- North AmericanNorth American
Association of Sales Engineers
Association of Sales Engineers
North American Association of Sales Engineers
Leveraging Influence and Association to Recruit Great Salespeople
While the known brands in your category take the lazy route and rely on their name recognition, you can do things that actually impact your audience.
If you’re a high-growth startup competing with big brands for sales talent, you have to think differently about how you market yourself to highly skilled candidates.
Here’s an easy influencer play that will allow you to tap into targeted candidate groups while building your brand credibility:
Have your Head of Sales host a series (podcast, webinar, whatever) where they interview the top SMEs in their space and jam on industry trends and topical issues.
Important: DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR COMPANY. This is about building brand through association and contribution to your industry. Detach from outcomes and you will see results.
Bottom line: Associating your company with influencers has the potential to take your startup from being largely unknown to being one of the most credible shops in your category.
Accept the fact that a) most startups more or less sound the same to the outside world, and b) it’s likely that nobody knows who in the hell you are.
If you don’t have brand cred in your space, you need to build it. This is one of the fastest ways.
The process is simple:
- Line up interviews with industry leaders.
- Record these conversations over Zoom. (You can even host them as private, invite-only webinars for your highest quality recruiting prospects.)
- Strip the audio for a podcast.
- Find 3+ video clips for the guest to share on their own social following the interview.
- Give this content to your recruiters to distribute via outbound messages.
Side note: Most influencers already have their own podcasts. And most cross-post interviews that they’re on. They have a larger audience than you. This is a major win.
None of this is rocket science. And it’s certainly not a new idea.
The execution is easy. The hard part is making this a priority.
There’s so much talk about building your employer brand. And most ideas are overly complicated, time-consuming, and ineffective.
This is the opposite. This is leveraging what already exists—with little to no budget.
BTW, you can replicate this model across marketing, engineering, and any other high-priority functions.
The 2.0 version: Turn your Head of Sales into an industry thought leader.
- Give them their own newsletter, their own podcast, and their own creative resources (aka a freelance video editor) to turn content out at scale.
- Put PR juice behind them to get them on influential podcasts in your space.
- Get them owning your category on LinkedIn.
Function leaders as SMEs are recruiting gold. Do this well and your Sales leader will become your inbound recruiting engine.
While the known brands in your category take the lazy route and rely on their name recognition, you can do things that actually impact your audience.
Marketers — Stop the eye-rolling. I know you’ve been doing this kind of stuff for a while now. But as far as talent marketing goes, this is uncharted territory.
Special thanks to Nate Guggia for writing this article.
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The Math Proves It: Sales Engineers are Hard to Find and Hire
HR Directors and Sales Managers are realizing a few tough facts right about now: Many companies are now beginning or expanding their sales engineering/ presales positions- but there just are not that many around or available. This of course leads to a market where- in general- it is a prospect/employee’s advantage.
How do we know that this is the case? A couple anecdotes combined with a crude math formula/ ratio. NAASE understands that there are of course many SE’s out there that maybe have been seeking employment for 6+ months, and there are always circumstances and outliers in various industries. However, using a broad brush here, it does seems that hiring a SE is quite a bit harder right now than many other professions.
For anecdotes, we provide the following:
Many articles and stories have been written over the past year or two about the importance of the sales engineer and them being a needed, yet unsung hero, of a winning revenue team in most B2B endeavors. Some of said articles may be self-serving, but overall these stories from various business and sales writers and enterprises is hard to ignore.
Another factor is that if and while purchasing decisions and teams are getting more complicated and more analytical, and with the B2B sales cycle taking longer, it would make sense that the sales team needs more qualified and technical support and assistance in winning the deal. Hence more sales engineers are finding there way into firms and departments where there were none several years ago.
But, now to the math and analysis…. a quick 25 minute review brought about the following revelation.
I reviewed how many positions actually exist in the USA, vs. looking at how many open job listings there are for said position/title. The first portion I researched thru the US DOL BLS, and the job listings were found on LinkedIn.
As an example, there are about 67,000 sales engineers that exist in the US. And, per LinkedIn, there are 51,127 job listings. Some of those listings might be repeats- I am not sure. Thus, I don’t really know if there are 51k job listings or 51k actual job openings; the two may not be identical. But regardless of that, figuring out this “professionals/openings ratio” can be used to compare different job titles. To help contextualize, for graphic designers there are 261,600 such people that exist in the country, with currently only 12,600 job listings.
I compared the ratios of sales engineers to that of: computer programmer, dentist, graphic designer, electrical engineer, and architect.
I averaged those 5 positions to come up with a ratio of “non SE”. Then I compared that to the SE job listing ratio.
The amount of job openings for sales engineers is over 9 TIMES that of the other job titles.
Said another way, I compared the SE ratio to that of the #2 job title in my analysis, and still- SE’s had roughly 4X the number of job openings that the #2 job title had (relatively speaking).
What does all this mean? Possibly nothing, and we don’t mean to say that it is “easy” to land a great SE position in the current economy. However, in looking at the data, and also at some broad anecdotes, being a sales engineer in 2021 puts you into a pretty solid position in a potential job search. It likely is much more difficult in many other professions.
This article was written by NAASE President Ken Lambert.
