How to Go From Engineer to Sales Rep

After the dust settled on my last failed startup, I took a good hard look at what I wanted to do next. If you’ve ever been in this situation, this isn’t where you want to be and you’re often looking at a few depressing options. If you look at my career, it’s honestly been like a story with no plot: a smorgasbord of random engineering jobs and startups. The most obvious choice was to go back to what I was previously doing: a mix of engineering and regulatory work for medical device companies. But my motivation for that type of work had dropped to zero.

Instead, I decided to venture into the world of sales. A move that would change my career forever.

Going through a failed startup made me realize that I didn’t have a solid sales foundation to rely on. We were often flying blind on customer calls or trying to replicate the mountains of sales advice we had read online. In short, we were bad at sales. So I made the decision, at age 31 to learn how to do good sales. There’s a lot of sales advice being published everyday, but I wanted to speak directly to those who are currently engineers and have thought about going into sales.

Complex Problems vs Complex Situations

When I was an engineer, I remember working on some very hard problems. Problems that required me to conduct research online, map things out on a whiteboard and sit in a quiet room to solve. In sales, the problems aren’t necessarily difficult to solve, but the situations and relationships involved are complex to navigate. You’re often reacting to customers without knowing the entirety of the context; you aren’t always privy to the internal customer conversations that are happening at an executive level. While engineers may be looking for a solution or a technical clue buried in a Stack Overflow forum, sales reps need to piece together a customer’s buying process by asking the right questions at the right time. In engineering, sometimes there’s only one real solution (or a couple), while in sales, there are often unlimited paths to success; sales strategy is constantly evolving and adjusting to the customer’s needs.

The Sense of Urgency

Timing is such an important aspect of sales that I’m surprised more sales books don’t delve more into it. As an engineer first transitioning into sales, I thought I had a sense of urgency, but I ended up completely missing the point. As an engineer, you often have time to solve a problem; you want your code to be elegant, designs to be functionally minimalistic and beautiful. In the early days, I found myself spending exorbitant amounts of time perfecting how an email sounds or how I should approach a touchy subject. While not inherently bad to do, I’ve found, in many cases, that speed wins. Customers like fast and honest responses over perfect but delayed responses (obviously within reason).

Running Your Own Business

When you’re part of an engineering team at a company, you often have a group of people helping you keep projects on schedule. The product manager has a go-to-market roadmap, the project manager has action items on a Gantt chart and your direct manager is handling internal politics so you can focus on the task at hand. In sales, you are essentially your own project manager. You have to stay on top of the action items on calls, make sure things are progressing in a timely manner, etc. It’s like you’re running your own startup and you’re the only employee.

To be fair, you’ll have a manager to help support the sales cycle, but he/she is not there to find and close business for you. Because you’re now on a commission plan, the time you spend getting organized and managing your opportunities directly impacts whether you get paid. Similarly, be prepared to run your sales book like you’re running your own business.

Take Advantage of Your Technical Knowledge

This last topic is an obvious one to talk about, however I feel engineers get so caught up with being the “salesperson”, that they often forget that they have a wealth of technical knowledge they can bring to the table. While you may not start off knowing the product well, your past experience understanding, digesting and explaining technical concepts will go far if you’re selling a technical product. My recommendation? If you’re technical, look for a technical product to sell.

As a side note, I did want to mention that you don’t need to be an engineer to take advantage of this. The critical personality trait for this is having a “technical curiosity”. Even if you have a liberal arts background, if you’re someone who dives deep into how complex technology works, that’s what will help you in a technical sale. Embrace your inner nerd!

The age-old question comes to mind about whether you can “teach someone how to sell”. I think if you come in with the right mindset, anyone can learn how to do good sales. Like everything else, it requires a lot of practice and repetition. What was interesting to me is when I came into a sales team, I found it to be a mix of different cultures and backgrounds. There were folks with an MBA, those without a college degree, military, athletes, scientists, etc. We all found sales in some way or another. So if you’re an engineer with a desire to go into sales, feel free to ping me; always happy to share my experience transitioning.

Alvin is a network security/performance evangelist and entrepreneur. His ramblings can be found at www.alvintai.com. Follow him @thealvintai