Get your meddic certification for engineering with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

hey everyone ryan here and welcome back to my channel if you've watched any of my previous videos you would know that i've been a sales engineer for just north of seven years but what you probably don't know is i actually hold a little over 10 technical certifications and if any of you have ever taken a technical certification before you know it takes a lot of time it's not inexpensive by any means if you actually attend a virtual instructor-led training to prepare for the certification as an example that a lot of vendors offer this could be anywhere from three to five thousand dollars depending on if it's a three or five day instructor-led training and that's to prepare you for the certification to actually take a certification especially if you're self-studying could be anywhere from two hundred fifty dollars to five hundred dollars per proctored exam if you you know if you fail your first attempt which many of us do you know you have to pay for that again so we're talking upwards of 500 to a thousand dollars just to take a certification a couple of times to obtain that and you know this kind of really begs the question right is are technical certifications necessary to be successful as a sales engineer but before we get into that if you liked today's video hit that thumbs up subscribe to my channel hit that little bell notification if you want to be up to date on every single time i create a new video i'm going to be trying to create one every single wednesday at 5 p.m so definitely you know keep up to date with that doesn't cost you a thing and it really helps out my channel so i'd really appreciate it if you give me that thumbs up button now so my answer is unequivocally most of the time no it's not you know it's not necessary as a sales engineer to have all these technical certifications and that's because as a sales engineer especially if you have two or three years of experience at a minimum that experience will outweigh any sort of technical certification you could obtain because after all our role as a sales engineer is to help drive the sales cycle and simply you know our goal is to sell and most technical certifications out there are designed for your typical i.t administrator meaning if you ever go in and you take an assessment for a certification you'll notice the questions are geared towards design implementation and most of the time you know as a technical sales resource we it's unnecessary to know that stuff we need to know things like you know the product features how to explain the features to the customer you know the different product editions we might need to show how the product can solve for the customer pain points we might need to know enough to do a basic proof of concept but if it ever gets too far into the into the weeds we can bring on another technical resource maybe from you know customer experience or from the implementation team to help drive that opportunity so the reason i say most of the time no is because there are some vendors out there that do require sales engineers to get a little deeper into the technology and maybe have a post sales aspect to the role so for an example you know my second sales engineer job out in the market was with a more startup type company and as a part of my role as a sales engineer following the sales cycle i was responsible for actually implementing the solution as well so i would spend half of my time on the road actually doing in-person demos and the other half of the time i'd actually be doing actual installations and implementations of the solution i'd say that's pretty rare for a sales engineer to have a hybrid role where your pre and post sales but there are type those type of roles out there so having those technical certifications could be beneficial if you do need to get deeper into the conversations with the it administrator with that engineer than you would typically need to as a traditional sales engineer again experience trumps all but having that technical certification in that type of scenario would definitely do more good than it would bad also if you're in college or maybe you're looking to make a transition to become a sales engineer maybe you have an i.t administrator or security admin type background having a technical certification that's relevant to the type of technology you're trying to get into as a sales engineer could have an impact of at least whether or not you get passed by by the recruiter or not so for example i think i mentioned this on one of my previous videos but i've interviewed quite a few candidates before in my previous role and we actually told the recruiter when she's looking at different resumes to see if they have things like a microsoft certification a citrix certification and if they do you know she's not gonna just throw those candidates and you know the discard pile right she's gonna be like oh they had the technical aptitude for the role i'm gonna pass them along to the hiring manager to have an initial conversation and see if they have the soft skills the charisma necessary to be in a pre-sales type role because they already have the technical aptitude this certification demonstrates that that they've taken the time to learn the technology so in that type of scenario having a technical certification if you're trying to get into being a sales engineer for the first time could have a huge value and a huge benefit for you as somebody trying to you know interview for those type of positions so again i have a ton of friends that are sales engineers with five plus years of experience they work across all different kinds of technology segments across plenty of different different vendors and most of them that i talk to and i ask them about their certification attainments they say you know they don't really bother with it unless their manager makes their requirement so again it kind of shows you that to be successful as an sc and these are very successful individuals that are now senior level in their role they don't think technical certifications matter to what they're doing on a day-to-day but you know i would say at the same time it doesn't hurt to obtain one here and there if you do have the free time if you do have the bandwidth it's definitely a resume booster it helps improve your own personal brand especially within your organization that you've taken the time to try and be more technical so it definitely does more good than bad but it's again it's not really necessary to to have success in your role instead if you are a newer sales engineer or you're trying to make a pivot into sales engineering i'd focus on three main factors your first is understanding the technology in the problem that the technology was initially created to solve for your second is your soft skills and your ability to relate the technology in an easy to understand and relatable manner and then lastly and arguably the most important in my opinion is your ability to create relationships there's a lot of ways to do that you can simply strike conversations with random people in the grocery store so you can you know practice actually getting to know somebody who is a complete stranger to you which is what we do on a day-to-day basis there's a lot of self-help book books out there you know i'm a huge fan of how to win friends and influence people i think that's the bible of being a sales engineer because that's what we do on a day-to-day basis again if you like today's video go ahead and hit that thumbs up subscribe to my channel again hit that little bell notification if you want to be up to date every time i create a new video i would really really appreciate all of you to hit that thumbs up button um outside of that you know thank you all for watching today's video if you have any questions feel free to write in the comments below that's all i got for today so bye y'all