Short excerpt from a Jason M. Lemkin YouTube video (recorded Nov 2, 2023) advising that in technical sales there is always a sales/solution engineer involved (even if dual-hatted). The speaker warns that hiring a generic AE without any solution-engineering resource is a major mistake and gives examples of how that leads to poor customer conversations (e.g., confusion about APIs).
Sit if it's a super technical say like 10 out of 10. Whether it's sometimes the customer success team will play that role whether you grab one of your top engineers to do it. The reality is if you have a technical sale there's always a solution architect, solution engineer, sales engineer in there. They're always in there but even if they're wearing two hats, here's the learning there's always a sales engineer in the deal. So you got to figure now do they have to have the title like no. Sometimes if someone else on the team can do it, great. But the biggest mistake in technical sales is when you hire a generic AE and don't put anyone no solution of any form. No chance. Right. Listen to their gong calls. You're gonna like blow your brains out. When you listen to dumb things they say like does your product. Wait, what's an API again? I think our. Yeah, our API does that. Yeah, a hook web.
