5 Things Founders Get Wrong About Sales Engineers

“We’re not here to fix the demo you oversold. But we will.”

Founders: we love you.
You’ve got vision, passion, and enough caffeine in your bloodstream to power an entire marketing team.
But when it comes to Sales Engineers (SEs)… you often have no idea what to do with us.

Here are the most common ways founders use SEs incorrectly — and what to do instead:

1. You Bring Us In Too Late

“Hey, can you hop on this call in 10 minutes? The customer wants to talk architecture.”
No.
We're not a fire extinguisher.
We’re the reason there isn’t a fire. Bring us in early and we’ll keep your sales cycle tight, your demo sharp, and your platform believable.

2. You Think We’re Tech Support

We’re not here to configure your client’s DNS or explain how PDFs work.
We’re here to help you sell reality, not duct-tape broken expectations after the contract’s signed.

3. You Undervalue Pre-Sales Strategy

Great SEs don’t just demo the product.
They de-risk the sale. They catch red flags, flag missing features, and steer deals away from cliffs.
Every time you leave us out of discovery calls, a tiny POC dies inside.

4. You Want “Just a Quick Demo”

Ah yes, the ancient ritual of the “quick demo” — no context, no prep, full chaos.
Demo fatigue is real. We don’t need more features. We need a story. A problem. A solution.

5. You Confuse SEs with Post-Sales

If you close the deal and then say “so you’ll help them get set up, right?”
No. You need onboarding, support, success, implementation.
You can’t duct-tape one SE into four missing departments. (Well… you can. But you shouldn’t.)

🧠 Real Talk:

If you treat Sales Engineers like button-pushers, they’ll burn out.
If you treat them like revenue enablers, they’ll save your whole pipeline.

Coming up next:

Issue 3 – Pre-Sales Therapy: A Day in the Life
…in which I explain how I went from troubleshooting a customer’s Terraform file to helping sales define “cloud.”