Sales Engineer – The best job in the world!

Is it for you?

The Sales Engineer job combines an engineer’s technical expertise with a salesperson’s sales skills. This results in a wide range of requirements that need to be met. In almost all cases, sales engineers come from a technical background and take on a sales role. The technical requirements cannot be trained on a website. The industry is very diverse. I am happy to provide you with the essential sales knowledge here. The Sales Skills Tree is an excellent place to start.

From my experience, I can say that many engineers find it difficult to approach customers openly and deal with occasional rejection. The articles on this site will teach you the basics of the most important sales skills. This will enable you to share in the excitement of the profession successfully.

Demands and Boundaries of the Profession

The employers of sales engineers are as diverse as the products they sell. They range from mid-sized companies to global automotive suppliers. The job requirements vary accordingly. In smaller companies, the sales engineer is often a lone fighter, handling parts of marketing, product development, and complaint handling. There are separate departments for all of these in larger companies, and they can concentrate more on sales.

However, there is still an interface function to these areas. He is the ear of the company to the customer. The sales engineer must bring the customer’s wishes, needs, and problems back to the company. He is the person who is most often confronted with competitors’ products. Therefore, competitive analysis is one of the classic tasks of the sales engineer. He is usually the first to hear about quality problems. 

Here is a summary of the five most important activities:

• Customer service
  This is where sales skills are most in demand. Acquisition, product presentation, objection handling, and contract negotiation are among the skills required. Soft skills such as empathy, body language, and organizational skills are also needed.
• Application Consulting 
  This is closely related to customer service. However, it is more concerned with the technical requirements for presenting a product competently. The sales engineer must be able to communicate a tangible benefit to the customer. This, in turn, requires sufficient technical knowledge to understand the customer’s industry.
• Product Management
  Understanding the customer’s processes and requirements is critical to product management. Only by understanding the customer’s needs can the right products be developed. It is vital to keep an eye on the future of the market. Where do customers want to be in five years? Only those who know this and develop solutions together with product management and marketing can secure a competitive advantage.
• Quality Management
  As the interface to the customer, the sales engineer must pass on feedback to the relevant departments. This is the only way to identify and correct problems quickly. This is even more important when selling safety-critical products.
• Marketing
  The Internet has changed both marketing and sales. The majority of inquiring prospects have already done their research online. Sales engineers are also engaging in marketing by writing or sharing posts about their products on networks such as Xing or LinkedIn. The lines between marketing and sales are often blurred.

Depending on the employer, sales engineers perform all these tasks to varying degrees of intensity. In addition, basic business skills are required. Bids, unit costs, and return on investment must be calculated. The importance of delivery terms and the resulting transportation costs should not be underestimated.

When selling large systems, the planning and sales process can take years. Different sub-projects from different departments are often intertwined. Creating specifications and feasibility studies can be just as necessary as defining milestones in the project process. A certain level of project management skills is also required.

Last but not least, you must deal with other people daily, so strong soft skills are part of the sales engineer’s job profile. 

Sales Check

Answer the following questions

• Do you like to approach people?
• Do you enjoy communicating with people?
• Are you sensitive to the emotions of others?
• Can you remain objective and fair in heated discussions?
• Can you accept defeat and learn from it?
• Do you have the drive to stay focused on long-term projects?
• Do you like to travel?
• Are you flexible with your daily schedule?
• Do regular nights away from home fit into your current life situation?
• Are you able to work independently toward a goal?
• Do you have the discipline to avoid distractions when working from home?
• Do you have a separate place to work from home?

Conclusion

Any sales and technology expertise you don’t have will come with hard work over time. Your personality is hard to change. You have what it takes if you can answer “yes” to the above questions.