A Whole New Career Path for Sales Engineers
There’s a new career path available to individual contributors in the presales function.
In fact, there are several.
This is a direct result of VCs pouring money into the category.
- Loopio and RFPio
- Vivun and Hub
- And obviously I’m pointing at demo creation platforms like what Reprise has brought to market
Why does this matter to the PreSales Collective?
Because it’s time to think career progression!
The creation of a tech stack leads to the creation of a leadership position. Someone has to build, deploy, maintain, and harness the value from these tools. Look at the executive RevOps role at your org – this position grew from just a Salesforce admin years ago. As more and more revenue tools got added, the data and output from those tools became a full-time, strategic job.
Well, the same is available for presales individuals today. How can you prep yourself to grow into this position? Jump on one of these projects:
- Become the de facto security/soc II expert on your sales team
- Manage all RFPS – be the gatekeeper to all sales proposals
- Own Vivun or Hub. Be in charge of the allocation of sales engineer time investment. You’re essentially running the show!
But my favorite position to volunteer for? Own your demo. Become your company’s demo engineering team.
Enterprise companies already have this resource. Just look at Salesforce. They actually call it Q Branch and I’ve heard it’s over 100 people. Like Santa’s elves, this army of builders is on call to produce for the AEs and customer success reps at SFDC.
If you have an opportunity where the prospect wants to combine Salesforce plus Pardot plus another product from the catalog, they’ll build a custom Salesforce environment, connect the other products to it, and “manufacture”/ fill it with anonymous data for you. They’ll add a couple of relevant case studies based on role and vertical, and they’ll ship that to the seller so they can do their job.
This is great for those huge orgs…
…but what about the rest of us? We’re probably just going to allocate half a sales engineer or product marketer, buy them a tool like Reprise, and call it a day.
Be first. Be the owner of your demo creation software. Be critical to the revenue team. Start now – your first Reprise demo is free for PreSales Collective members.
Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash
