Breaking into a pre-sales engineer role?
Hey folks. I've been doing consulting for four years straight out of Uni and have enjoyed it but ready for a change. I'm personable and deal with client facing interactions well. Technically my projects have included .NET development, migrating to cloud platforms, DevOps CI/CD, automation testing, and scripting. Interpersonally I've done customer workshops with IT managers and Execs, requirements gathering, sprint demos, lead UAT testing efforts and documentation, etc. A jack of a couple trades and able to pick up new skills quickly. I'm looking for a new challenge and sales has always been interesting to me. Solutions/Pre Sales engineering roles seem like a great fit for my background and interests. Of course breaking into that role at first can be difficult. I have an interview for a position with the hiring manager coming up. A conversation to see how we can work together and get an idea of how I tick and deal with customers was the primer i got for it. Any tips on how to nail the interview and make a good impression from a tech industry perspective? I know I'll need to sell them on myself extra hard since this would be my first time in this role. #presales #solutionsengineer #sales
OP, when meeting the manager highlight the following: 1. Technical strengths 2. Soft skills - customer interactions, being able to run workshops with people less technical like execs u mentioned 3. Salesyness- how often during your consulting gigs did you uncover more opportunities and brought them back to the account team as further upsell into the account 4. Were you viewed as a trusted advisor in the accounts, think of few examples Read a book or some articles on Sales Engineering. Lookup MTS by John Care. This will put you in a frame of mind for what Presales managers are looking for.
The job responsibilities vary dramatically from company to company. The biggest factor is: how technical are the deals and how technical is the implementation? Responsibilities can vary from being a demo monkey, to being an implementations expert, to being an RFP manager, or any combination of the above.