We have all hit crossroads in our careers. When this happened to me, I turned to the Salesforce community and was inspired to work towards a Salesforce Admin certification. Getting certified was a new beginning for me. The Salesforce Admin certification gave me the confidence and credibility to apply for many interesting opportunities.
What career opportunities are available for Salesforce-certified admins?
Some of the traditional roles include becoming an advanced admin or business analyst. Another option is to go down the code path toward a developer or technical architect role. Or if you prefer the business side, you can go into marketing or sales.
One new kind of role I discovered was the sales engineer. This is an interesting role where you serve as the technical resource for account executives. You need to have thorough understanding of the entire Salesforce platform so that you can explain how key benefits of a solution can help users improve operations in their Orgs.
Could you be a sales engineer?
Habits of successful sales engineers include:
- Work as a team.
- Help qualify needs.
- Show benefits, not just features.
- Be curious and ask lots of questions.
- Tell stories.
- Share user experiences to show solutions.
- Build trust during evaluations.
- Develop workable solutions.
- Engage with stakeholders at all levels.
What are the responsibilities of a sales engineer?
- Valuable technical resource - You need to have a strong desire to learn new technologies and methods.
- Platform expert - You need to understand the entire Salesforce platform.
- Relationship builder - You should be able to bridge the divide between users at all different levels.
- Problem solver - You must enjoy, rather than turn away from challenges.
- Sales superhero - You need to show value and help close sales.
What does a sales engineer’s day look like?
During product demos, you will be challenged with difficult questions from prospects in the roles of Salesforce admins, developers, and technical architects.
If prospects like what they see then you’ll run a POC (proof of concept) in their environment. POCs allows companies to demonstrate how their application actually performs in a live environment so prospects can fully evaluate a potential purchase.
With active clients, you will run training sessions to ensure they understand all the features of the application. A sales engineer can also be responsible for ongoing support to assist clients in resolving any questions that may arise.
You may also be asked to travel to conferences and expos to speak directly with customers and prospects and conduct live demos. This year, as a sales engineer for Own, I traveled to nine different cities across the USA!
I’ve been a sales engineer for one year. It has been a lot of hard work but also very rewarding. I have been fortunate enough to meet some wonderful people on the road this year and build some very strong relationships in the Trailblazer Community.
Do you have what it takes to be a sales engineer at Own? Apply now!
About Mat Kennedy, Sales Engineer at Own
Mat is a certified Salesforce Administrator with over 8 years of experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. He works closely with account executives as the technical expert on cloud-to-cloud backup & restore of Salesforce data and metadata.
Prior to Own, Mat was a Senior Business Analyst and Developer managing new releases and implementations of both a cloud application and client/server software. He led all development and support efforts, overseeing technical professionals. Mat has extensive experience in project management, client relationships, and technical support positions. He has a BS from Rowan University in Business Administration with a Specialization in Management Information Systems and a AAS in Computer Science from Middlesex County College.
