PreSales roles offer a compelling path for professionals who enjoy rigorous product evaluation but dread conventional selling. Operating under titles such as sales engineer or solutions consultant, these professionals partner with account executives to own the technical win rather than commercial terms. Their core responsibility centers on understanding complex customer requirements, building tailored proof-of-concept demos, and proving that a product genuinely solves a buyer's problem. While the position mirrors the analytical rigor of procurement, it demands deep technical fluency alongside disciplined preparation for high-stakes presentations. However, compensation structures vary significantly across employers: while roughly two-thirds of individual contributors carry quotas tied directly to sales targets, certain firms house PreSales within consulting to prioritize unbiased advisory over commission-driven closes.
Episode 6477 custom
Finding a Technical Evaluation Job Without the Sales Quota
Roughly two-thirds of individual sales engineers carry some form of quota, often directly mirroring the account executive they support.
22:54 Transcript
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The prompt
The prompt that started this episode, as sent in (production notes for the hosts removed).
We've talked in recent episodes about voice headsets, a product category I've been interested in for a few years because I dictate all the time. It's one of those categories that makes a big difference if you use it every day. Someone who lives on a headset, like a person in a dispatch center, or increasingly me, has a very different relationship to the product than someone who walks into a phone store for a cheap pair of headphones.
That's why I go deep when I research technology products. I have a specific process: I define the spec, then I look for the options. Since adopting AI to do the part I can't do quickly, parsing the spec sheets, I basically haven't made a single bad purchase. Every time, I've ended up with the best thing I could afford. I also really enjoy the process. It's frustrating when there are a million options, half of them no-name brands, and you can't tell what's actually good. But I love narrowing it down to what really is the best thing, and it's very satisfying to close that loop, buy something I value, keep it, and feel I made a good decision.
Here's where this is going, which may not be what you'd expect from that lead-in. Most of my career in technology has been in marketing communications and tech documentation. Sales has always been an attractive area: it's well compensated and there's huge demand for it. What has always put me off, as a very methodical and analytical person, is that the pressure to close deals, make small talk and hit a quota would be very stressful. At the same time, I can see myself really enjoying helping someone similarly motivated find the right product for a large workforce deployment, and being satisfied as the seller in that relationship.
So there are two ways to look at this: I could work on the buying side or on the selling side. We've looked at procurement before, but what is the equivalent on the selling side? Is there a role for people who don't want quota-driven SDR-style work, where the company instead lets them work very closely with a buyer on a significant procurement process on the buyer's end?
What roles exist for people like me, who have thought to themselves one day, "Wait a second, could I actually enjoy a career in sales?" What would this role even be called, or would this skill set fit better on the procurement side? It's really a question about which side of the purchasing relationship you want to be on, if what you love is finding the best solution, evaluating vendor options and getting to know what vendors offer, and the work is less about persuading people to buy things and more about helping them make thoughtful, good purchasing decisions, whether you're selling to them or buying for the organization.
Sources
What the research for this episode read before the script was written. Primary sources first.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook primary Sales Engineers, retrieved 2026-11-06; page last modified 2026-08-27.
- BLS National Employment Matrix, occupation 41-9031 primary retrieved 2026-11-06.
- OpenAI primary Value Engineer, San Francisco job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Decagon primary Business Value Consultant job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Rogo primary Business Value Consultant job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Profound primary Value Consultant job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Trackunit primary Business Consultant job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Vercel primary Senior Technical Account Manager job posting, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Palantir Blog primary A Day in the Life of a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer, published 2020-11-02; retrieved 2026-11-06.
- SE Rockstars Solutions Engineer vs Sales Engineer vs Solutions Consultant, retrieved 2026-11-06 (no publish date shown on page).
- SE Rockstars What Is PreSales? Role, Process and Metrics, retrieved 2026-11-06; page states Updated September 19, 2026.
- SE Rockstars What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? Role, Pay, Origins, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- SE Rockstars Forward Deployed Engineer vs Solutions Engineer, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- SE Rockstars Forward Deployed Engineer Skills: What the Job Really Needs, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- PreSales Collective Day in the Life of a Sales Engineer, Erik Abderhalden, retrieved 2026-11-06 (no date shown).
- ASCM (Association for Supply Chain Management) Strategic Sourcing and Category Management: Roles, Settings, and Career Outlook for 2026, published 2026-07-28; retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Argentus So What's the Difference Between a Buyer and a Category Manager?, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Macildowie Procurement Recruitment Demystified, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- ProcurementAIAgents Category Manager Job Description (2026 Guide), retrieved 2026-11-06.
- NASPO Are You a Buyer or a Procurement Professional?, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Consensus 2023 SE Report (PDF), retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Consensus How to Become a Sales Engineer (PDF), retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Revenue Playbook Sales Engineer, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Prolifiq Sales Engineer Compensation: A Complete 2024 Guide, retrieved 2026-11-06.
- Rox What is a sales engineer?, retrieved 2026-11-06.
Mentions
- Ansible Automation tool authenticating over SSH
- Decagon Hiring business value consultant for GTM function
- Kubernetes Container orchestration platform
- OpenAI AI research and deployment company
- Palantir Data integration and analysis platform for government
- PreSales Collective Community publishing SE day-in-the-life writeups
- Rogo Hiring first business value consultant role
- Salesforce CRM platform in consultant example
- Teleport Infrastructure access company with SE career guidance
- Terraform Infrastructure as code provisioning tool
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Episode Book (PDF)
The episode's record — date, duration, models, sources — with the full transcript
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The episodes Corn and Herman point you to at the end of this one.
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Daniel has a buying process he swears by, and honestly the record supports him. Define the spec, let the AI chew through the spec sheets, buy the best thing you can afford. He says he hasn't made a bad purchase since he adopted it. And then the twist — he's spent his career in marketing comms and tech documentation, he's always found sales attractive for the money and the demand, but the quota, the small talk, the closing have kept him away. What he wants to know is whether there's a selling-side role that works the way he buys: sitting close to a buyer on a serious procurement, helping them make a good decision instead of talking them into one. Or whether that skill set really belongs on the buying side.
The voice headset episodes, the whole series we did on how he researches a product category — this is the natural end of that thread. He's realized the part of the process he loves might be somebody's actual job.
He's not asking whether he'd be good at sales. He's asking whether the job he'd be good at exists, and which side of the table it sits on.
And the short answer is yes, it exists, and the job title tells you almost nothing. The family of roles is called PreSales. In most B2B software companies, sales engineer, solutions engineer, solutions consultant, presales consultant — those are different names for the same job. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics files the whole occupation under one label: sales engineers.
Five names, one job. Very efficient industry.
What actually differs between companies is three things: who you report to, how you're paid, and what happens after the deal signs. Everything else is branding.
Walk me through the names anyway, because Daniel's going to be reading job ads.
Sales engineer is the long-standing default, especially in US software and hardware-heritage companies. Solutions engineer is what platform SaaS companies call it — often literally the same team, renamed. Solutions consultant shows up in ERP and CRM, where the audience is a finance director rather than IT, so the emphasis is business process. Presales consultant is the European enterprise flavor, often sitting inside consulting. Then the outliers. Solutions architect is the one title that differs — that person designs how the solution gets built and integrated, and often stays involved after signature. Demo engineer builds demo environments rather than running deals. And value engineer owns the quantified business case — that one matters, we'll come back to it.
Forward deployed engineer too, which sounds like a military posting.
SE Rockstars calls it, quote, a well-paid rebrand of work PreSales already does. Most sales engineering leaders they surveyed consider the FDE the same job with better branding. Which is not nothing — the rebrand came with better pay, and we'll get there.
The thing that actually separates this from the account executive, though — the thing Daniel's really asking about — is what the role owns.
Right. PreSales owns the technical win. The account executive owns price and contract. The PreSales person's job is to understand the customer's problem, prove the product solves it, and build the case. Sales owns the commercial outcome. PreSales owns the customer's confidence that the solution will work.
Which is structurally the same work Daniel does at his kitchen table. Define what good means, evaluate options, prove the choice holds up. Except someone else has the awkward money conversation.
And the misconception worth killing right here: people assume the sales engineer is the account executive's assistant. A junior sidekick who sets up the projector. In reality it's a peer role, and at many companies it carries the same quota as the seller. Sometimes literally the same number.
So the quota fear follows him into this role too.
Mostly yes, and I don't want to soften that. The Consensus SE Report from a couple of years back — about a thousand respondents — found roughly two-thirds of individual contributors carried some form of quota. And the way it's set is mechanical: if an SE is paired one-to-one with an account executive, the SE typically carries the same quota as that AE. If the SE supports any seller in the company, the quota is the company's new-business number.
Your quota is decided by your seating chart.
Pretty much. But then there's the day-to-day, and this is where I think Daniel's going to recognize himself. Erik Abderhalden is a Lead Solutions Engineer at Salesforce, and he wrote up a day in his life for the PreSales Collective. The day starts with dashboards — how's the team doing, anything popped overnight. Then one-on-ones with the account executives he supports. Customer meetings are, in his words, the majority of my time, the lifeblood of the role.
And what does he do inside a first customer call? Because that's the moment Daniel fears, the rapport thing.
He says on a new-customer call he's trying to learn who the customer is, what they're trying to do, and how we can help — while furiously capturing notes, because, quote, I may not get a second call with this customer, so I need to make this count.
That's not small talk. That's discovery. That's Daniel's spec definition, done live, against a person.
And the demo build is where his methodical streak would shine. Abderhalden wants two hours or more of uninterrupted time to build a demo, and he writes the talk track out word for word so, in his words, everything I say ties back to value. His first demo build took him eight hours. Then rehearsals — a solo run-through, then an internal run-through with the account team, then more solo passes, in his words, finessing my talk track, memorizing where to click.
Eight hours. That's a man who has never made a bad purchase either.
Then the presentation itself, which he describes as simultaneously thrilling and exhausting — and usually when the meeting ends, he collapses in his chair for a breather.
So the emotional texture is: deep preparation, performance, exhaustion. Not cold calls. Not schmoozing. But also not sitting quietly with a spec sheet — it is a room, and there is a performance in it.
The technical bar is real too. This is not a role where you glide in on communication skills. Teleport's guidance for aspiring SEs is blunt — you still need to be able to do deep technical work. Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, some Go. Familiarity with a terminal is huge, their words. Prolifiq's compensation guide lists what the SE owns: discovery of technical requirements, demos, proof-of-concept builds, RFP responses, security and architecture reviews, and answering the deep questions that make or break enterprise deals.
Daniel's done RFP-style evaluation from the other side his whole career. Answering the RFP is the mirror of writing it.
He'd also be entering through a documented door. BLS explicitly says candidates without a degree sometimes qualify with sales experience plus technical training, and that software SEs often came from development or systems analysis. And the coursework BLS calls out as helpful? Marketing and communications.
His exact CV. The thing everyone assumes disqualifies him from anything technical.
BLS's own list of important qualities for the occupation leads with analytical skills — evaluate the products, determine how they suit the customer's needs. Persuasion is on the list too, we should be honest about that. But the Consensus report argues that from the buyer's side, the SE is, quote, the key to superior buying experiences — a trusted advisor who focuses not on selling products but on solving customer problems. The persuasion in this job looks like building a demo that proves a claim. It's closer to technical argument than closing.
I'd still want Daniel to walk in knowing it's a performance. Rehearsed, word for word, in front of a room. That's persuasion wearing a lab coat.
Fair. And the quota-free version does exist — but as an employer choice, not a job category. There's a SAP partner called Sybit whose entire PreSales team carries no sales quota. Their lead, Saskia Cempel, argues that if her people had the same commission structure as sales reps, advisory quality would eventually suffer, because you start pushing for the close instead of giving honest counsel. The team sits organizationally inside consulting, not sales. Their targets mirror solution consultants rather than revenue numbers. And externally they don't even call the team PreSales — they brand them Solution Advisors, to reinforce a trusted-advisor role rather than a sales-adjacent one.
She's right, and she's also describing the diagnostic for reading any job ad in this space. Ignore the title. Read who the role reports to, how it's paid, and what it owns.
SE Rockstars says almost exactly that, word for word. And the follow-on line is the one I'd underline for Daniel: a title that promises advice while the comp plan rewards the close is a contradiction customers eventually notice.
So the answer to his quota fear isn't which title he takes. It's which employer. The quota is set at the company level, and no individual negotiation moves it.
Now the buying side, because Daniel framed it as either-or and the comparison is where it gets interesting. ASCM's career outlook draws the line cleanly: a buyer executes against a decision already made; a sourcing or category professional makes the decision and lives with it for the length of the contract. Argentus is blunter — a buyer is not tasked with figuring out what to buy or who to buy it from. They handle the how, not the what or the who.
And we've covered this ground before — the tiers, the sourcing analyst, the category manager tracks. The new question is which side suits Daniel, not what procurement is.
What the category role owns is the specification of the deal itself: which suppliers get invited to compete, what commercial construct is used — fixed price, indexed to a raw material, cost-plus — how long the agreement runs, how volume is split, what happens to price when the underlying index moves. Those are decisions made once that then govern thousands of transactions.
So the category manager is the buying-side mirror of the solutions engineer. Define what good means before anyone negotiates price.
ASCM says the category professional's most valuable move is reaching the specification conversation early, rather than being handed a part number and told to find it cheaper. And the solutions engineer's whole job is being in the spec conversation. Same skill, opposite sides of the table. The difference is who signs the cheque and who carries the savings number — sourcing's headline metric is savings, and ASCM notes it's the most contested number in the building, because sourcing counts the negotiated reduction and finance counts what reaches the profit and loss.
Two sides, one conversation, and both are fighting with their own finance department about who gets credit. Daniel should feel at home already.
Call sign Amber Lantern. Groups: four seven, two nine. The second oven is cold. The second oven is cold. Nine one, three six. The rye is counted twice. The baker sleeps with the ledger open.
Six two, eight eight. The crumb is not for the crust. The third shelf remembers. Close on Marzipan.
Noted. Anyway — the savings metric.
Herman. What the hell was that.
So the savings metric, and then the role I actually think is the answer to Daniel's prompt.
You're just going to keep going?
The savings number follows the category manager the way quota follows the seller — it's the pressure the role is built around. If Daniel wants the evaluation work without a number hanging over it, the buying side doesn't automatically give him that. It gives him a different number.
A savings target instead of a quota. Cheaper therapy, same anxiety.
But here's the role I keep landing on as the actual bridge: the value engineer. It's the most procurement-shaped job in sales, and it's booming right now. OpenAI is hiring a Value Engineer in San Francisco to articulate and quantify the business value of the technology across enterprise, education and government customers. Decagon wants a Business Value Consultant to build and scale their value engineering function, sitting at the center of go-to-market, bridging product, sales and finance, working with CFOs and COOs. Rogo is hiring its first Business Value Consultant, and their posting says enterprise deals are won on quantified value, not features — the buyers are CFOs and heads of technology at large banks and asset managers.
The seller who writes the CFO's spreadsheet for them.
Which is the exact document a procurement category manager reads across the table. Trackunit's version of the role is an individual contributor solely focused on value engineering in high-complexity enterprise deals — they want eight to twelve years' experience. And the detail I find most telling: Rogo's role reports into Revenue Operations, not sales. No quota that I can see stated, though none of these postings say no quota outright — I wouldn't promise Daniel that.
So a person whose job is to quantify whether the deal is actually good for the buyer. That's... suspiciously close to Daniel's whole buying process, weaponized for the seller.
Then the quota-free extreme on the selling side is the forward deployed engineer. Most FDEs carry no quota — pay is base, equity and bonus, and the median US total comp is around two hundred ten thousand. A fully loaded FDE costs an employer somewhere between two-twenty and four hundred thousand a year. The model is one or two accounts, deeply embedded. OpenAI's FDEs, per the Pragmatic Engineer's write-up, embed with customers, understand their domain, co-develop solutions — the team went from two people to more than ten across eight cities in a few years. Palantir pioneered it; they call theirs Deltas, with the mandate to achieve technical outcomes for customers, one customer, many capabilities.
Co-developing solutions with the customer. No quota, no close, no small talk — the account executive isn't even in the room half the time.
The trade is travel. Palantir's posting asks up to twenty-five percent, OpenAI's up to fifty.
Fifty. Daniel has a young family in Jerusalem.
Worth saying plainly, though — that's the one role where the money and the quota freedom are unambiguous, and it's the one where the lifestyle cost is unambiguous too.
The other thing worth naming for Daniel, whichever side he picks: his background is a documented path, not a liability. BLS calls marketing and communications coursework helpful. On the buying side, Langley Search's transition guide is about leveraging analytical abilities, negotiation skills and project management, with certifications like CIPS or CPSM. And Una's piece on transferable skills is almost comically direct — procurement needs, quote, marketers who know how to persuade, writers who can communicate.
TrinityP3 looked at where the best marketing procurement people come from, and their conclusion was that both camps are right and both are wrong — some of the best are marketers who learned procurement, others are procurement people who learned marketing. The traits that predicted it were curiosity and data analysis.
Both routes in, same destination. For once, an industry that can't decide which prejudice to hold.
Which is why I'd tell Daniel the either-or in his prompt is slightly false. The two sides are converging on the same skill from opposite directions — both sides now compete to be in the specification conversation earliest. His methodical evaluation process isn't a reason to pick a side. It's the asset both sides are hiring for.
My cousin does this for a pump company.
Does what?
The sales engineer job. They don't call it that. He's an application engineer. The company moved the role out of the sales department and into engineering, which killed the commission and killed the quota with it. He says the title change alone was worth five figures a year to him and he'd never go back.
What does he actually do all day?
Sits in a room with a clipboard while the customer's engineer argues with his own boss about whether they need the bigger model. He carries an actual clipboard, not a laptop. Says the customers are pump people, not software people, and a clipboard says you're taking this seriously.
And you know this how.
He tells it at every family thing. Herman, the thing you said about the comp plan being the tell — he says the same thing in different words. The day the quota went, he says, he started telling people not to buy things.
The honest sentence. That's exactly what the quota-free argument is — an SE paid less on any single deal can afford the honest sentence.
You've been carrying a clipboard yourself for three weeks, haven't you.
That's unrelated. There's a hardware store near me where it helps.
Unrelated.
The pencil behind the ear is what does it. Without the pencil it's nothing.
Noted. Herman, the clipboard economy is apparently thriving.
The part of that I'd actually take seriously is the engineering-department move. That's Sybit's structure in miniature — physically relocating the role out of the sales org is a stronger signal than any title, and it's checkable from a job ad. You look at where the team sits and who the manager reports to.
And the customer noticing the clipboard is the same point from the other end. The buyer can tell which side of the comp plan you're on.
Cutting-room floor before we close — one detail from the BLS numbers I couldn't fit in. Sales engineers as an occupation: about fifty-one thousand jobs in this country, growing to maybe fifty-three thousand over the next decade. Three percent growth, as fast as average. But the interesting number is openings — about thirty-eight hundred a year, almost all of them replacement needs. Meaning most people who get in, stay in.
Not a revolving door. For a job adjacent to sales, that says something.
And the wage spread is wide. Tenth percentile around seventy-four thousand, ninetieth around one-ninety-five, median one-twenty-five. The ceiling in this occupation is very much an employer-specific thing, same as the quota.
One thing left open for Daniel, and I'd leave it open rather than close it: no standard role exists that is structurally, by name, the selling side of procurement with no quota and no persuasion. It exists as employer choices — Sybit's model, most FDE roles, an application engineer at a pump company sitting in engineering. So the search isn't for a job title to type into a listings site. It's for the right employer and the right comp plan, and the value-engineering postings are the closest thing to his process that's hiring right now.
If he wants the buying side instead, the category manager is the mirror — same work, savings number instead of quota, and he walks in with the persuasion skills Una says procurement is short of. Either way the skill is identical: define what good means before anyone talks about price.
Producer credit to Hilbert Flumingtop, who did not invent the clipboard but has certainly advanced it. If you enjoyed this one, try episode thirty-six fifty-six, From Spec Sheets to Career; and episode ninety-one, The Story Behind the Show. This has been My Weird Prompts. Everything we've ever done lives at my weird prompts dot com, and if today's episode found you the right role, the review button finds us.
We'll be back soon. Corn, the pencil behind the ear.
Herman, no.
See you tomorrow.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities. It may contain errors: disclaimer · report an error