If you’re a sales engineer, you have a lot of responsibilities.
From converting prospects into customers to managing sales data, you know just how important it is to have the right skills to handle your day-to-day sales engineer responsibilities effectively.
Given the complexity of sales engineering operations, building a set of sales engineer skills is key to both showing your value and serving your customers.
In this blog post, we’ll break down 10 sales engineer skills and helpful tools you can leverage to take your impact to the next level.
2. Analytical thinking and problem-solving
Let’s get started!
As a sales engineer, having a strong understanding of your company’s product(s) or service(s) goes without saying.
You should be able to answer questions about:
In turn, you should be able to:
Another skill you’re likely to find in a sales engineer job description is the ability to find and solve customer problems. To do this effectively (and enjoy the process!), having strong problem solving skills is a prerequisite. Assessing a situation quickly, identifying the root cause of the problem, and developing a solution that meets customer needs is table stakes.
On top of that, you’ll also need analytical thinking skills to brainstorm, find patterns, seek out data, and make informed decisions based on the situation at hand. Analytical thinking skills can run the gamut for sales engineers, from researching and analyzing data to using creativity to solve unique problems.
As a sales engineer, communicating with potential customers about your products and/or services may involve presenting to large groups, including your teams and other stakeholders. Being able to present information clearly and concisely is critical, as good presentation skills can help you engage your audience and build rapport.
Confidently speaking in front of a group can also help increase trust—whether you’re in an interview or meeting with a customer evaluating different software options.
Empathy lets you understand and share the feelings of another person or group of people—or put yourself in someone else’s shoes. In sales, empathy often comes into play during discovery, when the primary objective is to dig into a prospect or customer’s pain points and goals and really listen about what they may (or may not!) need.
Needless to say, empathy is essential for developing relationships and helping people solve their most pressing problems. Knowing how to personalize a pitch will go a long way in helping people feel seen and heard.
As someone in a sales engineer role, you'll be responsible for completing various tasks in a typical workday, from running client meetings and product demonstrations to doing administrative work and research.
Practical time management skills will help you successfully complete all of these tasks. Having a solid time management system can also help you:
If you have strong risk analysis skills, you’ll be well-equipped to find and reduce any risks you may come across while learning about your customer’s problems. This can be useful, as bumps in the road are common during the sales process, sometimes lasting months and involving the communication of multiple parties.
Separate but related: Having strong risk analysis skills can help you better understand a potential client’s business and specific pain points, making it easier to present the best possible solution.
As the saying goes, "It’s not what you know; it’s who you know." Being a sales engineer is no exception. By using your networking skills to strengthen your professional network, you can gain exposure to new industries and sales opportunities that you may not have had otherwise.
Networking with others in your space can also help you stay up to date with industry trends and common problems and solutions.
Let’s face it—potential customers may not always see the light after your first sales call. In some situations, you may have to rely on the power of persuasion to help convince a prospect that your product or service is the right fit for their short- and long-term needs.
Down the line, after a prospect becomes a long-time customer, they may ask for a different price, timeline, or contract. Knowing how to navigate those negotiation conversations will hopefully benefit you, your company, and your customer.
Because sales engineers are often part of a sales team, the ability to work with a variety of different personalities is a major bonus (if not a requirement). Strong teamwork skills can help your whole team work together to achieve a common goal.
Chances are good that you’ll need to quickly get to know—and collaborate well with—different people to ensure your sales process goes off without a hitch. “Teamwork makes the dreamwork” is a refrain for a reason. Any friction felt internally will likely be felt externally, by your customers.
The last skill on our list of sales engineer skills is project management. Project management helps you juggle multiple projects and deadlines to ensure you and your team accomplish the tasks at hand—without wasting time or working harder than necessary. Recognizing common project management challenges ahead of time can also help you save your team from potential headaches.
As a sales engineer, you may need to do all of the following on any given day:
Now that you know how to be a good sales engineer, you may be wondering about tools you can use to take your work to the next level. Check out these 11 sales engineer tools to help support your sales team with daily tasks and optimize everyday processes.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) software that enables salespeople to manage their pipeline, attach files and notes to deals, and create custom workflows.
By automating repetitive tasks, Salesforce allows you to focus on selling and building relationships with customers. It also provides extensive reporting features that help you track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
Zoom is a video conferencing service that allows you to hold and attend virtual meetings, conferences, and webinars. Zoom also offers several features that are ideal for sales engineers, such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, and breakout rooms. These allow you to effectively give presentations and demo products without needing physical materials.
Google Calendar is a free online tool that allows users to create and manage their meetings and events by setting reminders, creating recurring events, and sharing calendar information with others. Whether you use it for managing your own time or for coordinating with a team, Google Calendar can be a valuable tool for sales engineers.
Calendly is a sales automation tool that enables you to easily schedule and track appointments. With Calendly, you can let customers schedule meetings automatically, send automatic reminders before appointments, keep track of customer interactions, and follow up with customers after meetings.
Calendly also integrates with popular CRM tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot, making it easy to keep customer data in one place.
Slack is a team messaging app that lets users communicate and collaborate in real time. It's available on the web and mobile and integrates with various applications, including Salesforce, allowing you to easily access customer data and manage your sales pipeline within the app.
You can also use Slack channels for file sharing, group chats, and private conversations. The messaging tool is valuable for keeping track of conversations, sharing documents and files, and coordinating with other team members.
HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that connects everything scaling companies need to deliver a best-in-class customer experience into one place.
With Sales Hub, you can access deeper insight into your prospects, automate busywork, and close more deals faster. There are countless features specifically designed to power sales teams, including task automation, email sequencing, pipeline management, deal forecasting, and more.
Gmail is an email service developed by Google. Users can use Gmail online or through mobile apps for iOS and Android. Gmail also offers features such as offline email storage, an email search function, support for multiple inboxes, and more. Gmail is great for staying organized and keeping track of customer communication.
Loom is a powerful tool sales engineers can use to take their sales presentations to the next level. With Loom, you can quickly and easily record yourself giving a presentation and share the video with prospective customers. Loom videos can also be embedded on websites and shared through social media, making it easy for prospects to view the presentation at their convenience.
SignNow is an e-sign software that allows users to sign documents electronically. You can use SignNow to streamline the sales process by creating and sending digital contracts to clients. Your client can then review and sign the contract without printing it, scanning it, and emailing it back.
You can also use SignNow's tracking feature to see when a client views or signs a contract (which makes follow up a breeze).
Tourial helps you create customized, interactive product demos that guide your audience through your product in a way that is engaging and easy to follow. With Tourial, you can eliminate friction points in the sales process, increase conversions, and shorten sales cycles. The platform is simple to use and gives you flexibility to create tailored stories for specific audiences.
Tango is a browser extension and desktop application that automatically generates helpful how-to guides while you work. What makes it so popular with sales engineers? It takes half the time to create technical documentation, making it easier to spend more time winning deals and less time answering repetitive questions.
As a sales engineer, you know that efficiency (read: how to save time) is the name of the game. Being able to quickly assess customer needs and provide solutions that suit unique use cases is half the job.
The other half of the job is usually helping users become successful with products, processes, or new tools. Because if your teammates and/or customers can easily learn how to get work done (the right way), then everyone wins.
Remember those 10 sales engineer skills we rounded up to help you be more efficient? We may have left out the most important one of all. Excelling at knowledge transfer will make you an invaluable team player (and a no-brainer new hire, if someday you decide to make a jump).
Ready to ditch the documentation dread and set a new standard for your sales engineering team?
A sales engineer is a salesperson who specializes in scientifically or technologically advanced products. In this role, sales engineers commonly work on a sales team and help customers solve problems by presenting solutions.
Sales engineer tools help support sales teams with daily tasks and aim to automate and optimize related sales processes. Some examples include Tango, Salesforce, and Slack.
A sales engineer has an estimated total pay of $117,607 per year.
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