Hello fellow Cisconian!

Hello fellow Cisconian! About transitioning into a sales role, you have to really confirm first whether do you want to be a sales engineer or do you actually want to be a salesperson, because there's two different roles, right? So when you go into sales from a technical role, which you're in technical support, there's actually two sides of the fence. There is the pure salesperson or the sales engineer. And so if you want to transition into a sales engineering role, which would be the next logical step for you since you're already in a technical background, you're going to need two things. You're going to have to develop some business acumen and some sales acumen. You're going to have to have some personal skills as well, so it's actually three things, and be actual have good interpersonal skills. You might have the beginnings of that because you work in the TAC and you deal with people day by day. And then you're also going to need support from your management about transitioning from your role into a sales role because realistically, getting into sales is difficult, but once you're in, you're good as long as you've got good numbers. But it's even harder to do it from the outside in. So the fact that you're already inside Cisco is great. Generally, Cisco is very supportive of people's careers. I think it's a great company to work for. And so you need to talk to your managers and go, hey, you know, mister or missus manager, part of my career progression plan is me moving into a solutions engineer role, we call that an SE role. You might want to choose what particular architecture you want to focus on because Cisco sells four major architectures. So do you want to be in networking? Do you want to be in DC? Do you want to be in collab? Do you want to be in security? Security would be a good place to be right now, to be quite honest, because, you know, Cisco's transitioning into a security company. So that would be a good place to be. But it's really about what you're interested and passionate about. So first of all, speak to your manager about this. Number two, you know, understand what a sales engineer actually does if you want to go to sales engineering. And then number three would be start to develop some interpersonal skills because you have to deal with people, right? Like you might understand technology, but you are have to work with your account team, your account managers, your account executives on being a good human in sales. And so that's really important as well, right, developing personal and interpersonal skills. That's what I do. I teach people the technical, the non-technical skills required to be successful at sales. So, um, yeah, if that if that's of interest to you, hit me up and, uh, good luck with it.