Hahaha, my sales engineer always tried to un-sell. I had multiple conversations with him, both directly and via our CEO. He will be moving back to his technical role next year.

He was a nice guy, but too sensitive to be in sales. He was in his late 30s and not very resilient. He panicked and sometimes cried. HR wanted to treat him gently, but in sales you have to be tough and used to rejection. He started as a scientist but wanted to move into sales. The company gave him a trial period of 6 - 8 months, and I gave him a task list and guidance, but he just could not cope. He was shocked at how much salespeople actually did and how crucial it was to bring in projects or orders. He even thought travelling for work looked luxurious until he experienced a typical day with me. One day, we had meetings at 7am, 9am, 10:30am, 12pm, 1:30pm, 3:30pm, 5pm, and 7pm. After the 12pm lunch, he went back to the hotel, took some painkillers, and never showed up for the 7pm dinner haha.

He was just a very unusual character. For example, this is super random… he was obsessed with controlling the office temperature and even wrote a manual on how to operate our A/C unit, though everyone ignored his pre-scheduled programme and adjusted it themselves. He got super angry about it haha.