I’ve been away from VCE for many years (and Dell Technologies for just over a year) but I look back fondly on the experiences. Specifically, I look back on the team members I was so fortunate to learn from while building a multi $B business.

While trying out yet-another-Gatsby-theme, I was thinking back on my time at VCE that I’ve cataloged in my blog. Each memory I uncovered led me to realize the most Account Executive (AE) and Sales Engineer (SE) pairings were typically those that complimented each other.

Customer engineering, solutions engineering, and sales engineering are names for the engineering subject matter expertise required to support technology pre-sales when a technology company wants to add a new customer. Often, these roles are associated in Enterprise sales and generally speaking, the pre-sales engineer (SE) is the tandem partner to a highly relationship oriented selling role that the customer recognizes as their salesperson or account executive (AE).

Two patterns came to mind and I do love a good backronym: ROD and REEL. Further, the best AE and SE pairs could float between these two patterns fluidly as a truly dynamic duo.

ROD

• R - Relevant

• O - Organized

• D - Direct

REEL

• R - Responsive

• E - Effective

• E - Efficient

• L - Likable