In the last 10 years I have evolved from a deep dive technical troubleshooter into a conference speaker, technical seller, and mentor. How exactly did this happen? Every bit of my experience in the past has helped when I am talking to customers period one of the important things to know is that people relate to stories about people even if it’s a technical discussion. Let me illustrate some of my history.
In 2009 I was 3 years into my role as a Premier field engineer on the Premier Support services arm of Microsoft. This role involved proactive and reactive support to large customers of Microsoft. I was delivering workshops to varied groups of people on a lot of SQL Server technology. I realized I was talking to people managers and sometimes managers of managers all the way down to technical people.
What was extremely important was to have advice from other people. I was blessed to have a great manager who always came up with ideas for how to improve and operate better period some of the suggestions including helping to train the technical account managers who were in charge of the account side of support. Other opportunities came up to provide new content and deliver new workshops and assessments.
Part of this role sometimes involved the product team to help get new features built or encourage fixes for issues that customers were seeing. I definitely valued every interaction there and have enjoyed adding these people to my network of resources.
These cumulative experiences led to other people recognizing my abilities. I was also fortunate to have a great interpersonal ability. As the role evolved overtime it became apparent that the product itself was getting features that would help improve performance. At this point it became obvious that there were times the customer should buy a new version of SQL Server instead of sitting on old stuff and having terrible performance.
The other side of my job was helping to ramp up new hires, as well as do interview loops for new hires. This was definitely a different way of thinking, because we have to decide what is best for Microsoft as well as for the candidate. In our group we tried our best to make sure that candidates would be informed of what they were going to go through comma and if they needed further education or help to be qualified for the role, we would make sure that they would know that as well.
By 2012 I was ready to transition to a new role in technical sales. This role focused more on helping sales people advocate to customers the technical side of why they should adopt new technology. Some of this involved workshops similar to performance tuning workshops i did in the past. In this case, I was showing off the new features of SQL Server 2012 or later.
As time moved forward, I got better at those higher-level discussions with C-level executives, and continued to deliver technical material to keep myself grounded. It was in this time frame where i got involved with the user group around SQL Server and started to get involved in SQL Saturdays. I also was mentoring people who wanted to move from support to sales.
I have been delivering at SQL Saturdays across the northeast US and down into the south since 2013. I also had a chance to deliver internally at Microsoft at our TechReady conference. Some of the material included SQL Server tuning, new features in new versions of SQL Server, business intelligence, Azure cloud migrations, and more recently professional development.
I love seeing when people progress in their careers. On the non-technical side, I was also involved in hiring decisions, on-boarding new salespeople and cloud architects. In one case I knew that the candidate was supremely qualified. When i had them walk into the room, I glanced at their resume, dropped it on the table, looked at them, and asked why they were there. They were the perfect candidate, and I had to argue up the chain to make sure that they were considered strongly. They were hired, and very successful. At this point they have moved on in their careers and have become a people manager of technical people.
In early 2018 I moved to the partner side of Microsoft as a partner technical strategist helping a portfolio of partners adopt our cloud technologies. This is both a technical sales position, as well as a strategic position. What is interesting here is that instead of being involved in the sales process directly, my job is to help a partner company learn how to adopt cloud to help their sales process improve.
In this new org, I realized that some folks were not familiar with the other pieces of Microsoft that i had experienced. When working with partners, there’s always account teams on the sales side as well as support that might need to be engaged. I made sure to have mentoring sessions for my peers to help educate them and to get feedback from them on this org’s particular unique strengths.
With my prior experience ramping up sales people and being in hiring loops, I was able to help be in screening calls for college hires, as well as in person finals interviews for college hires. I enjoyed and respected the role I took as part of the team to choose candidates for both internships and permanent roles.
My advice to most people is to figure out what you’d like to do and then volunteer when opportunities open. Be open to trying new things and listening to people who are giving advice. When you have a choice, do what is right, rather than what you think you’re “Allowed” to do. When your boss questions you, hopefully they will have your back when you explain you did what was right.
I’m happy to talk with anybody about some of my experiences as well as what I hear others experience. Feel free to reach out to me. I hope you have a great day!
George Walters 