Short excerpt from a Jason M. Lemkin YouTube video advising that to make new Account Executives (AEs) successful you must provide overhead and infrastructure (not just hire AEs). Recommends using sales engineers as a pull-in resource during technically complex or security-sensitive parts of SaaS sales conversations so AEs need not be experts on every technical detail.
You're starting to develop the need for some real, I'd say, like, overhead and infrastructure in order to make these AES successful. You can't just hire like five new AES and expect them to become successful without having any support whatsoever. And you might need a sales engineer as well. So what a sales engineer does is they're a resource that gets pulled into a sales conversation by an AE to deal with highly technical parts of the conversation. So if you have a SaaS product that's a highly technical product, or let's say there's security concerns, what you want to do is have the AE pull in that sales engineer at a critical moment in the conversation so that the AE doesn't have to be an expert on every technical aspect of your on every technical aspect of your product.
