Transitioning to a Solutions Architecture/Sales Engineering role from an Application Developer role
Last year I made a switch transitioning from leading application dev teams to leading a sales engineering team for Solace. For those who are not familiar, a Sales Engineer is typically the first technical point of contact a customer has with a vendor’s product. A Sales Engineer can also go by the name of Systems Engineer or Solutions Architect depending on the company.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect before I took on the role so I thought I’d spend a few moments to list out some of the salient points on what you can expect as well as relevant experiences from being an application developer that I personally found helpful:
Be prepared to present… A LOT!
An obvious responsibility of someone in this role would be to present the company’s product to the customers. If you’ve ever had to present an idea/algorithm/architecture to your team and get their buy in, you can expect a similar sort of vibe. However, a key difference would be that your audience will be a good mix of people with various levels of technical fluency which leads right into the next point…
Be able to speak to both a technical and non-technical audience
Given the nature of the role, you can’t always expect to know the exact makeup of the audience you are presenting to. On some days, you might be speaking to a group of hardcore developers and on other days you may be speaking to project managers/executives who are looking to solve a business problem. To speak to the latter group, what is most powerful is knowing stories of successful customer implementations of your company’s product and relating it to the business problem they are trying to solve. If you’ve ever had to sell a feature enhancement to your product manager, this is what you can expect.
However, at the end of the day your ultimate decision makers will be the techies so you will need to…
Know your product in and out
Once you’ve successfully gotten past the gatekeepers of the customer, you will be given access to the techies who will be responsible for evaluating your product. Therefore you should know your product in and out. While the company may have internal enablement/training of some sort to get everyone accustomed to the product, nothing better prepares you than getting hands on experience with the product and understanding all of its capabilities. A trait that is useful from an application developer background is being curious and taking the time to know how your system works from end to end rather than just being focused on your specific component. Also whiteboarding architectures can be a huge part of the job as well as building out proof of concepts.
Be passionate about technology
Technology is evolving at an extremely rapid pace and customers are deploying technology in a variety of environments. You will constantly need to not only keep up to date with these trends but speak to how your product can integrate with them. You will also be expected to take on booth duty and/or speak on stage at conferences, so the more passionate you are the more you can get the customers excited. If you are the type of application developer who is constantly keeping up with the latest programming languages/frameworks you will fit right in.
Be good at building and maintaining relationships with your customers
When a customer decides to buy a product from a company, they are also making an investment for the technical relationships the company provides. This means working hand in hand with the customer to integrate your product in their environment and guiding them along the way. Being approachable, generous with your time and periodically checking in on the customer (preferably in person) is of utmost importance. The dynamics of working with other teams and making sure they are comfortable integrating with your systems as an application developer would be relevant here.
While there are many more traits, I’ve listed a few that come top of mind. If you’ve made a similar transition and you think you have something to add, feel free to leave a comment below.
