This book will follow a step-by-step process to help you start your career and further your career in the sales engineering world. You will find that you can enter this career at various technical skill levels to almost no technical skills, provided you have the charisma, drive, and interpersonal capability to tell great stories. The one goal is to become that trusted advisor for your customer and identify the critical business and technical issues you can solve.

Why I am writing this series

I am writing a series of books focused on SE Worklife, including the first of the series, My Journey: Lessons Learned, then How to Become a Sales Engineer, followed by SE Worklife: Living the Job, and lastly, SE Worklife: Leadership vs. Management. No other books on the market today will offer you the combined experience of my 30 years and the years imputed through this team involved, ranging from legacy on-prem software solutions to current consumption-based solutions. You will hear the unfiltered, pure, honest direction on the ins and outs of this career. I will not ask for forgiveness for how blunt I will be, and there will be no sugar-coating successes and failures.

The first book, SE Worklife: My Journey, is about my career and with it, all the done-wells and do-better understood through this 30-year journey. You will benefit from the second book, SE Worklife: How to Become a Sales Engineer, which will take you on a backstage tour of how organizations hire, what they look for, and how they measure one candidate versus another. I will help you understand the job, how to get the job, and the onboarding experiences. The third book, SE Worklife: The Day in the Life of a Sales Engineer, will work through several key elements to become a world-class sales engineer, solution architect, and solution consultant. We will work through understanding where you want to be in five years, professionally and personally. We will cover all the promotional levels with real examples and guides to play the career chess game and move up that ladder. You will learn how to mutually work with your sales leaders with roles, rules, and responsibilities outlined for success. We will workshop important sales tools and skills tailored for the position: brainstorming; DISC profiling; story telling, lead SE training, negotiation, objection handling, and how not to do proof of concepts.