The four skills every sales engineering leader needs | Malcolm Murphy

The skills that make someone a strong technical expert are rarely the skills that make them a strong leader of the business around that expertise.

This episode continues the conversation with Malcolm Murphy, who returns to Tech World Human Skills for a second time. The first conversation covered the people management skills a new leader needs. This one moves into the business management side, set specifically in the world of technical pre-sales. Malcolm lays out four areas he has come to rely on: partnering properly with your sales leader rather than acting as a service center, knowing your sales process well enough to know when it is right to deviate from it, understanding how organizations actually buy, and staying cross functional even when the day job keeps pulling toward the next urgent deal.

The conversation gets specific. Malcolm tells the story of a car purchase that never happened, and what it taught him about what buyers are really comparing you against. He and Ben talk about the difference between a sales process and a sales framework, when it is safe to break the rules, and why treating your sales counterpart as a genuine partner, not a supplier, changes how a whole team behaves. For Sales Engineers, Technical Consultants, Customer Success Leaders, and CTOs or engineering leaders trying to grow into a broader leadership role, this episode is a practical map of what that growth actually requires.

Malcolm Murphy has worked across organizations of every size, from global enterprises to small teams, and has held roles as an individual contributor, a solution consultant, a sales engineering leader, and now a sales leader at Mimecast. He has also spent time on the buying side of the table, managing a technology budget inside an end user organization, which shapes how directly he talks about what buyers actually think.

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Listen and subscribe:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1yU6AcoCLySqE1wGn80HOT?si=649d8f8c3d8b47a3 

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tech-world-human-skills/id1674003078  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@techworldhumanskills/podcasts

Newsletter and archive: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com 

Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts 

Technical Storytelling for Individuals: https://www.elevatedyou.live/individuals 

Technical Storytelling for Organisations: https://www.elevatedyou.live/organisations 

Malcolm Murphy Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malcolmmurphy/