Frequently Asked Questions

Tech Sale Advisors is a firm founded in 2020 by Chris White, author of Amazon best seller The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers. The mission of Tech Sales Advisors is to help those in the technical selling profession increase their effectiveness in all aspects of their role. 

In 2021, Chris decided to expand the business. He asked 25 year technical selling veteran Bill Balnave to join. Bill has deep experience both as a Sales Engineer and Sales Engineering Leader, giving Tech Sales Advisors greater expertise and the ability to offer more to a wider audience. 

You can find  more information about the company here. 

While presale enablement is a core part of Tech Sales Advisors mission, the offerings are not for sales engineers alone. There are workshops, online course, and resources for SE leaders, technical sellers, those responsible for sales enablement at a tech company. Select Who We Serve in the menu at the top of the page to see detail on how Tech Sales Advisors helps everyone involved in technical selling. 

Tech Sale Advisors provides technical sales enablement through several channels. There is a subscription service designed to provide continuous learning for SEs, SE Leaders, and technical sellers. There are live, instructor-led workshops offered on both an open enrollment basis as well as tailored to and offered to an entire organization's technical sellers. In addition to the live workshops, Tech Sales Advisors offers a wide range of recorded on-demand video instruction. 

To supplement the core material, Tech Sales Advisors provides a set of downloadable resources, a monthly newsletter, and an email-based learning reinforcement service. 

Tech Sales Advisors does more than its Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers Workshops for SEs and Leaders. It also provides on-demand online video based content, email based learning reinforcement, and  downloadable worksheets and ebooks. 

Not all content available on Tech Sales Advisors requires a subscription to access. There is free to download content as part of the available resources that can be found here. This content includes worksheets, forms, and ebooks that help increase your effectiveness in supporting a technical sales cycle. In addition, you can register for an open enrollment workshop without being a Tech Sales Advisors subscriber. Finally, some online content can be accessed for a limited time for a one time fee and not a full subscription. 

There are three levels of subscription to Tech Sales Advisors. This allows customers to subscribe to only what they'll use and what makes sense for their role. Subscription pricing is the same based on role but the content will vary. You can subscribe to the content for more than one role at a discount to the full combined price. 

For complete details on the 3 level of subscription, including the content available at each level and the price, click here. 

Many of Tech Sales Advisors subscription customers are individuals who want to make sure they are as effective as they can be as sales engineers, sales engineering managers, or technical sellers. The three levels of subscription are designed to support the needs of all individuals as well as an organization. If you have any questions or don't see what you need, please contact Tech Sales Advisors directly here. 

A sales engineer is a sales person who specializes in the sales of technological and scientific products and services, typically in a B2B setting. Sales engineers need to have detailed knowledge about the products and services they sell, as they need to answer questions about the technical and advanced mechanics of what they sell. They can work as sales representatives for different companies, or work for independent sales firms. 

The complexity of the products they sell means that sales engineers need to be able to translate complex terms and industry-specific knowledge into terminology that an average person would be able to understand. In the same vein, they also need to be able to answer difficult questions and understand exactly how the products and services they sell work, so that customers understand the sales presentation and are aware of what the products or services do. 

In addition, sales engineers also need to be good sales people. They have to be able to make a good pitch and presentation to clients, be responsive, and proactively look for new customers and business. They need to work with their sales team and know how to be a collaborative player within their company culture.

 For a more detailed explanation, please see our blog post here. 

Presales is a general label given to anyone who works in the sales organization and partners with salespeople to deliver revenue to a company. There are many job titles given to those who fit this category. Examples of those job titles are: sales engineer, solution architect, solutions consultant, technical representative, and presales engineer. These people are responsible for providing the information and evidence necessary for the key decision makers in an organization to become convinced that the products they represent are the most worthwhile and valuable investment compared to other options and/or the status quo AND inspired to want to make a change. 

There are many potential job titles for those in the role of sales engineer. While at first this may seem confusing, there are good reasons for it. Not everyone in the role has the same responsibilities. What an SE does is very dependent on the products they represent and the personas to whom they represent those products. In some cases, people in presales roles will sell very technical and bespoke products. They are responsible for not only convincing a customer of the value of the product, but they must also create the design and specifications for the actual product that customer will use. They may in that situation then also be responsible for helping the customer implement the product at their site. In other situations, those in presales need to be familiar with their solution but may not have complete working knowledge of it or be required to implement it for a customer. Because of the variety of responsibilities within the area of presales, companies will give their presales people different titles to align with their actual responsibilities.