What Is A Sales Engineer And How Do You Know When It’s Time to Hire One?
Technical innovation and world-changing digital products rely on incredible feats of engineering, laborious attention to coding detail and fastidious attention to manufacturing and product creation detail. It also needs very good sales people to get the product in front of people.
Call it ironic, but one of the most humbling moments for any startup in a VC meeting, founder putting their business plan in front of a bank, or CEO attempting to hire new staff is when the sales approach falls on deaf ears. For all the clarity of tech purpose, and many man hours put into development, your market approach has to have a well thought out, viable and brand-led sales strategy that highlights why and how this product differentiates from others, and why it deserves to be heard, seen, used or experienced.
The second you move from creating your product to market-facing communication, you need to take the months, if not years, of development, love and attention and distill it into something sellable.
That can be incredibly difficult, if not frustrating, for those whose labor of love is now being put under the microscope. Building a sales approach, let alone a continuing structure of product or service support, teaching, and development, takes a very particular type of tech-minded sales talent: one who understands the product, it’s development, and history, but who’s also deeply ingrained in both the branding and marketing language and technical support, line support and use.
This is where a sales engineer steps in.
What is a sales engineer?
Sales engineers are your front-line brand, service, and product thought leaders, customer advocates, trainers, and salespeople.
Although their roles do vary from industry to industry and product to product, the best way to describe sales engineers is as a conduit between sales teams and developers. They are part of the team that builds the story around the product, they’re instrumental in creating the language and sales scripts to sell it, and central to creating platforms of product support with customers, often acting as first-line support for sales teams and customers who need to query elements of the product.
Sales engineers are naturally customer-facing, but technically proficient enough to get into the product tech weeds - in almost every aspect they have to embody your product.
What makes a good sales engineer?
Customer-facing experience:
This includes great soft skills such as empathic sales techniques, confidence with negotiation and escalation of queries, being able to focus on top-line sales figures, and simultaneously communicating technical information.
Great communicator:
Sales require not only confident communication skills but persuasive skills. You need to be able to be both friendly, authoritative, knowledgeable but humble, able to spin a yarn, and invested enough in the tech, figures, growth options, packages, and support to talk to anyone in any role about your product.
Natural collaborator:
As sales engineers tend to work across training, sales, marketing, and with the tech-heads, they need to be collaborating pros. They need to be cross-organizational wizards, bringing together disparate sources of information to build effective sales strategies.
Technical know-how:
Above all else, you have to know your product or service inside and out. Sales engineers are often expected to be able to pull apart and analyze their product, confidently discuss technical aspects and manage any technical rollout, fixes, updates, or patches.
When do I need to hire a sales engineer?
Although startup founders and senior developers may see themselves as sales engineers (in fact in growth and seeding stages they undoubtedly will be), the general rule of thumb is from day one someone in the enterprise needs to take responsibility for any customer-facing sales and technical support - be that a developer, or someone else in senior leadership. But it’s one of the most vital roles to fill as you look to scale.
From a customer's point of view, continuity in sales support is vital as people learn about your product. A key way of enshrining customer service as both helpful and relevant is to make sure your sales engineer team is well stocked with talent, able to query any question, and able to take the initiative on the road or digitally to keep customers happy: so hire early and hire well!
