Becoming a sales engineer...

College Majors Engineering Majors
21

I am not trying to put you down boneh3ad. But, I am pretty sure you never took that intro to Marketing classes/courses aka Marketing 301. I understand since your major is Mechanical Engineering. I took a couple classes in Marketing as core courses for business major. So, I am saying it again: If any of you want to be Professional as Sales Engineer (not car sales man or selling washer and dryer etc), you need to take that classes as elective if you are not business major. Knowledge is huge and once you get it, it will make you the Man and will separate you from the boys.

That class will you will teach, equip and introduce you a bit of the tools in marketing, the psychology of marketing etc. And if you want to be specific and going deep then take another marketing class, like direct marketing, etc.

YES, Marketing courses definately have things to do with successful Sales Engineers. That is why people are not successful in Sales Engineer because they don’t have the philosophy of Marketing as presented in that class/course.

Your Engineering degree is also good to some degree for sales. But when it comes to professional sales job, you need to take some marketing courses. It is even worse that some people think of sales jobs can be done by only having High School degree and know how to talk to people. So high-end goods like aeroplanes, tractors, earth movers, etc, to be successful salesman, you need to take Marketing classes too.

More importantly, if you take MBA, you have to take classes in Marketing too. Why, MBA requires you to take that, so you can have knowledge about marketing, how to deal with sales-marketing staff and know to analyze the market and its philosophy etc. IF, they they think marketing is not important, they will not require you to take such courses in getting MBA, right?. check the MBA courses and its requirements.

The name of the job: Sales Engineer meaning it is not engineer but sales and to be successful in that job, you need also the basic knowledge of Sales-Marketing. IF you want to be successful and be into managerial position, take marketing classes/course but if you just want to be ordinary sales engineer then do not take Marketing classes.

22

Sales is sales. Anyone with the requisite selling skills, and the aptitude to be trained about and understand their product, can be successful selling it. I have a friend with a business degree who sells airplanes. Has enough smarts to learn about the planes, but doesn’t need to actually design them to sell them. My sister is in pharmaceutical sales with a liberal arts degree. She was smart enough to be trained all about her drugs, without having any science background, and is very successful. Insurance agents can know the ins and outs of insurance without being the actuary who creates the products. As for sales engineer, It might take an engineering degree to understand the product (or get the job), but the selling skills are much more important to success.

23

When I was studying engineering, I didn’t really appreciate the difference of marketing vs sales. Years later I worked with marketing teams and interfaced a bit with sale reps (although more typically I dealt with service reps doing technical analysis). Here’s an a helpful comparison chart for those that are interested.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Marketing_vs_Sales

24

While having some basic understanding of marketing is useful, as Chardo said, the key requisite is selling skills. Selling is a talent, if you have it, it can (and will) lead to a very long and successful career.

Using UF’s Sale Engineering minor (16 to 18 credits) as an example of the type of courses that could be useful to a sales engineer.

Keep in mind a sales engineer doesn’t need to minor in it, but this gives one a good idea of what UF thinks would be useful for someone entering the field.

25

Caveat: I don’t hire sales engineers but I’ve worked with numerous ones in the past (spent last week with ~800 of them). Some relevant comments:

  • sales engineers (SE) can make 200k but most of them don't.
  • it's a terrific job if you're technically adept and have enough confidence to speak well.
  • strong SEs are often as technical as strong development engineers. They know different things but the best ones are a pleasure to work with as they often help sand down any product's rough edges.

If I was advising people academically for this job, I wouldn’t worry about marketing or business classes beyond micro, macro, and an introductory finance course (usually called engineering economics). In my experience, the sales person they’re paired up with is responsible for crafting the ROI message specific to the customer’s business. Returning to advising, I’d recommend additional writing and speaking classes as SEs often do a ton of both (they often writing RFPs/RFP responses* and doing customer presentations) and elegance in communication is critical. Likewise, in my experience, I wouldn’t recommend anything too specific** (e.g. Cisco certification) as companies spend beaucoup $$$ training their SEs and Account Managers.

SE helps the customer write the RFP and then writes a response to the *same RFP. Yes, the fix is often in as customer staff have their biases towards/against companies as well as having “a two vendor strategy” is often a management wild hair and just adds stress that individual staff don’t appreciate.

**in my experience, certifications are primarily a cash generator and, probably more importantly, a brand amplifier for the certifying company.

26

@fragbot I say that coming from my dad who was a sales engineer manager at HP with over 600 at any given moment reporting to him, and he directly hired each of them. It is a tremendous job, but in his field, also a lot of travel (50-75%). Out of his 600 employees, he says at least 75% of them with 5-10 years of experience made 200k+.