Sales opportunity qualification for Security

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hey guys hope everyone's doing well it's a beautiful Wednesday it's August 2nd can't believe it's already August and today we're going to be talking about sales engineering versus cyber security sales so I feel like this is a video that a lot of people have been requesting they've been wanting my opinion on a few things happy to help I'm gonna break down as best as I can a few different elements talk about kind of what sales engineering is cyber security sales um what they are the responsibilities the type of person that might be best suited for them as well as financial compensation and a few of my tips and recommendations so I thought I would also change it up I usually do it for my laptop and I think I'll try the phone today hopefully see how it goes I know the quality is different on each one obviously I got my nice coffee mug uh gift from my sister-in-law thank you sis anyway so got a few things to discuss um some fun stuff anyway if this is your first time ever tuning in um I do hiring I'm a talent director of you know I have my own kind of Staffing and everything but I'm also a lead account executive in Tech sales as well and cyber security sales I've done this for 10 15 years uh working kind of the tech industry in fintech and cyber security and so forth I've done tons of hiring so know this area to a degree there are other experts out there and you should always get different perspectives too um one I recommend I did an interview but that was about 45 minutes with my good friend Ryan Freese who has been a sales engineer for seven years definitely recommend I'll put in the description below we broke down everything about sales engineering so I would definitely recommend checking that out um obviously uh there's a lot of fun stuff there's a lot of information out there to digest and it can get a little bit um crazy so we're gonna try to break it down as best I can so first off what about sales engineering let's talk about sales engineering so with sales engineering uh sales engineer these days is making between 100 to 140k a year they usually have an option pool or stock options with benefits so it can be very very lucrative um usually with sales engineering right now you need to know coding now in the market we've seen a huge uptick with every company there's about five to ten sales and Tech sales people to one sales engineer so you need to be aware of the ratio so if you think about and a lot of people who are getting excited are beginning to jump into sales engineering so you do need a little bit of a leg up which is why I'm a big big proponent of you need to know kind of how to do a correct interview you need to have the right resume so you can get your foot in the door if you need help you can check out my giveaway some free resumes check out the description for a link um and also if you want some premium resumes you can check out on my website but you want to make sure that you are providing technical expertise okay you need to know the sales funnel extremely well you need to know the analytics very very well um and this is something that a lot of people don't understand you need to be a people person okay you don't need to be the biggest Communicator the best Communicator over the top Visionary status but you need to be a balanced person that understands the metrics knows kpis knows the sales funnels um knows the targets and the score of the company and your department and the customer but also um as well as like kind of you're a little bit like looking at a dashboard of everything okay if you're looking at like if you're in a Navy ship you be that person looking at all the different knobs and buttons and making sure you're keeping registers of everything so you but you need to be a people person because you're interacting with almost every other department you're interacting with leadership right you have to communicate to them you're interacting with your sales people you're interacting with your development team um you're acting up with other sales engineers and you're also interacting when you go to conferences all the time and displaying um your product also a big part of it is knowing the feedback from the customers and bringing that to the development team so every type you see your needs preferences um things that might be some nice add-ons some nice little things or you need to be able to communicate that and the same way with leadership and back forward from the development team to to your customers your development team has a new attribute on the product or a new benefit um on the product you need to be able to translate that to the customer or the client and then the and be able to get them to realize that how this can help them so a big part of sales Engineers that notice is they have a you have to be able to juggle a lot of plates you have to know all the analytics kind of going on at once you need to know the basics of coding um you need to still know a good level of how to do sales and communication and people skills okay but you're going to be juggling a lot of different things so that's a little bit on sales engineering again check out that whole interview because that really breaks it down fully now a little note on coding okay coding is a tricky subject especially in the last two years with chat gbt a lot of things are being automated we're seeing Automation in in all Realms right now but with coding specifically and this is just a little bit of a heads up I'd be very nervous if I was like just starting out in college and you're picking kind of like computer science as your potential major uh for four years because within four years that industry might be completely different versus other things are going to be a little more constant such as cyber security so I would be just aware of that you don't need to be the expert but you still need to know the basics okay and you need to know the basics you need to know the basics of coding essentially so you can communicate and how to configure that with your product meets your clients needs and how to talk to your also your development team so everybody's on the same page okay I hope that helped anyway let's get into cyber sales and cyber security um so right now with cyber security you actually can get paid a little bit more than an entry-level Tech sales SDR bdr okay I think uh it keeps kind of fluctuating a little bit but the range ranges from around 50 to 75 entry level uh an entry excuse me salary for Tech sales right now um but however your commission structure usually is a lot more you can make a lot more than that with cyber security you have a higher base usually right now it's between 85 some upwards to 125 depending on a few variables but 85 minimum it's pretty nice um usually with a lot of cyber security companies um they are offering more option pools which means stocks to options so if the company keeps going up and up and up those socks can be worth three to four times what they are right now really good to do uh something to consider with cyber security sales you need to obviously know the fundamentals of sales right you need to know sales 101 um if you don't know what that is then um feel free to contact me I'll let you know what it is but you need to know kind of the basics of cyber security you need to know your product well you need to know malware ransomware attack vectors security technology cyber teams firewalls um antiviruses and intrusion detection you need to know all these things depending if it's Enterprise or if it's B2B b2c all those little interesting points and you have to understand where your clients are coming from so for example I'll give an example the one of my first leads was actually funny enough on the pickleball court it was a friend who they had a small startup and they got attacked by ransomware from you know kind of overseas this happens a lot more than people realize and the reason why they go after smaller companies is because they don't have huge cyber security right A lot of people think like oh it's only the big companies that have cyber security and if you can get those accounts that's great that could be a huge commission but actually ransomware goes after smaller companies so this is kind of some of the things you have to be aware of in the industry you don't need coding you have to be able to read people this is very essential in kind of just sales in general you have to be able to read people and how to read the room read the situation um tailor yourself to matching what the customer's needs are what matters to them a lot of sales people I need especially in cyber security talk about benefits that nobody cares about okay you have to be able to match what they actually care about and ideally you have a few options for them it's like a menu right you know if they're into you know this type of thing oh great I can recommend this this and this you have to be Solutions oriented and you have to be very consultative selling all right um anyway so if you're doing a cyber security Enterprise you can make a lot more money usually like 200k plus so it's something to consider you for types of personalities again going back to sales engineering I think you need to have a very ability to focus you have to be able to get in the zone you have to be able to juggle a lot of people you have to know the basics of communication you have to know the basics of sales and coding um and technology and you have to be willing to kind of like kind of work all hours in a lot of ways okay so just be aware that that I know a lot of sales Engineers um that they're working on the weekends but they get paid very well on top of that let's go over to cyber sales cyber sales you need to have grit for lack of a better vote you got to be aware of rejection okay you have to be also just loving people you have to be approachable but you have to have a level of certainty you have to have um faith in your product is going to benefit the other person that's the perfect range that you can get to now with both if you're getting into this realm I would recommend that you are very aware of your day-to-day activities okay know your day-to-day breakdown where you're putting your time and effort and what is equaling results so I do this every week where I'm always breaking down usually by the half hour an hour that you know what am I doing what is giving me the best results what should I prioritize to give me the best results you have to always be kind of asking that question at the end of the day you're asking what worked what can I do better um and also a big thing is you know continuous growth in all areas and all just any career but also in this especially uh continuous growth now what do I mean by that I meet a lot of salespeople that or or just type people in general that has say they have five to seven years experience well here's the question do they have seven years of continuous experience or do they have one year experience just repeated seven times okay that happens a lot a lot of people plateau and they get to a level where they're comfortable with and they don't keep adapting to the situation and in technology technology is an exponential curve which means it keeps getting faster or the capacity gets like the storage capacity gets hot it's like crazy it's basically technology keeps having a compounding effect and you have to be aware of that with your career as well that hey if in the next few years if I'm going to um invest in this in two years if it doubled in like urgency or speed of technology or automation would I still be safe as well as what can I doubt or how can I maneuver this these are things in strategy you need to consider for your own career okay so I hope this was really helpful um I love talking about this type of stuff feel free to message me if you have any questions um I should mention I'm going to put together a vocabulary sheet that I'm going to put in the in the shared Drive where I keep the free resumes so if you're kind of new to this industry you might want to learn some of the vocabs so it will help you on interviews as well as just kind of navigating all the videos out there and everything um and I also include interview tips too if you guys want to schedule a one-on-one with me go to the the new website resume2offer.com um and happy to do that I do have a full plate as well but uh if you guys put in um YouTube 20 I give you 20 off on kind of like scheduling some calls with me or Consulting sessions I've helped people with mock interviews help people get new jobs in Tech sales and cyber security so feel free to reach out for that hope this was helpful well if you can if you got any value out of it you do me a favor and like it it helps the YouTube algorithm it helps you know more people being able to see this and getting more value as well all right I'm getting married in three weeks so I got a lot of preparations ahead of me and then I'm gonna be off to Europe for three more weeks after that so might be a little down time in September so just a heads up there but I hope everyone's doing well and have a great one cheers