Curious about what it takes to go from sales engineer to director of sales engineering? Then you’ve come to the right place. 

Keep reading for a comprehensive action plan to guide you from your current role in sales to a director of engineering role.

Step One: The Mindset of an Aspiring Director of Sales Engineers

Making the Shift from Sales Engineer to Director of Engineering

As a director of sales engineering, you’ll need both a solid technical foundation and excellent people skills. Your focus in your new role is as much on people management as it is on addressing technical challenges such as product integration, customization, and security. 

That means you must be capable of speaking to other departments in their language while also maintaining a thorough understanding of your sales team’s technology, but also that you’ll need to develop strong project management and leadership skills.

How to Think and Act Like a Future Sales Engineering Director

While sales engineers explain and demonstrate the benefits of complex products, a director of sales engineering ensures they have the tools and guidance necessary to do so. To be successful as a director of sales engineering, you must be able to transition from customer engagement to a people- and project management-oriented mindset. 

A common mistake when transitioning to a sales engineering directorship is to assume that technical competency and communication skills are all you’ll need. While these are still foundational for a director of sales engineering, you’ll also need to know how to strategize, optimize, and manage your team in the long-term. 

Sales engineers may be independent, but you still need to lead and guide them — you need to know how to identify challenges and guide your team through problems that aren’t always evident to engineers in the field. 

The Skills Necessary to Become a Director of Sales Engineering

• Emotional intelligence and active listening. 
• Strong technical prowess and deep familiarity with your organization’s products and current sales enablement technology.  
• The ability to identify and plan solutions to problems your engineers might not be aware of. 
• Focus on people, product and project management rather than customer engagement.
• Excellent communication skills and motivational abilities. 
• Ensure continuity and stability for key technologies that drive sales and customer success forward
• An eye for innovation and a willingness to explore options such as automated product demos 
• Deep knowledge and understanding of your organization and industry. 
• Create policies and processes around sales, demos, and onboarding. 

Step 2: Know Your Role: What Does a Director of Sales Engineering Do? 

A director of sales engineering typically acts as both a technical and strategic lead for an organization’s sales engineers. 

Director of Sales Engineering Role and Responsibilities (R&R)

Director of Sales Engineering Technical Scope

Understand

• Cloud demo environments (ie. Microsoft Azure. AWS, Google Cloud)
• Complex SaaS products and systems. 
• Legacy systems such as Microsoft Active Directory. 
• How to incorporate cloud infrastructure with on-premises infrastructure. 

Required Skill Set

• Technical knowledge relevant to your organization’s industry and sector. 
• Capacity to work seamlessly with both legacy and modern technology. 
• Knowledge of sales technology tools such as marketing automation, CRM, and sales enablement software. 

Director of Sales Engineering R&R

Goal

• Lead, manage and guide your team to more effectively sell your organization’s products and services to drive revenue growth. 

Required Skill Set

• Translate technical concepts and ideas into understandable language. for organizational leadership. 
• Understand industry trends and devise solutions to common industry challenges. 
• Identify problems in the sales process based on: 
  • Customer feedback
  • Analytics data
• Leverage feedback from other departments, such as marketing, CRO, and customer success.  
• Choose software that helps streamline your own workflows, allowing you to focus more on problem solving.
• Apply your problem-solving skills and industry knowledge to pre-emptively identify and address customer pain points. 
• Assess and deploy new sales technology
• Apply your technical knowledge and understanding to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, improving the customer experience.

Director of Sales Engineering Business Scope

• Act as the gateway between sales engineers and other teams such as marketing, R&D and CRO, conveying information to help them communicate more effectively.
• With regards to the above, ensure all departments involved in the sales process are coordinated and aligned. 
• Assess spending on sales enablement to identify opportunities, eliminate inefficiencies, and determine overall ROI.

Step 3: Understanding Your KPIs 

Everyone has different KPIs and quotas. Although you’ll be less focused on analytics as a director of sales engineering than if you worked in conversion rate optimization, focusing on the right sales engineering metrics can set you up for success.

Sales Engineering

How did each sales engineer support the customer in a way that removed technical barriers? Did the customer resonate with the demo? Did the engineer focus on the right features? 

Metrics in this category include:

• Attach Rate.
• Support Ratio.
• Outcomes by Effort
• Outcomes by Deliverables
• Deal Efficiency
• Effort Efficiency
• Time Spent on Sales Opportunities. 

The goal is to give your engineers genuine feedback that promotes professional development.  

Technical Metrics

How effective are your POC demos? Are you using your technical resources effectively? How might you improve and optimize future demos? 

Metrics in this category include: 

• Time Spent Creating Environments. 
• Total Engagement (Clicks, Usage, etc.) 
• Completion Rate
• Cost Per Participant. 
• Spend Per Channel/Resource. 
• Environment Utilization. 
• Time to Completion.
• Net Promoter Score.

Step 4: Critical Knowledge for a Sales Engineering Director

As an aspiring director of sales engineers, you’ll want to focus as much on developing your interpersonal skills as you do your technical skills. Beyond developing a working professional knowledge of your industry, there are a few training and certification programs you might consider: 

• The Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional Certification
• Certified Sales Engineer (North American Association of Sales Engineering)
• Certified Sales and Marketing Engineer (American Society of Mechanical Engineers). 
• Certified Sales Engineer (Project Management Institute)
• Senior Human Resources Manager — Certified Professional
• AWS Certification
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
• Grow with Google — Google Cloud Certification

Step 5: How to Be a Director of Sales Engineering Without Prior Experience

Now for the challenging part. Assuming you aren’t getting a promotion with your current employer, it’s time to figure out how to land your first job as a director of sales engineering. 

Option One: Build Yourself Up

• Offer your part-time services as a director or project manager of the sales team at a friend, family member, or colleague’s small business. 
• Ask your current director of sales engineering for advice or reach out to one
• Find and apply to temporary/freelance director of sales engineering roles. 

Getting Your First Director of Sales Engineering Job

The Application Process

1. Start by sending out at least 20 resumes in a week, along with personalized cover letters for each position. 
2. Assess how many positions responded and requested an interview within a week and a half to two weeks. 
3. Revise your resume and rethink your cover letters if you get lower than a 50-70 percent success rate. 
4. Continue until you either receive at least a 50 percent success rate or find a position you’re interested in pursuing. 

How to Create a Compelling Resume for a Director of Sales Engineering Role

• Don’t just focus on your technical skills — emphasize your people skills, as well.
• Consider presentations, briefings, or community events in which you’ve participated.
• Note any certifications or official qualifications you currently hold. 
• Mention any major successes or milestones in your career as a sales engineer. 
• Try to highlight instances where you took a leadership role or showed initiative as a leader. 

Interviewing for Your New Career

• Ensure you’re up to date on the state of sales in your industry. 
• Let your personality shine through. Show interviewers your charisma. 
• Don’t just be a passive participant, ask questions as well. 
• Prepare to interview with a range of different departments, including marketing, sales, and human resources. 

What to Expect in Your First 90 Days as a Director of Sales Engineering

You’ve finally done it. You’ve landed your first job as a director of sales engineering. Take pride in the hard work and dedication it took to get here — but remember that you aren’t done yet.

Now you need to show your new employer that they made the right choice in hiring you. 

Ensuring Your Success in the Director of Sales Engineering Role

Based on our experience working with countless sales engineering directors, it’s important to keep the following in mind. 

Find the Right Tools for Your Team

POC demos are among the most important tools in any sales engineer’s arsenal. 

As a director, it’s your responsibility to ensure they can create and deploy those demos as seamlessly as possible. Virtual, cloud-hosted demos are likely your best bet in that regard, as they not only offer excellent scalability, but are considerably more cost-effective than traditional labs. 

It goes without saying that you also want those demos to be as immersive as possible — and that you’re able to control your platform and environment in a way that doesn’t require constant support from other departments. 

After all, a platform that supports self-service trials is also immensely beneficial as it allows prospects to engage with your products at their own pace. More importantly, a platform like this gives prospects the opportunity to experience your demos in a completely safe environment. They need not worry about bugs or downtime, and instead can only focus on the parts of the product you want your demo to showcase. 

It goes without saying that you also want your demos to be as immersive as possible — and that you’re able to control your platform and environment in a way that doesn’t require constant support from other departments. 

We have the perfect solution in mind for you, but more on that in a moment. 

Different Organizations Have Different Approaches to Sales Engineering

In many cases, your role as a director of sales engineering will be highly technical. However, this may not always be the case. Some organizations will expect you to be onsite and technically-focused, managing everything from policy creation to strategic roadmaps, while others might have you continue your role as a sales engineer and only occasionally act as a leader/advisor. 

Learn the Exact Steps You Need to Take in Your First 90 Days

Managing technology is a cornerstone of your new role as a director of sales engineering. So, where should you start?

We’ve put together your 90-day guide to ensure you have everything needed to excel. Everything from the cost-effective, scalable, and intuitive platforms that will allow your team to expedite POC creation through automation, allowing them to spend more time on customer engagement to the exact tactics you can deploy to get up and running in no time.

In our follow-up blog, Your First 90 Days As a Director of Sales Engineering, we’ll walk you through best practices, do’s and don’ts, and more — all based on insights collected from hundreds of sales engineering directors.

How to Become a Director of Sales Engineers

Curious about what it takes to go from sales engineer to head of sales engineering? Then you’ve come to the right place. 

Keep reading for a comprehensive action plan to guide you from your current role in sales to a director of engineering role.

Step One: The Mindset of an Aspiring Director of Sales Engineers

Making the Shift from Sales Engineer to Director of Engineering

As a director of sales engineering, you’ll need both a solid technical foundation and excellent people skills. Your focus in your new role is as much on people management as it is on addressing technical challenges such as product integration, customization, and security. 

That means you must be capable of speaking to other departments in their language while also maintaining a thorough understanding of your sales team’s technology, but also that you’ll need to develop strong project management and leadership skills.. 

How to Think and Act Like a Future Sales Engineering Director

While sales engineers explain and demonstrate the benefits of complex products, a head of sales engineering ensures they’ve the tools and guidance necessary to do so. To be successful as a director of sales engineering, you must be able to transition from customer engagement to a people- and project management-oriented mindset. 

A common mistake when transitioning to a sales engineering directorship is to assume that technical competency and communication skills are all you’ll need. While these are still foundational for a head of sales engineering, you’ll also need to know how to strategize, optimize, and manage your team in the long-term. 

Sales engineers may be independent, but you still need to lead and guide them — you need to know how to identify challenges and guide your team through problems that aren’t always evident to engineers in the field. 

The Skills Necessary to Become a Head of Sales Engineering

• Emotional intelligence and active listening. 
• Strong technical prowess and deep familiarity with your organization’s products and current sales enablement technology.  
• The ability to identify and plan solutions to problems your engineers might not be aware of. 
• Focus on people, product and project management rather than customer engagement.
• Excellent communication skills and motivational abilities. 
• Ensure continuity for business environments.
• An eye for innovation and a willingness to explore options such as automated product demos. 
• Deep knowledge and understanding of your organization and industry. 
• Create policies and processes around sales, demos, and onboarding. 

Step 2: Know Your Role: What Does a Director of Sales Engineering Do? 

A director of sales engineering typically acts as both a technical and strategic lead for an organization’s sales engineers. 

Head of Sales Engineering Role and Responsibilities (R&R)

Director of Sales Engineering Technical Scope

Understand

• Cloud demo environments (ie. Microsoft Azure. AWS, Google Cloud).

• Complex SaaS products and systems.
• Legacy systems such as Microsoft Active Directory. 
• How to incorporate cloud infrastructure with on-premises infrastructure. 

Required Skill Set

• Technical knowledge relevant to your organization’s industry and sector. 
• Capacity to work seamlessly with both legacy and modern technology. 
• Knowledge of sales technology tools such as marketing automation, CRM, and sales enablement software. 

Director of Sales Engineering R&R

Goal

• Lead, manage and guide your team to more effectively sell your organization’s products and services, thereby driving revenue growth. 

Required Skill Set

• Translate technical concepts and ideas into understandable language for organizational leadership. 
• Understand industry trends and devise solutions to common industry challenges. 
• Identify problems in the sales process based on: 
  • Customer feedback
  • Analytics data
  • Feedback from other departments such as marketing, CRO, and customer success.  
• Choose software that helps streamline your own workflows, allowing you to focus more on problem solving.
• Apply your problem-solving skills and industry knowledge to pre-emptively identify and address customer pain points. 
• Assess and deploy new sales technology. 
• Apply your technical knowledge and understanding to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, improving the customer experience. 

Director of Sales Engineering Business Scope

• Act as the gateway between sales engineers and other teams such as marketing, R&D and CRO, conveying information to thelp them communicate more effectively. 
• With regards to the above, ensure all departments involved in the sales process are coordinated and aligned. 
• Assess spending on sales enablement to identify opportunities, eliminate inefficiencies, and determine overall ROI. 

Step 3: Understanding Your KPIs 

Everyone has different KPIs and quotas. Although you’ll be less focused on analytics as a head of sales engineering than if you worked in conversion rate optimization, focusing on the right sales engineering metrics can set you up for success.

Sales Engineering

How did each sales engineer support the customer in a way that removed technical barriers? Did the customer resonate with the demo? Did the engineer focus on the right features? 

Metrics in this category include:

• Attach Rate.
• Support Ratio.
• Outcomes by Effort
• Outcomes by Deliverables
• Deal Efficiency
• Effort Efficiency
• Time Spent on Sales Opportunities. 

The goal is to give your engineers genuine feedback that promotes professional development.  

Technical Metrics

How effective are your POC demos? Are you using your technical resources effectively? How might you improve and optimize future demos? 

Metrics in this category include: 

• Time Spent Creating Environments. 
• Total Engagement (Clicks, Usage, etc.) 
• Completion Rate
• Cost Per Participant. 
• Spend Per Channel/Resource. 
• Environment Utilization. 
• Time to Completion.
• Net Promoter Score.

Step 4: Critical Knowledge for a Sales Engineering Director

As an aspiring director of sales engineers, you’ll want to focus as much on developing your interpersonal skills as you do your technical skills. Beyond developing a working professional knowledge of your industry, there are a few training and certification programs you might consider: 

• The Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional Certification
• Certified Sales Engineer (North American Association of Sales Engineering)
• Certified Sales and Marketing Engineer (American Society of Mechanical Engineers). 
• Certified Sales Engineer (Project Management Institute)
• Senior Human Resources Manager — Certified Professional
• AWS Certification
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
• Grow with Google — Google Cloud Certification

Step 5: How to Be a Director of Sales Engineering Without Prior Experience

Now for the challenging part. Assuming you aren’t getting a promotion with your current employer, it’s time to figure out how to land your first job as a head of sales engineering. 

Option One: Build Yourself Up

• Offer your part-time services as a director or project manager of the sales team at a friend, family member, or colleague’s small business. 
• Ask your current director of sales engineering for advice or reach out to one. 
• Find and apply to temporary/freelance director of sales engineering roles. 

Getting Your First Director of Sales Engineering Job

The Application Process

1. Start by sending out at least 20 resumes in a week, along with personalized cover letters for each position. 
2. Assess how many positions responded and requested an interview within a week and a half to two weeks. 
3. Revise your resume and rethink your cover letters if you get lower than a 50-70 percent success rate. 
4. Continue until you either receive at least a 50 percent success rate or find a position you’re interested in pursuing. 

How to Create a Compelling Resume for a Head of Sales Engineering Role

• Don’t just focus on your technical skills — emphasize your people skills, as well.
• Consider presentations, briefings, or community events in which you’ve participated.
• Note any certifications or official qualifications you currently hold. 
• Mention any major successes or milestones in your career as a sales engineer. 
• Try to highlight instances where you took a leadership role or showed initiative as a leader. 

Interviewing for Your New Career

• Ensure you’re up to date on the state of sales in your industry. 
• Let your personality shine through. Show interviewers your charisma. 
• Don’t just be a passive participant, ask questions as well. 
• Prepare to interview with a range of different departments, including marketing, sales, and human resources. 

Getting Through Your First 90 Days as a Head of Sales Engineering

You’ve finally done it. You’ve landed your first job as a director of sales engineering. Take pride in the hard work and dedication it took to get here — but remember that you aren’t done yet.

Now you need to show your new employer that they made the right choice in hiring you. 

Ensuring Your Success in the Director of Sales Engineering Role

Based on our experience working with countless sales engineering directors, it’s important to keep the following in mind. 

Find the Right Tools for Your Team

POC demos are among the most important tools in any sales engineer’s arsenal. As a director, it’s your responsibility to ensure they can create and deploy those demos as seamlessly as possible. Virtual, cloud-hosted demos are likely your best bet in that regard, as they not only offer excellent scalability, but are considerably more cost-effective than traditional labs. 

A platform that supports self-service trials is also immensely beneficial, as it allows prospects to engage with your products at their own pace. More importantly, such a platform gives prospects the opportunity to experience your demos in a completely safe environment. They need not worry about bugs or downtime, and instead can only focus on the parts of the product you want your demo to showcase. 

It goes without saying that you also want said demos to be as immersive as possible — and that you’re able to control your platform and environment in a way that doesn’t require constant support from other departments. 

We have the perfect solution in mind for you, but more on that in a moment. 

Different Organizations Have Different Approaches to Sales Engineering

In many cases, your role as a director of sales engineering will be highly technical. However, this may not always be the case. Some organizations will expect you to be onsite and technically-focused, managing everything from policy creation to strategic roadmaps, while others might have you continue your role as a sales engineer and only occasionally act as a leader/advisor. 

CloudShare Can Guide You Through Your First 90 Days as a Head of Sales Engineering— and Beyond

Managing technology is a cornerstone of your new role as a head of sales engineering. In that regard, CloudShare can ensure you’ve everything you need in order to excel. Cost-effective, scalable, and intuitive, our platform allows your team to expedite POC creation through automation, allowing them to spend more time on customer engagement. 

Our software is only part of the equation, though. You’ll also need to understand how to use it, how to build a roadmap around it, and how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls of your new career. We can help with that, too.

In our follow-up blog, Your First 90 Days As a Director of Sales Engineering, we’ll walk you through best practices, do’s and don’ts, and more — all based on insights collected from hundreds of sales engineering directors.