<p>I want to work in technical sales as a sales engineer, and am currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I'm struggling with the math, however. Would a degree in English with courses in Information Technology help me get into a role like this?</p>
<p>The most recruited person I ever met was a technical writing major with a minor in EE. She was getting job offers and phone calls from places she had never even contacted.</p>
<p>Most technical sales jobs are more sales and less technical, though some will require the engineering degree as a starting point.</p>
<p>All the sales engineers I am familiar with have a strong technical degree, not just a minor. Sales skills and techniques are important, but eventually you need to be able to understand and explain the details of the product, and it is questionable that a minor alone would give you that kind of depth.</p>
<p>Now, bear in mind that there are indeed plenty of positions for people with the type of academic program you and Magnetron are describing, they just generally work in slightly different positions. We have a small staff of people who essentially rewrite all our proposals, and most of them are some type of writing major with additional technical coursework and are indeed highly in demand. But they are not usually the ones directly interacting with the customers - that is where a lack of tech skills can really trip you and make the customer skeptical.</p>
<p>tech skills can be many things, however. do you need to be a software developer in order to know enough about your company’s software to sell it?</p>
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That depends entirely on who you are selling it to. Sales people generally sell to a technically-uneducated customer, and require no specific technical background. Sales engineers generally sell to technical professionals and need to be able to discuss the guts of the system in detail.</p>
<p>For example, if I am going to buy a laser, it is not going to be because of snappy patter or a nice smile. I need to know that your laser has certain characteristics, and can be modified in a manner that suits my needs. I need to know how it has been tested, how it will perform in different environments, and what areas represent a risk for me. I need you to understand my needs and help me find solutions that meet them. If you are not yourself a laser engineer, I do not think you would have the understanding the of the issues that would allow you to do so, if we could even understand each other in the first place. And while you are talking to engineers back at your company to get me mt answers, the sales engineer with your competitor is answering my questions on the spot and making the sale.</p>
<p>I completely agree with Cosmicfish. There is an important difference between a salesperson and a sales engineer. The sales engineer needs to be able to explain every technical aspect of the product and have a much more technical understanding of the product than the engineers that they are selling it to.</p>
<p>The company I work for recently purchased a new software package, and yes, the sales engineers were able to answer the most technical questions on how the software was created and how it could be customized to suit our unique needs and specifications. We received proposals from multiple companies and all but a few of them were able to answer the technical questions on the spot. The ones that were unable to answer the questions were quickly removed from the running!</p>
<p>Thanks for the great input guys</p>
<p>Technical sales is such a valuable skill. I have a brilliant software engineer friend who just the other day complained that while giving a presentation, his boss (who sucks as a salesperson) was explaining their product at the data structure level to a room full of mba’s and other assorted non-technicals and they were all just staring at the one technical guy in their company to gauge his reaction. That one guy said no, so everyone else said no. If you can convince the engineer, CTO, etc. you’ve got the sale.</p>
<p>There is a difference between technical sales and sales engineering. Being in technical sales probably doesn’t strictly require a technical degree, just some tech knowledge, and seems to be what people have been describing here. But sales engineers, in my experience, are very much engineers, and have different responsibilities. Sales engineers generally support the sales people and the customers, by preparing and running technical demos at customer meetings and trade shows, helping customers troubleshoot technical problems with newly purchased systems, etc.</p>
<p>How can I get into technical sales?</p>
<p>A friend’s son was just offered two such jobs and accepted one of them. His engineering major was completely unrelated to the type of things that he will be doing sales consulting on. A CS degree would have given him the ability to look at jobs across our company - developer, support, IT, engineering, etc.</p>