career growth and development. You’re also likely benefitting from a confidence booster as tests are passed. Most companies recognize this benefit and subsidize certification. If you’re not you may be taking a hit for it that you don’t realize.

So as an individual or company, don’t miss out on the tie breakers. You’ll find time/money here is well spent even if not immediately quantifiable.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Certification, Compensation, Management

Sales Engineering Specialization

May 14, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Sales Engineers pick the positions they occupy. Depending on the company you work for, the SE role can involve very different day-to-day tasks. There are some obvious and more obscure reasons to choose one company (or type of company) over the other. I don’t know that I need to cover basic aspects such as salary, benefits, culture, travel, etc. While they are important, I’m sure they have been covered elsewhere. What I’m more interested in is what aspects of being an SE draw certain people to certain roles.

To begin with some type of logical progression, let’s start with a startup. Certain products are so complex companies need to begin hiring SEs at the same time/pace as reps. In this environment the SE is able to deeply specialize in one product. The SE will probably even be a key determinant of product direction and will have a close working relationship with the developer. At the same time the SE will also be spread very thin between accounts and will be acting in a sales capacity a large portion of the time. New companies have poor territory coverage and therefore reps and SEs are not always at the same account at the same time. This situation is what I refer to as product specialized; business generalist. The SE intimately knows the product, but covers many business angles between engineering, sales, support, services, etc. From past experience (and only a slight psychology education) I am positing that this SE either 1) really enjoys or gets comfort from understanding all aspects of a product, or 2) really likes being involved in all parts of the business, or seeing the product all the way through the lifecycle as it were.

As you move in to medium size businesses, the product mix is likely still such that it is easy for the SE to maintain deep expertise across the entire product line of maybe 1-4 products, especially since there is almost always a dominant product. There is, however, much more clearly defined infrastructure to support the sale and accompanying process. The SE would be spending much more time tied to the rep and the majority of work is within a stricter definition of the SE role. To me this is product specialized; business specialized. This SE would enjoy or be more comfortable within the confines of the job description and still be able to have ultimate mastery of the technology. It also likely provides additional stability not found in startups.

When you get to large business, it gets more interesting because there is likely a continuum of responsibilities inside the SE organization. You can “specialize” as a generalist meaning you are the big picture guy/gal. You can work channel, SMB, top tier accounts, product specialist, industry verticals, etc. In that sense you can define your career (or market) as anywhere from product generalist/specialist to business generalist/specialist. If you’re at a large company you are probably there for a reason: job stability, great benefits, variety in positions available, etc., but the interesting questions to me are 1) Does the average SE understand this continuum and market themselves purposely? and 2) On what basis are they making decisions (i.e. why choose one over the other)?

Again, going back to experience to try and answer these questions, my belief is that most SEs do understand this facet, though mostly at a subconscious level. This means that for question 2, the answer is mostly instinct and not a result of careful/thoughtful planning. If you’ve never thought specifically about this concept before, it would be very beneficial for you to understand your current and desired path to see if they align. If I had my eyes set on a product manager position, it might behoove me to seek SE roles that allow me to specialize in a product line but give me wide berth in terms of business areas I touch. If your goal is try out being a rep, you’ll need wide business exposure along with a broad understanding of the portfolio, competition, marketplace, etc.

This process isn’t only about complementary skills but also about setting yourself up to meet the right people and build the right network. For example, being seen as a technology leader inside your company for a product is sure to get noticed by the product manager.

As you gain rapport with the right people and build the right skills, doors mysteriously find a way of opening.

The implications for SE managers should be clear. I think it is our duty to have these conversations with our people. Once we understand (or get our people to understand) what path they would like to take, we gain deeper insight into personality types. We can point people to roles that will set them up for success and greater satisfaction. Even if you don’t do it for the right reason, do it because your competition (internal and external) will.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Management