Day Two Cloud 186: A Day In The Life Of A Sales Engineer With Pete Robertson

Today’s Day Two Cloud episode gets into sales engineering. IT pros may look down on sales for not being a strictly technical discipline, but it turns out there’s more overlap between an engineer and a sales engineer than you might think. Both have to solve problems. Both have to understand requirements. Both have to design and deliver outcomes. So stick around–you might come away with a new view on sales engineering. Our guest is Pete Robertson, Specialist Sales Engineer – Networking at AHEAD. We discuss: * What a sales engineer does * Compensation and incentives and balancing making the sale with customer needs * Why he transitioned from traditional engineering to sales engineering * Requirements for a sales engineer role, and why there’s more technology and design than you might think * The educational side of selling * Work-life balance * How he responds to engineers who see sales as…icky * More Show Links: @vcloudpete – Pete Robertson on Twitter Transcript: [00:00:10.090] – Ethan Welcome to day two. Cloud. And today, Ned, I was going to say we’re going to take a diversion from our normal deep dive of engineering and we’re going to talk about SaaS, but in fact, it turns out sales and engineering are very closely related, according to our guest, Pete Robertson. [00:00:28.100] – Ned Yeah, we get into a philosophical point on what is engineering anyway, because it’s not just bleeps and bloops and typing out commands at a command prompt. There’s a little bit more to that. And if you back away for a moment, take a look at the larger picture you discover engineering is about solving problems, and a portion of sales is solving a problem that someone has, hopefully. [00:00:49.830] – Ethan Hopefully, hopefully. [00:00:51.430] – Ethan And Pete is very good at that. Pete is a sales engineer with the consulting firm Ahead. They’re a large VAR, and he’s been on both sides of it where he’s been a deeply certified human who’s the guy with the bleeps and the bloops and the blinky lights making all the things happen. And these days he finds himself on the presale side. And so we thought Pete would be a great person to discuss what it’s like to both understand delivering a solution, but then designing the solution on the front end for the customer as well. And Pete’s really good about that and understanding business needs and business outcomes. So if that all is interesting to you, because I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of money to be made in presales. Pete’s got a lot of wisdom for you. Enjoy this conversation. Pete Robertson. Welcome to day two, Cloud. In a sentence or two, would you tell the nice people listening who you are and what you do? [00:01:41.710] – Pete Yeah, Ethan, thanks for having me. I’m Pete Robertson. I am by trade and Vocation, a sales engineer. I have a background in data center engineering. I’ve taken on a number of different roles over the years, and I focus right now on cloud networking. I’m a principal consultant for Ahead. [00:01:57.910] – Ethan But you led with sales engineering, Pete, which of course is the topic of today’s show. Was that your way of apologizing for being in sales when you said, I did this, all this data center stuff and cloud stuff, too? [00:02:08.940] – Pete You know, I have no apologies. I love what I do. But, yes, you certainly get some people that feel I’ve gone to the dark side by saying that I’m in pre sales. [00:02:17.130] – Ethan