Sales Team Role Definitions

Hey Salespeople: CEOs often ask me: "My sales engineers are 'better' than my account executives. Should I just get rid of my AEs and have my sales engineers be my sellers?" I advise them this would be a terrible idea because... - Trust factor: Technical buyers trust sales engineers and don't trust sellers. Fact of life. You need separate people because of the way your prospects' brains are wired. - Competencies: It takes years to be a great enterprise seller and years to be a deep technical expert. These competencies are very different. - Scale: One may be able to find a person or two with both sets of competencies. That is fine if not ideal for very early stage startups. However, once a company starts to scale beyond a couple of reps, this talent strategy is not viable. I'd be remiss if I did not throw AI sales engineers into the mix. As of today, I would not recommend AI SEs for complex enterprise deals. Perhaps SMB and lower MM, but not upper MM & ENT.

In today’s increasingly competitive industrial landscape, technology and products alone are no longer a differentiator. Deep industry domain expertise is the key enabler and differentiator! At the CEO level, I’ve learned that customers aren’t looking for product presentations—they’re looking for partners who understand their business, their operational challenges, and the outcomes they need to achieve to stay competitive. This is where Application Engineering becomes one of the most powerful sales enablers. When application engineers combine technical excellence with industry knowledge, they shift the conversation from “Here’s what our product does” to “Here’s how we solve your specific challenge.” That changes everything. Application engineering empowers sales teams by: • Speaking the customer’s language, not just technical specifications. • Identifying operational pain points before proposing solutions. • Building credibility through real-world industry insights. • Accelerating decision-making by demonstrating measurable business value. • Creating long-term partnerships instead of transactional sales. The most successful organizations don’t separate engineering from sales—they integrate them. Domain expertise transforms technical discussions into strategic business conversations, helping customers make confident decisions. As markets evolve and customer expectations rise, investing in industry-specific knowledge is no longer optional. It is a competitive advantage that drives trust, differentiation, and sustainable growth. Technology may open the door. Industry expertise and application engineering are what close the deal. #Leadership #ApplicationEngineering #SalesEnablement #IndustrialAutomation #EngineeringExcellence #CustomerSuccess #B2BSales #DigitalTransformation #Manufacturing #Innovation

Sales engineers are an overlooked resource when it comes to moving a stalled deal forward. 😎 Here's how it goes... Your deal starts out hot. Buying team is engaged. They love what they've heard/seen so far. They want to take the next step. But then... Your buyer gets busy, so they are slow to respond to your AE. They are still interested. They still plan to take the next step. Just need some time. Your AE starts to get a little worried and so they start to follow-up more often... and on more channels (email, VM, text, LinkedIn). Your buyer is still busy... but now has A TON of messages from the AE to which they are behind on replying... and so your buyer starts ghosting the AE. You AE is now frantic... "Did they go with a competitor? Is this a dead deal? Am I going to be able to hit my number this quarter?!?" And this process repeats for weeks or months (with the AE getting more and more frantic and your buyer becoming more of a 👻 after every unanswered ping). OR... Rather than your AE pinging the buyer... have your sales engineer ping your buyer... WITHOUT YOUR AE ON THE EMAIL. Your sales engineer should simply ask "Hey Brian. Is there anything you need at the moment? Anything I can help with?" That's it. Buyers appreciate you (as the vendor) being HELPFUL vs. simply pushing for updates. Removing the AE makes it a 'safe space' to reply without the AE jumping on it. So your buyer replies with "Hey Sameer. All good here, just been swamped. Thanks for reaching out. I did socialize your solution with a few people. Give us a few days and I'll grab us some time. Busy times!" BOOM!💥 You got a response, and maybe you got some new info like in my example. Your AE loves you. And you know where things stand. This works. 💪 Try it on some deals, and report back. #presales #salesengineering #technicalsales #salesengineer #cro #sales

Beyond Forward Deployed Engineering, I want to highlight “Forward Deployed Sales”, where AEs are running lots of the sales and pilot cycle solo. At Lorikeet, AEs like Ryan Collins, Alex Holder and Isabella Codsi have gone way beyond “do sales run demos?” and are architecting and delivering pilots largely independently: building outbound Lorikeet concierges, configuring custom voices, generating PRs against our codebase, running simulations and managing agent performance. It’s sales, account management, solution engineering in one. The obvious and reasonable counterpoint is specialization. If AEs are spending time on this, is it taking time away from more “AE only” parts of the funnel. The answer is in part yes, but being able to do more independently lets the AEs move at the pace of the deal and of the prospect, not at the pace of any internal bottlenecks. And there are large savings in coordination time cost. I also think this represents something about how selling AI agents is different, since you’re selling both a tool and an outcome: 1. The product is configurable enough that the person closest to the customer's problem is best placed to configure it. A handoff to a separate technical team introduces translation loss that shows up in worse outcomes. Lorikeet does not require custom engineering to stand up and deliver value. 2. Customers respond better to a single point of accountability. When the same person who understood the original problem is also the one tuning the concierge, the feedback loop is tighter and the iteration is faster. 3. The skill set, at this stage of the market, just doesn't exist in discrete buckets. The people who can sell CX AI and the people who can implement it are often the same people -- or they're learning to be. Watching Alex, Ryan and Bella work -- across different customers and different geos -- I've come to think "forward deployed sales" isn't a clever workaround. It might be the default model for early-stage AI deployment. Happy to compare notes and hear alternate perspectives, this is a top of mind area for me at the moment.

For years, we have been looking for the right name for an engineering role that was essential to how we worked. At KeyReply, now @Rezonate, the work existed before the title did. Internally, engineers tended to see themselves as either product engineers or project engineers. Product engineers built the platform. Project engineers worked closely with customers, learned their operational realities and adapted the platform until it solved a real problem. Many people naturally preferred the product path - understandable. “Project engineer” could sound like a step away from the core product and towards a career shaped by one-off implementations. The industry did not yet have the language to describe deep customer proximity as a valuable engineering capability in its own right. Since November 2024, we started talking about the Forward Deployed Engineer who was already involved in the pre-sales process and will transit into a project delivery lead, being well-informed about sales, pre-sales and delivery. Someone technical enough to build, but close enough to the customer to understand how the system must work in practice, not only how it was designed to work. The function is not new, but the status seems to be. And status influences which work people volunteer to do, which capabilities they develop and which career paths companies are able to create. It is interesting to witness increasing acceptance and value of this role that was not preferred by many just a couple of years ago.

Sales Engineers are the unsung heroes of software sales. Twice the work for half the glory. They’re force multipliers.  If an AE touches five deals a month, an SE touches 20. They provide credibility in the deal cycle.  They understand the product better than everyone else, but they often understand the customer’s problems better too.  They hop on demos at the last minute, with almost no context, even though they told you last time that they wouldn’t do it anymore. They spend three hours customizing the demo environment for a 30 minute demo that gets cancelled five minutes before it's supposed to start. They do the soulless work of responding to RFPs, trying to turn the customer's terrible questions into something that remotely makes sense. They’re the glue between pre and post sales. They keep the product from being oversold and are often the ones to correct the situation when it does happen. The hiring strategy for a lot of Sales leaders is get young, inexperienced AEs at a discount and train them up.  You can get away with doing that with AEs, but you should never cheap out on SEs. Hire well. Pay them well. Listen to them. Give them what they need to succeed.

Microsoft’s wake-up call to Sales Harry Stebbings shared in a tweet today the reality of sales in 2025: “Microsoft’s layoffs weren’t a ‘replaced by AI’ story; they were a ‘replaced by better people’ story.” Facts… Microsoft (and many other companies) can’t afford sending generalist sales reps to get deals done. Especially big deals. Doesn’t work. They kept the solution engineers who knew the product inside and out, and partnered with strategic sales professionals. This isn’t about technology taking your job. It’s about your job evolving faster than you are. Too many AE’s get blindsided because they thought showing up with a feature dump and a smile would still work. That approach now carries massive risk. High chance of no deal, and if you do win, it’s probably a tiny one with a high probability of churn. Not likely you’ll achieve your quota that way. The AEs who survived operate differently - They stopped slinging software and started studying their prospects & customers business. The markets they play in. The ones still standing are: • Reading customer 10-Ks and earnings calls (not relying on legacy CRM notes) • Understanding business constraints, not just pain points • Engaging with the entire team of stakeholders-business group, operations teams, and executives - not just their primary contact • Partnering with SEs as strategic advisors, not just demo drivers. Sales is the “why”and “why now” - in business terms SEs show the “how it’s done” - in business terms • Speaking ROI and business outcomes, not feeds and speeds Here’s where AI plays a key role. Top AEs leverage technology to: • Analyze customer financials faster than ever • Prepare for calls with deeper insights • Research stakeholder backgrounds and priorities • Generate business case scenarios based on customer and market data • Free up time for the high-value conversations that matter Sales leaders are using these tools to: • Identify which AEs are engaging strategically vs. just staying busy. • Lead scoring and routing • Automating low-value tasks • Team composition That visibility is the foundation for optimizing GTM. Provides opportunities to coach and help mitigate risks. Transforms savvy managers into strategic leaders. (Follow Kyle Norton and Kevin "KD" Dorsey - bosses on how to leverage AI). Your job isn’t safe if you’re still operating like it’s 2019. But it’s (more) secure if you’re willing to become what customers actually need: A business advisor who happens to sell software, not a software seller who happens to know some business. The generalist spray-and-pray approach just got expensive. Microsoft proved that. The question isn’t whether this shift is coming to your company. The question is: Are you ready? What did I miss? What are you seeing in your market? Are the fundamentals of selling really changing this fast?

𝗧𝗟;𝗗𝗥: Google Cloud Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) bridge internal development and real-world deployment by embedding with enterprise clients to build solutions while guiding the product roadmap. It is a tough job due to the unglamorous realities of client-site integration but it is deeply rewarding because you co-own and shape customer's and Google's product roadmap! 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗙𝗗𝗘𝘀 𝗗𝗼 While many tech roles focus primarily on internal product development, Google FDEs expand on this by operating on the front lines. They act as a 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 within customer environments, creating tight feedback loops with internal engineering teams. Look at the work of Dave W. as a prime example. His work (https://lnkd.in/e8bc-waB) co-developing A2UI directly addresses the friction enterprise clients face with messy, text-heavy AI interactions. By translating front-line enterprise needs into Gemini Enterprise native UI rendering primitives, his efforts along with Google engineer Yuan Tian show exactly how FDEs build high-impact solutions while ensuring core product roadmaps are driven by real-world deployments. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜𝘁 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗗𝗘 Becoming a Google FDE requires a diverse, multifaceted skillset. Based on the definitive roadmap by Pier Paolo Ippolito (https://lnkd.in/efbdr8i4), another Google FDE, mastering this role means executing across five distinct areas:  1. Complete mastery of core GCP infrastructure.  2. Deep expertise in GCP Data architectures to handle massive enterprise data pipelines.  3. Advanced knowledge of GCP AI alongside the broader artificial intelligence landscape.  4. Fluency in core Google Engineering principles and codebases.  5. Strong customer consulting skills to navigate corporate complexities. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗼𝗹𝗲 𝗜𝘀 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱 As highlighted in a recent The Wall Street Journal report (https://lnkd.in/eHaTD8rX), this type of position in tech is often not very glamorous. It is not about drafting clean code in a bubble. It involves the gritty reality of technical integration, traveling to client sites, debugging messy legacy architectures, managing intense corporate stakeholders, and solving the chaotic data infrastructure problems that stall AI deployment at scale. It requires immense grit, deep systems thinking, and a high tolerance for ambiguity. But it's rewarding to see your work shape customer outcomes as well as Google's AI roadmap! 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 If you have what it takes and want to do the really hard work, apply here: https://lnkd.in/ePiQHRBd Ravi Rajamani, Mitesh Agarwal and I look forward to it

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗽 𝗜 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗱 𝗮 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝟭𝟱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝘁. Every so often I'll be working on a technical sales or product manager search, and a client will say some version of the same thing: "We need someone who can walk into a dealership, understand the customer's application, and position our product correctly. Someone technical, but who can actually communicate." And I'll think, you just described a good engineer with people skills. Here's what most hiring managers overlook: the core skill in consultative selling isn't persuasion. It's diagnosis. It's asking the right questions, understanding the problem, and knowing honestly whether your solution fits, and saying so either way. That's what strong engineers do every day. They gather requirements. They push back when the spec doesn't make sense. They consider ‘feasibility’. They tell you when the design won't work before you've spent money finding out the hard way. The best technical salespeople I've placed over the years weren't career salespeople. They were technical professionals who figured out that their ability to read a problem and match it to a solution was worth a lot more in front of a customer than behind a CAD screen. They didn't close deals by talking more. They closed deals by knowing more, presenting solutions that ‘fit’, and making sure the customer felt that difference.

Most people still don’t understand the Forward-Deployed Engineer. They need to. Because no matter your role in GTM, this motion is becoming one of the clearest signals of where software buying is heading. In a recent conversation with Jeff Margolese, GVP of Solutions Consulting at ServiceNow, he mentioned something that keeps coming up in every enterprise room I’m in: Customers want to see their problems solved with their data, inside your product, before they ever sign a contract. Buyers aren’t buying promises anymore. They’re buying proof. And the sins of our selling past are here to collect their debts. So where do FDEs fit into all of this? FDEs are high-context, customer-embedded technical experts who build real workflows, integrations, and lightweight applications directly in or on top of the product. -They don’t run “better demos.” - They build actual outcomes. - In many cases, they even write production-level code. Think of this role as the intersection of Software Engineer, Solutions Engineer, and Consultant (and, some would argue, what the SE role was meant to be before the function evolved). The motion isn’t new, but it’s accelerating. Palantir made it famous, and many modern enterprise companies are adopting versions of it under different names. We ran it at my last company, too. Why should you care? Because in a world of skeptical buyers and collapsing product moats, proof is a competitive advantage. FDEs create it on day one. It’s another tool in the GTM toolbox that matches how buyers evaluate risk today. CROs, SEs, Ops - this is a motion worth leaning into. I’ll drop resources in the comments and cover this in more depth on upcoming podcasts and newsletters.