BC Startup Sales Podcast – Hiring Effective Sales Engineers with Laura Menicucci (Cloudera)

Hiring effective sales engineers is something that has been requested frequently from our audience and so this week we had Laura Menicucci from Cloudera on to the podcast to chat specifically about the topic. We’ve talked a bit before about sales hiring in general but never specifically about the sales engineer role and hiring effective sales engineers. Laura brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the discussion around hiring effective sales engineers having formerly built out the worldwide sales engineering organization at ArcSight and Rapt before joining Cloudera as their first VP of Sales Engineering. She’s made that critical first sales engineer hire, built a team of 100+ sales engineers on several occasions, and has seen the ins and outs of hiring effective sales engineers from all angles.

We start the discussion on when to consider the sales engineer hiring question. Specifically there are a number of key items to think about and things to avoid when thinking about hiring that first sales engineer. In addition we talk about the profile of the company needed to ponder this question. We then move on to actually embarking on the hire and exactly how as a young SaaS founder you should be outbound trying to find this person. We walk through the ideal profile of the sales engineer and then move on to closing that person and how to effectively put forth the correct compensation package. Beyond this we walk through how to specifically incentivize sales engineers and what metrics you should put in place from day one. We close with a walk through of how to grow the organization from one to many and Laura gives some tips and tricks from her experiences over the years. All in it was a great topic that we hope the listeners enjoy.

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