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This is something my wife has suggested. About four years ago I almost made the switch to get into this at my previous employer. I had gone as far as getting technical certifications for their product. But before I got an opening I was recruited away to my current role, doubling down on business operations stuff.
This is good to hear. Do you think sales engineering is hard to come into of you aren't already in the company / have experience with their solutions? What would get me looked at from the outside?
Conversation skills and general people skills are the most important. You can turn a intelligent and curious sales person into a sales engineer, but it seems nearly impossible to teach a highly intelligent and skilled engineer people skills.
Straight up sales experience is great, if you have it. Also, I'd play up times where you advocated for something within your company or with a client. Bonus points if you can quantify the impact of your efforts. More bonus points if you can describe successfully navigating a complex problem with a customer or another team -- what was the problem and how did you scope it? Who were the stakeholders and how did you identify them? Did you define clear success/fail criteria to asses the results of your work on the problem? How do you handle customer objections? Are you good at asking questions to discover what the customer really needs (because often customers have misidentified their own problems)? Any stories you can share that answer these questions will help you.
For the technical side, you'll just have to target companies whose product seems "crammable," for lack of a better word. This depends on your technical chops. You have a CS degree, so I'm assuming you can probably figure things out on your own and teach yourself, if so there are a lot of companies available to yoy. Sign up for a free trial of their software, play around with it, read the docs, see if it's something you can learn or whether you're in way over your head (but tbh you'll feel like you're in a little over your head no matter what -- that's normal). Make sure you do the obvious stuff like reading the site's main homepage, the "About Us" page, etc. You'd be surprised how many people show up to interviews poorly informed about the company and/or the product.
I'd also at least skim "Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer's Handbook". It's no-nonsense and not as dry as it sounds. It will give you a good idea of the sorts of problems and questions that SEs have and give you an idea of whether it's something you want to do or not.
as a coda here, unfornately I don't actually hold a CS degree. I switched majors halfway through. Nor do I ahve prior sales experience.
I am pretty confident, I could do (and enjoy) technical sales, as I peruse job listings, I am doubtful about getting to an initial interview with my background. I've put this to the test by applying to several, but I am not hopeful.
A path to Sales engineering looks like I'll have to come up through strategy 3 or 4 above anyway (entry level sales or entry level software dev). We'll see, I guess
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