If you sell anything technical, you may need sales help
and support. Often you have a technician or a product support person who you
can get answers from. This is a great help, but don’t confuse this person with
a Sales Engineer.
Sales Engineers have a unique blend of sales, personal,
and technical skills. They need the ability to have a comfortable conversation
with the C level people at your prospects site and with the end users. Can your
“technical” person do that? If yes, you are closer. Now can they describe cold
fusion so that you can understand it, you have a winner.
The sales engineer needs to be able to do the following. Understanding
the prospects needs, knowing how to solve them with your solution, being able
to describe and demo the solution, making the difficult to understand easy to
understand.
If your “technical” person can do that, make them happy,
keep them excited, and turn them into gold.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteGood stuff ! I could not agree more with you on the differences between a vanilla engineer and a sales engineer.