Sales engineering is truly an art-form. To be awesome, a sales engineer needs to invest effort into the technology, the business opportunity, and most importantly their personal style. I like to say they need to be left and right brained. Technical, creative, personable comes to mind. They also need to gain the trust of those they are partnered with and presenting to. Here are my 5 points of discussion of becoming an awesome sales engineer.
We’ve all had them and maybe we were one ourselves. Maybe we still are? Managers that simply could not let go of any control. This goes for owners of businesses as well. You know the type… they’re pretty sure no one can do the job as well as them. They have the “If you want a job done right you have to do it yourself” philosophy. I wish I could tell you this applies to new managers only… unfortunately it doesn’t.
Somewhere along the way sales professionals thought they had found the infamous “silver bullet” for sales success. “If I just Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin I will have thousands of sales easily!” Question… when has marketing using email, faxing, or mailers ever worked that way? Isn’t social media the same? You’re return will always be fractions of a percent for the effort. Always has, always will be… and you know what? That’s o.k. So, Is social media a waste of time?
Just Business… Nothing Personal… Of course business is personal. The concept that somehow when we call something “business” the personal touch to the end user and/or potential customer becomes less important is just wrong. I don’t care if you’re the owner of a small “mom and pop” organization or the CEO of a global conglomerate all business is personal or at least it should be.
