Has anyone transitioned to data science to sales? Is it easy to?

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I’m in a weird spot where I’m doing more soft skills than coding right now. Weirdly enough, I don’t really miss the coding. I’m “selling” my LLMs to business partners who don’t get DS, leadership for funding, etc… I’ve had to do this for every model I’ve built so far, but this time, I don’t want to both create the models and then sell them. Or sell the idea, create a POC, continue talks/improving the model, go through legal/compliance. Because of the soft skills, I’ve been able to productionize the most models in my department, but it’s exhausting to do both. I should also add that my manager isn’t even a DS and doesn’t know what they’re doing, so I’ve had to go out to business partners from the start to get projects. Legitimately have been doing their job and mine for a while.

I’ve been applying to DS/ML roles to get practice with interviewing and realizing that I really don’t want to go through coding interviews or read research papers anymore. I’ve been really enjoying business books and other books on soft skills. I’m also am an extroverted person by nature, so it’s hard for me to go back from talking to coding. I love to present, too and love public speaking. I love to learn and discuss what I learned, I just don’t think I want to build models from scratch or maintain existing models anymore.

I love NLP/AI, so I’d want to stick into that area if I were to go to sales. I know tech sales that are in cloud, and I have a few AWS certs, but have never really heard of sales in data science

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If you have good people skills, a good Sales Engineer is worth his weight in gold.

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What would you say makes a good sales engineer?

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The ability to read your audience. To turn complex ideas into layman‘s terms. Most buyers won’t care about how it works, just about the outcome, but they need to believe that you are credible.

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Ahh, I do that with business partners all the time! Definitely start with the outcome versus process, but sometimes they’re interested in the process and I’ll explain it in a way that they’re familiar with

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I haven’t transitioned personally, but being in a pseudo-sales consulting role from a data analyst role, I think you should try Solution Engineering instead of a full sales role.

A lot of SE work requires legit knowledge of POCs sold to companies in a pre-sales capacity. You’d be brought in to assist in closing sales deals where they want more technical information. Fun role, and a weird niche but if it fits it can be really lucrative.

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What would be the difference between SE and full sales? I did some sales competitions in college and liked it, but it’s been a while since then. I remember people started out as account executives, I think? And also BDEs