Curious about what it takes to go from sales engineer to director of sales engineering? Then you’ve come to the right place.
Keep reading for a comprehensive action plan to guide you from your current role in sales to a director of engineering role.
As a director of sales engineering, you’ll need both a solid technical foundation and excellent people skills. Your focus in your new role is as much on people management as it is on addressing technical challenges such as product integration, customization, and security.
That means you must be capable of speaking to other departments in their language while also maintaining a thorough understanding of your sales team’s technology, but also that you’ll need to develop strong project management and leadership skills.
While sales engineers explain and demonstrate the benefits of complex products, a director of sales engineering ensures they have the tools and guidance necessary to do so. To be successful as a director of sales engineering, you must be able to transition from customer engagement to a people- and project management-oriented mindset.
A common mistake when transitioning to a sales engineering directorship is to assume that technical competency and communication skills are all you’ll need. While these are still foundational for a director of sales engineering, you’ll also need to know how to strategize, optimize, and manage your team in the long-term.
Sales engineers may be independent, but you still need to lead and guide them — you need to know how to identify challenges and guide your team through problems that aren’t always evident to engineers in the field.
A director of sales engineering typically acts as both a technical and strategic lead for an organization’s sales engineers.
Understand
Required Skill Set
Goal
Required Skill Set
Everyone has different KPIs and quotas. Although you’ll be less focused on analytics as a director of sales engineering than if you worked in conversion rate optimization, focusing on the right sales engineering metrics can set you up for success.
How did each sales engineer support the customer in a way that removed technical barriers? Did the customer resonate with the demo? Did the engineer focus on the right features?
Metrics in this category include:
The goal is to give your engineers genuine feedback that promotes professional development.
How effective are your POC demos? Are you using your technical resources effectively? How might you improve and optimize future demos?
Metrics in this category include:
As an aspiring director of sales engineers, you’ll want to focus as much on developing your interpersonal skills as you do your technical skills. Beyond developing a working professional knowledge of your industry, there are a few training and certification programs you might consider:
Now for the challenging part. Assuming you aren’t getting a promotion with your current employer, it’s time to figure out how to land your first job as a director of sales engineering.
You’ve finally done it. You’ve landed your first job as a director of sales engineering. Take pride in the hard work and dedication it took to get here — but remember that you aren’t done yet.
Now you need to show your new employer that they made the right choice in hiring you.
Based on our experience working with countless sales engineering directors, it’s important to keep the following in mind.
POC demos are among the most important tools in any sales engineer’s arsenal.
As a director, it’s your responsibility to ensure they can create and deploy those demos as seamlessly as possible. Virtual, cloud-hosted demos are likely your best bet in that regard, as they not only offer excellent scalability, but are considerably more cost-effective than traditional labs.
It goes without saying that you also want those demos to be as immersive as possible — and that you’re able to control your platform and environment in a way that doesn’t require constant support from other departments.
After all, a platform that supports self-service trials is also immensely beneficial as it allows prospects to engage with your products at their own pace. More importantly, a platform like this gives prospects the opportunity to experience your demos in a completely safe environment. They need not worry about bugs or downtime, and instead can only focus on the parts of the product you want your demo to showcase.
It goes without saying that you also want your demos to be as immersive as possible — and that you’re able to control your platform and environment in a way that doesn’t require constant support from other departments.
We have the perfect solution in mind for you, but more on that in a moment.
In many cases, your role as a director of sales engineering will be highly technical. However, this may not always be the case. Some organizations will expect you to be onsite and technically-focused, managing everything from policy creation to strategic roadmaps, while others might have you continue your role as a sales engineer and only occasionally act as a leader/advisor.
Managing technology is a cornerstone of your new role as a director of sales engineering. So, where should you start?
We’ve put together your 90-day guide to ensure you have everything needed to excel. Everything from the cost-effective, scalable, and intuitive platforms that will allow your team to expedite POC creation through automation, allowing them to spend more time on customer engagement to the exact tactics you can deploy to get up and running in no time.
In our follow-up blog, Your First 90 Days As a Director of Sales Engineering, we’ll walk you through best practices, do’s and don’ts, and more — all based on insights collected from hundreds of sales engineering directors.