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Owen McCarthy
I was a software engineer in Dublin who accidentally became a salesperson. In 2017, I was building internal tools at a fintech startup when the CEO asked me to join a sales call because the prospect had technical questions. I answered them. We closed the deal. The CEO looked at me and said, "You're doing this from now on." I protested. He gave me a raise. I stopped protesting.
That accidental career pivot led me to Intercom, where I joined as a solutions engineer in 2018. Intercom was in the middle of moving upmarket, from self-serve startups to mid-market and enterprise, and they needed people who could speak both engineering and business. My job was to sit between the sales team and the product team, translate requirements in both directions, and build custom demos that showed prospects what Intercom could do for their specific use case.
Over three years, I supported 200+ enterprise deals and built a demo environment that became Intercom's secret weapon. The insight was simple but powerful: generic product demos lose deals. Custom demos that use the prospect's own data, their own brand, their own use cases, those win deals. I built a system that let solutions engineers spin up a customized Intercom instance in under an hour, pre-loaded with the prospect's data. Win rates on deals where we used custom demos were 2.4x higher than generic demos.
In 2021, I moved to Stripe as a pre-sales technical lead for EMEA. Stripe's approach to technical selling was different and, I'd argue, better than any company I'd seen. Stripe didn't really do "demos" in the traditional sense. They did "integration workshops," sessions where a solutions architect would sit with the prospect's engineering team and actually start building the integration together. The sale happened during the build. By the time the contract was on the table, the prospect's engineers had already written code against Stripe's API. The switching cost was built into the sales process. Brilliant.
I left Stripe in 2024 to write about the craft of technical selling, which is criminally under-discussed in tech. Sales content is all about "discovery calls" and "MEDDIC" and "building champions." Engineering content is all about architecture and code quality. Nobody writes about the space in between: the people who have to understand the product deeply enough to build a custom demo, explain it clearly enough to win a non-technical buyer, and diagnose technical objections in real-time. That's what I write about.
I live in Ranelagh, Dublin. I play rugby on Saturdays, I brew my own beer (badly), and I have a theory that the best indicator of a SaaS company's health is the quality of its solutions engineering team.
Experience
- Pre-Sales Technical Lead, Stripe (EMEA)
- Solutions Engineer, Intercom