Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow
12touches.com, Wednesday, August 25th, 2026
In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work - yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public.
That's not a knock on AEs. It's structural. The AE is understood to be advocating; everyone in the room knows how they're compensated and discounts accordingly. The SE occupies a different position entirely. You're the one who says that integration is going to be painful, or you don't need our premium tier for this, or honestly, that's not what our product is for. You give up small pieces of the pitch in the name of being accurate, and that's precisely why the customer believes you when you tell them what will work.
Solutions architects, technical account managers, professional services consultants, customer success engineers, field CTOs - the pattern holds across all of it. Technical credibility is earned by being right, including when being right is inconvenient. It's the most durable form of trust in the business.
And for most technical field professionals, it's almost entirely invisible outside the handful of accounts they happen to be staffed on.