Caveat: I don’t hire sales engineers but I’ve worked with numerous ones in the past (spent last week with ~800 of them). Some relevant comments:
- sales engineers (SE) can make 200k but most of them don't.
- it's a terrific job if you're technically adept and have enough confidence to speak well.
- strong SEs are often as technical as strong development engineers. They know different things but the best ones are a pleasure to work with as they often help sand down any product's rough edges.
If I was advising people academically for this job, I wouldn’t worry about marketing or business classes beyond micro, macro, and an introductory finance course (usually called engineering economics). In my experience, the sales person they’re paired up with is responsible for crafting the ROI message specific to the customer’s business. Returning to advising, I’d recommend additional writing and speaking classes as SEs often do a ton of both (they often writing RFPs/RFP responses* and doing customer presentations) and elegance in communication is critical. Likewise, in my experience, I wouldn’t recommend anything too specific** (e.g. Cisco certification) as companies spend beaucoup $$$ training their SEs and Account Managers.
SE helps the customer write the RFP and then writes a response to the *same RFP. Yes, the fix is often in as customer staff have their biases towards/against companies as well as having “a two vendor strategy” is often a management wild hair and just adds stress that individual staff don’t appreciate.
**in my experience, certifications are primarily a cash generator and, probably more importantly, a brand amplifier for the certifying company.