Sales Engineering, Unfiltered : What We Wish Someone Had Told Us on Day One
Overview
Nobody hands you a map on your first day as a Sales Engineer.
You learn the job the hard way. In the demo that dies thirty seconds before the reveal. In the deal that dies with it. In the 2 a.m. escalation nobody warned you about, and the quarter where three eight-figure opportunities evaporate for reasons that have nothing to do with your technology.
This is the book we wish someone had handed us on day one.
Three Sales Engineers, three very different seats, and four decades of scar tissue between them. Chris writes from the Principal SE chair, the one who carried a backpack full of laptops to customer sites. Glenn writes as the SE Manager who has scaled teams from five to fifty. Brian writes as the Chief Technical Evangelist with the 30,000-foot view. Every chapter gives you all three perspectives on the same problem, because the answer usually looks different depending on where you sit.
No theory. No corporate handbook language. Real scars, real wins, and the honest "why did nobody tell me that?" moments that shape a career.
What is inside:
- What the job actually is, and why only about twenty percent of it is demos
- How to pass the windshield test that hiring managers run on you without telling you
- Why the best SEs break things on purpose, and how to build a home lab to do it
- How to improvise when the projector dies, the stakeholders change, and the plan is gone
- Turning brutal feedback into information instead of a confidence crisis
- Saying no before you become the team's garbage collector
- Building technical champions who fight for you when you are not in the room
- Negotiating salary, equity, and the numbers nobody teaches you to ask about
- Where AI genuinely helps, where it quietly destroys your credibility, and the guardrails that matter
- Surviving sales kickoff without becoming the cautionary tale
- Where the SE seat can take you next, and how to leave with a reputation that travels
Twenty-six chapters, each ending with an action plan you can start this week.
Who this is for: the new SE trying not to drown. The experienced SE who has plateaued. The engineer or account executive wondering whether this seat is right for them. The SE manager who wants a book to hand to every new hire.
Written by the hosts of The PEBCAK Podcast, who named it after the error every one of us has been at least once: Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.
The SE role is one of the best jobs in tech when you know how to play it, and one of the fastest ways to burn out when you do not. This book is about the difference.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798174725720
- ISBN-10: 9798174725720
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: October 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.39 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.56 pounds
- Page Count: 184
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