Applied scientist supporting the business. Have been getting burnt out with ops deadlines and pay, started aiming for more product dev roles. Got stuck on the fence between PM and MLE, but suddenly realized I haven't considered going the other way altogether: sales. Only familiar with the high level processes, tons of questions... - What's a day in the life like? - How's pay vs ML across different sales roles? - How much is luck of what territory you get? - What are the high TC companies? TC 140, low for ML #sales #enterprise #machinelearning
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I would go into Presales. It's better than Sales Executives for somebody with a product background.
What is the TC like ?
Depends on the company. But 225-300 for a senior would be average. You so have about twice the lifespan of a SE.
Yoe? Location?
Anyone else cringe @ sales?
Nah just you
Lolll
I always thought sales was beneath me. Then joined a pre-sales role and realized that sales, not engineering is the lifeblood of a b2b company. Engineering was a lot more predictable and more often rewarding. Presales can pay upwards of 200k. Sales rep can easy exceed 500k but also very quickly be shown the door if you don't perform.. When you worked a day 9 times out of 10 you got a days worth of results. In enterprise sales I can work for 3 months non stop and have it literally be worth nothing if a deal doesn't close. In my opinion going from engineering to sales makes you invaluable on sales team. Also if you look at long term career progression, many in csuite are from sales and finance...
To add an additional comment here about the doing nothing. Some sales cycles can take months if not over a year before pulling across the finish line. You can have a deal worth 3x your quota take 2+ years to finalize. It can be super hard to stay motivated when you can't even find the right person to talk to or if they straight up ignore you.
+1 to being an engineer in the sales org. You add a different perspective and bring credibility with technical buyers. Also if you build some automation tools to solve pain points on the side and they’ll treat you like a king.
My husband does this, and 1. It requires a very different skill set - you have to have high emotional intelligence. If you in any shape or form don't like dealing with people, sales will be very hard. 2. You will be doing a lot of talking 3. You don't really create anything, you just talk about what others created (this would be hard for me as an engineer). 4. You make a shit ton of money if you're good and have a high EQ
This I concur. One solid advice here
EQ is more important than IQ.
I'd consider reading one of the popular sales books like "The Challenger Sale" or "Solution Selling" and see if the things they talk about resonate with you. Ultimately selling is a skill everybody needs in life so even if you determine sales isnt a route you want to go down, it's a valuable read. Also I'd consider with an engineering background going into Solutions engineering/Presales/ Solutions Architecture. Highly involved in the sales process and get to showcase your technical acumen
Sound advice. The only think I will add is as presale engineer you also need to have some business acumen. Ultimately even that’s an engineer position you are in a sales team and facing customers. Without business acumen you will find it strange why sales do what they do.
Having moved from pre sales to pure swe it is definitely worth a tour of duty, an engineer with sales experience is incredibly valuable to smaller orgs. Also just humanly it will do wonders for your negotiation skills. Don’t know about TC, kind of apples and oranges I think
+1 sales experience for a SWE actually works wonders with negotiating TC
how’d you make the switch? previous SWE experience on your resume? i’m currently in pre sales
Pace of movement is slower and there's more beurocracy
Yeah dude, it's IBM. I've seen less bureaucracy in Federal Gov
It's not like that for me
Why not Product Manager?
Bump
What does bump mean?