Having posted there in its heyday, it made for an interesting self-moderation dynamic for sure. Before I posted something totally offbase that I knew I'd be punished for, I had to think "is saying this stupid shit really worth $10 to me?". Many times that was enough to get me to pause (but sometimes you also can't help yourself and it's well worth the price).
I manage a team of Solution Architects and I've hired many where this is their first "sales" job.
What kind of jobs are you applying to? If this is your first SA role, you should take a look at the technologies you use every day and apply to those vendors (and/or their competitors). You'll be able to speak credibly to their customers about your experiences and it'll make you a very effective SA.
In my experience, to hire a good SA, the sales skills come in a distant second to relevant technical skills. Rewrite your resume to highlight those skills and you'll have success.
For sales, I recommend How You Make the Sale. It's a general sales book no matter if you're selling software, services, or physical goods and it does a great job of walking you through the sales process and where it overlaps with the buying process. It also helps reframe a lot of the "scary" parts of sales like objections as "requests for more information". Highly recommend for technical people who are new to sales https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204....
Red Hat is hiring for Solution Architects in both Eastern and Pacific time zones. This is a remote job with some travel requirements for customer meetings.
Solution Architects at Red Hat are technical pre-sales engineers who help customers solve problems with our linux, automation and container offerings. Responsibilities include delivering presentations, demos, proof of concepts, and hands on workshops.
If you're personable, like talking tech with people, and don't want to be on call again, give presales a try!
A lot of sales books teach Jedi mind tricks and "tricks to close" and crap like that. This is much more practical. It walks you through a customer's buying process and shows how you can map that to your sales process. I find that making a better connection with my clients comes from putting their best interest first and being a good person. No need for psychology or tricks. Once you understand the buying process, and you understand the products/services you're selling, you're good to go.
Thank you for the advice, will also note that. I think that's my problem as well, making a true connection with my clients..
Thanks for the book recommendation :)
I agree with this and have experience with the Sales Engineering side of it. Any enterprise software company needs a field sales team with technical people to back up the sales reps. Sales Engineers or Solution Architects own the "technical close" of a deal. Once the customer says your technology solves their problems and they're not looking at any competitors, your job is done. Rarely do you have to do any salesy activity like negotiating contracts, "closing deals", cold calling etc.
You give demos, proof of concepts, and talk shop with your customers. Most of it can be done remotely, but for important customers, you travel in your territory. As long as you're close to an airport, you're good.
Base + Commission can be easily $250k plus equity.
Highly recommend this as well. And I encourage people to not get scared off by the "sales" aspect of the job. As the technical resource, you're almost never closing deals, cold calling, or any of the other salesy responsibilities. Your job is really just to help the potential customer solve a problem with your technology. You gather requirements about their problem, and have technical conversations to show how your product(s) can be a good fit.
You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.
The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.
Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.
This is a fun idea. I thought of a slightly different spin. Combine what Million Short does with search results (omits the top million results to help find things beyond the usual top results) with Reddit.
Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones.
