Fractional SE: Five Groups of Knowledge

July 30th, 2026

Pulling the right strings to create a chord

As an SE, you are responsible for a number of tasks and activities when you  sell. Understanding them well and breaking them down into skill stacks and sub tasks is the key to being powerfully responsive in your role.

Sales engineering by any other name is a role that requires the listening skills of a therapist, the technical acumen of a super user, the intuition of a visionary, and the execution of a top performer.

Developing these skills are your mission throughout your career, regardless of how you got your start. You may have to ask yourself: Are you a subject matter expert (SME) for the industry? A SME for a product? Or is it the SME of your company? All of them in fact. You must have a deep understanding of all of those domains, and a few more including being an expert on your customer, and THEIR industry, which may differ from your own.

Five Groups of Knowledge

Industry: Yours and your Customer

Taking a specific industry, such as Cyber Security, you will need to be aware generally of the entire industry. What is the breakdown of the different security domains? Which domain does your company operate within? Where are you positioned in that market? Are you a leader? Close followers? Or middle of the pack? It is easy enough to learn these things, but you need to be aware of it to be effective when positioning your product. Not knowing will leave you blind to your strengths against specific competitors, or blind to theirs over your solution. 

This is a bit different from knowing your own company and market position. Knowing your customer’s industry is essential as well. When you understand what your customer's market is all about helps you align your solution to their needs, and talk the language of the customer on calls. As an example, you may be selling encryption technology to a car manufacturer. Why would they care about encryption? The understanding of protecting intellectual property for files in their environment may be the way that they need encryption. Or using it to identify users in a digital signing or authentication scheme. So the ways they use it to protect their business activities of designing and building vehicles is the use case. YOU must  understand that they use Computer Aided Design (CAD) to design a car, and that those files need to be protected. Understanding their industry is how you find use cases to sell your solution.

Technology Domain

Your technology domain is a high level perspective on what your product does, and its architecture. Sticking with the security topic for now, if you study cyber security there are a number of core domains of security. Let's just pick one. Identity and Access Management (IAM). 

At a high level IAM is about who has access to what and when did they access it. That is the core problem IAM solves. But the how will transform your understanding of the approach. If you are talking about Web Access, you may need to learn about various protocols like OAUTH, or SAML (not defining these here, just pointing them out). On the other hand, if you are talking about security in a “Sensitive compartmented information facility” or (SCIF) zone, it may have more to do with card access, where you deal with physical access to the zone.

Each of those elements are critical for security, but depending on your industry, or the customer's industry, the approach to each is going to be a totally different conversation.

The People Element

Ultimately most sales engagements require a team of people. In house, assuming you build a solution, you have product managers, product marketing, developers, support teams, order management teams, delivery (professional services) teams. Not to mention the most obvious, the sales team. When you are in conversation with a customer, it is inevitable that you will be asked a question that you don’t know the answer to, and the right person is not on the call with you. Being able to capture the question, and the intention behind the question, is critical. But then you have to find the person with the right answer. As a pre-sales engineer, you are most often the go-between. You have to have a personality that will allow you to make relationships with various people throughout a company. You are not just a tech, so personality will be critical here. If you don’t like interacting with people, pre-sales is probably not the right role for you.

Product Managers

But in your head (or mapped out in a document perhaps) you must know who is in charge of the product’s direction, as well as who can make commitments for the product team. Eventually you will be asked to deliver something your product doesn’t do today. If you know where to get the roadmap data, that is fine, but more often than not, you will need permission to share roadmap details.