Ashwin Kumar

for embedded fintech, what's the most important org? not eng. not product. not design. it's...sales engineering. sales engineering owns (1) pre-sales solution design (2) post-sales onboarding and implementation (3) some ongoing support. it is the most important org for your embedded fintechs to get right. but i never hear anyone talk about the importance of sales engineers. product, engineers, designers are worshipped (depending on the company). if you're building embedded fintech - you are not a product company - you are not a design company - you are not a sales company You are a SOLUTIONS company. You build tech (so you need to be great at engineering & product). But you don't sell tech. you sell a solution. your customer doesn't understand how fintech works. the sales eng org bridges the gap. If they bridge that gap well, the org becomes incredibly strategic. Good sales engineer orgs are the nexus for all the other teams. The collate input from sales, product & eng. If they collate that input well they can leverage it to make all of those orgs (sales, product & eng) better. i think fintech need to elevate the role of sales engineers in terms of (1) status (2) importance. For embedded fintech writ large to be successful, we need to get better at building sales engineering teams. How do we get better? Start talking about it. Not enough ppl talk about it...but: It's the number one request I get from my portfolio companies. "Help I'm growing fast, I have closed lots of customers, I need help w/ Sales Eng" Embedded fintech is coming, let's start talking more about how to build sale engineering teams. We need to make it the sexiest team in embedded fintech.