You need to build an audience on the internet to get a steady pipeline of leads. It sounds counterintuitive, but, share everything you know on the internet for free (Blog for SEO), and then collect emails at the bottom of each post promising further valuable information. You’ve now got a list of leads who think of you as an expert and specifically need help with your niche area. You need to email them regularly with…
This is what the typical hacker News poster says. It is a lot of work and will take a lot of time.
An other way is to get in touch with your contacts working in companies that have problems you can solve.
This sounds really interesting. How would you define what Sales engineering is?
In cloud software at least, sales engineers/solutions architects work with the account manager to drive adoption of services. A lot about evaluating a customer's problem space or existing architecture, and proposing possible cloud-native architectures. Sales engineers also do educational sessions and service-specific "immersion days" for the platform, which usually tie into the customer account manager's sales and ad…
This sounds really interesting. How would you define what Sales engineering is?
In my view, it's the person who is able to understand the business problem the customer is trying to solve, then evalute if the problem is something you or your company can and want to solve. If the problem is something your company want to solve, provide the technical evidences during the due diligence process to the prospects that you can solve their problems. In my case, this also bridged nicely to help out the ex…
Good to hear that you realized that management is not for you; it's not for everyone. Alas, being a consultant is a lot about being in sales, how are your selling skills? I think for a while you need to continue what you're doing, as you're doing; AND - along the way - investigate ways on where to bring your consultancy. Besides the usual suspects of books on selling, I also recommend the following reading: * So Good…
I don't really know. I never learned sales, but I sold Kotlin to a lot of companies successfully in the last few years. It is something that I think I can do if I put the time in.
What if you simply found a few projects people are working on and consulted for them until they got their MVP to market and iteratively improve the product market fit until they have a revenue stream that allows them to pay you for the work you've done? Then you can use that income to do it again for some new projects and get a good reputation built up. I believe you need to initially build a reputation in order to have something to attract clients. It's something I'm doing currently on the side. I both want to see my friends become successful and I also believe if my skills can help them achieve their goals it will validate my strategy. I have about 3 years of pre-sales engineering experience and lots of software development experience so I'm not far off from where you are it sounds like. Best wishes, I hope you find a nice groove :)