Wednesday, September 05, 2007

The Hazards of being a Sales Engineer

How old is NCLB, aka "No Child Left Behind"? I am a Sales Engineer ... er, babysitter for sales people ... and I see evidence of lack of cognitive skills that are beyond my admittedly meagre imagination. These folks are in their 20s on up, so I shudder to think that NCLB is exacerbating the situation.

Example: Sales rep rushes over to my desk, almost breathless. "I just sent you an email, I wanted to check if you got it."

I check and sure enough, an email arrived 7 seconds ago. I hadn't seen it because I was busy websurfing for ways to kill myself without causing my wife to cry.

2 comments:

jannx said...

WD... "surfing for ways to... " almost sprayed tea all over my screen when I read that!

Unknown said...

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Another function of the sales engineer is to introduce modified, improved, and/or advanced technology to potential users who may have an application but who have not yet acquired knowledge of the material or technique in question. The sales engineer may conduct training sessions or demonstrations to accomplish this. The task of seeking out industries, firms, or business models that do not yet use a certain product (for example, a CAx system or a CRM system) and causing them to adopt a new approach using that product is what puts the "applications" in "applications engineering" or "application development" (not to be confused with another common sense of that term, which refers to software development and programming). The task is to seek out and develop new applications for the product, in order to increase sales. The customer's only motivation for adopting it is "what it can do for me", such as same-output-lower-costs, more-output-same-cost, etc. Thus, when things work out correctly, both firms profit from the application development.
In general, the more sophisticated – and better paid - sales engineers are closely aligned with specific clients and sales people. They are capable of performing a well synchronized dance with sales people in asking the right questions at the right time, and deliver the right messaging without sharing too much information or providing free consultation.

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