A recent situation with a client tells me sales engineers need sales help. Why? My experience tells me that many an engineer in small and large companies think they are great sales people because sales is easy work and not really hard to do and they have most important skill of all: the technical skill. Unfortunately, most engineers are not great sales people. Why? The reason is simple: sales take a considerable amount of process and persistence as well as the ability to initially position the product or service to meet someone’s business pain.

The majority of engineers I know:

• Don’t like to make cold calls
• Tend to sell on the technical properties a product has versus the business benefits it can provide
• Don’t have the staying power to see the sale through the sales process from prospecting to proposal (sometimes 6 to 24 months and in many cases over 10 calls / follow-ups and meetings)
• Lack the soft skills to build rapport and a trusting relationship with a client

This blog is not to belittle an engineer’s role in the sales process, on the contrary, it is to help define it. Experience tells me after working companies in a number of verticals with a variety of different types of engineers, engineers are:

Excellent Resource

Excellent resource throughout the sales process as they can help to define the requirements and technical fit of the product when dealing with a customer’s technical team.

Product Data

Vaults of detailed product data that a sales person can learn from and utilize when linking a client’s business pain to how the product you are selling can solve it. Every sales person needs to have an understanding of how their product works and where it fits in order to help qualify opportunities and be positioned to speak to a variety of individuals at a company in different roles – some technical, some financial, some strategic.

Great Resources

Great resources when trying to move the deal from proposal to close. Often at the proposal stage, the business need has been identified and met and now the technical fit has to be formalized; here is where an engineer is in their element and can help to bring this deal to fruition. The prerequisite to this is to make sure the engineer is prepped on the sort of questions that will be asked, the business pains that have been the drivers in the decision making process and is able to tie back to how the technical prowess of the product can help the client achieve their business goals.

So my point here is not to discount engineers in the sales process, rather utilize them effectively – if a company is like a toolbox, and an engineer is a screwdriver, don’t use them to hammer a nail. A company’s engineers should be intimately involved in the sales process but they should not lead it. Use them strategically.

To learn more about us, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.