On being a Technical Sales Lead or Sales Engineer at balena
All team members at balena are laser-focused on our mission: enabling developers to succeed in IoT and edge computing by helping them deploy and manage large fleets of devices across the globe. Our sales and customer success team is no different. As a product-led company, we don’t follow the traditional sales playbook;we run sales like we run engineering, and while closing deals is important, we’re more interested in helping our customers solve their challenges and succeed with balena.
As a Technical Sales Lead / Engineer, you will be empowered to lead all activities across the customer lifecycle. You will wear multiple hats including technical pre-sales, solutions architect, and account manager for existing customers. You will proactively identify opportunities through inbound activity as well as strategic outreach, engage with prospects to understand their business and technical challenges and map them to the balena platform, and envision new solutions and use cases. You will own the development and delivery of presentations, proofs of concept, and proposals and manage all communications, contract negotiations, and escalations. You will also focus on optimizing the post-sale experience by guiding onboarding and adoption with the ultimate goal of helping customers scale their IoT fleets.
Identifying areas of friction in our sales efforts and working to remove them will be another key part of your role. This could include building tools and enablement materials and exploring new ways to encourage expansion using product data.
You will work independently, with a team of other Sales Engineers, and cross-functionally —facilitating knowledge sharing and aligning the efforts of the Product, Engineering, FleetOps, Growth, and other internal teams towards the development of long-term, scalable solutions for customers from the front lines.
Responsibilities
- Identify, qualify, and nurture leads from our user base, inbound requests, events, etc.
- Manage a pipeline of customer opportunities at various evaluation stages.
- Engage with potential customers to understand their current and future needs and goals;support them with their evaluation of balena by providing demonstrations, answering technical questions, and explaining our value proposition
- Maintain relationships with existing customers, help them to continue to grow with balena, and take ownership of expansion, renewal and upgrade opportunities
- Develop tools and methods for increasing sales process efficiency and automation
- Act as the voice of the customer and help influence the product roadmap by partnering closely with engineers to incorporate customer feedback, help prioritize and design features, and expand product capabilities.
- Manage extended customer projects (e.g. enterprise POCs)
Requirements
- Customer-facing experience and demonstrable ability to ask questions, understand, interpret, and address customer needs, and coach users on how to get value from the product
- Practical knowledge of navigating the sales and account management process within organizations ranging from start-ups to large enterprises, and interacting effectively with diverse audiences from engineers up to C-level
- Excellent communication skills and fluency in English
- Highly organized, able to handle many threads at once, and keep things moving —you’ll be interacting with many different customers on any given day
- Curiosity and willingness to learn complex technical subjects and develop a deep understanding of the balena platform
- Continuous improvement mindset and desire to make yourself and others more effective
- Comfortable working in an environment that practices radical candor and transparency
Bonus points
- Technical or engineering background
- Technical background, such as in software development
- Knowledge of technologies like Docker, Linux, IoT/connected devices e.g. the Raspberry Pi
- Awareness - and healthy skepticism - of SaaS, platform or infrastructure sales processes, combined with an ability to adapt these practices to the balena context and build new ones from first principles
- Experience working with IoT companies
- Familiarity with remote working
Make sure to let us know if any of these items apply to you.
To apply
Send us your CV/Resume and cover letter, with a focus on what you can bring to the team. Please include a paragraph about how you think Sales Leads/Engineers can best help customers succeed, with examples if possible. We're interested in understanding your philosophy or approach to technical sales.