In this interview, Speaker A (a technical CRO) argues that for companies selling highly technical products, having a sales leader and sales team with deep engineering backgrounds is essential because technical buyers distrust generic sales pitches and expect deep product knowledge. He emphasizes that salespeople must be able to teach customers how to extract value from the product, which requires technical competence. Speaker B reflects on this and advises founders not to over‑prioritize domain experience (e.g., healthcare) when hiring, as it narrows the talent pool; instead, they should consider the unique category of technical‑to‑technical sales where engineering expertise can be more valuable. Both agree that a balanced mix of domain experts and technically skilled sellers is needed, but the core message is that technical credibility is a critical differentiator in technical B2B sales.
Chapters
First off, our company was founded by 7 PhDs from Berkeley, right? So some of the smartest people I've ever met. And I think in general, if you have a really technical product, most of the buyers, if they're technical buyers, they want, they don't really love talking with salespeople. So you have to add a lot of value on the technical front. You need to know your stuff. They don't even necessarily trust all salespeople, I think inherently. I think if you look at Silicon Valley, even lots of founder technical CEOs, and I really think like having a technical CRO for a technical company is really important. I could say the same for domain and whatever you're selling, but for sure in, in the technical space that I'm in. Having an engineering and a technical background and having known very technical sales and technical products is not just a big part of kind of my background, but a big part of our sales team, right? Like I would say most of our salespeople are more technical than most. We're still going to focus on business outcomes and how do you sell to the C-suite and all those things. But knowing the technology and being able to add value, I think is is really important for a technical company and technical sales team.
What I'm interpreting as a takeaway is my, my guidance on this to founders is something like, I wouldn't over-index on domain experience because oftentimes you're making a trade-off for something else. And if you're selling into healthcare as an example, and you only look to hire somebody who has sold to healthcare in the past, your candidate population is just extremely limited by that nature. There's only so many tech companies that exist in the world and how many of those are selling into healthcare. I think maybe the one nuance, and I've heard this now both from you, but also somewhat regularly, even from Jason M. Lemkin, who is the head of SaaStr, a technical sale to a technical buyer might be its own unique category where domain experience or having an engineering background similar to yours is something you actually want to solve for. Does that sound right? And is that the right interpretation based on what I said?
Listen, what does a salesperson do? They teach your customers how to get value out of your product, right? So if you're not technical enough to understand the product and understand how it works, it's hard to teach your customers how to get value from it. So even if you're a leader, again, I'm a people leader. I try to hire the best people and motivate them and inspire them, but you're still gonna have to hire the right types of domain experts and the mix of those talents to be able to add value to your customer.
