Is your "Sales Engineer" role actually just an AE job in disguise?
Applying to different sales engineer positions, I have noticed a variety of employers care less about the engineering part of a SE job description and in reality they are looking for a hunter, relationship builder and business development person; more often than not, they do not have any AEs to take care of the deals or do any of the prospecting. Aren't these the responsibilities of an AE?
To me, this seems like they want to avoid hiring multiple people, make people believe this is an engineering role and frankly misleading compared to the job description.
For the people with a Sales Engineer title, would you say this is the most common experience? How would you compare your responsibilities to an Account Executive?
I have only had prior 1 job as a SE but since we were 95% inbound sales, prospecting wasn't really a part of the job and my conversations were, for the most part, with people already interested in the product. Is this rare?