Career Advice – How to Go from Presales to Exec/Founder
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I think it depends a bit what you want. The skills you need for building a company from scratch is very different from the skills you need from scaling a big organisations. If you want to be a founder I recommend you either just fund a company or you join a very early stage one, say as the first sales hire.
Hope to gain some perspective from the community. I'm currently in Solution Engineering (SE/Presales) after having been in tech consulting for a while. It's a great job with a major player in the B2B SaaS space.
But now I'm not sure if this is the right career in the long term. As an SE you don't have the same accountability at the Sales people for delivering the sales quota and inevitably that limits where you can go at the top i.e. working towards becoming an executive at a tech or traditional company as the CIO or similar.
I'm good at presenting, communication and managing stakeholders to deliver outcomes successfully but I want to build the right skill set to advance my career upwards and/or in the right direction to start my own company.
What next step do you see that would help me in or put me in the right spot to progress my career?
I'm thinking about a few things that will help me become ready for an exec position or a non-technical startup founder.
- Moving to Product Marketing (learning to tell stories and go to market with a product) - Moving to Sales (owning the sales cycle but being subjected to "the number") - Moving to join an early stage company as the first presales (SE) hire and hope to build a varied skill set. - Stick it out in SE and aim to move to manage an SE team and go from there... - Other career paths...
Any experience from anyone who moved in any of those roles who can talk about career paths and perspectives?