total jobs On EngineeringCrossing

188,045

new jobs this week On EngineeringCrossing

13,428

total jobs on EmploymentCrossing network available to our members

1,478,350

job type count

On EngineeringCrossing

Building Relevant Work Experience in Sales Engineering Jobs

3 Views      
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Many sales engineers harm their careers early on by accepting jobs that offer better salaries or work-life balance instead of choosing jobs that provide more valuable opportunities to build relevant work experience. However, lack of relevant work experience on one's resume significantly decreases the number and quality of job offers received and stunts career growth. Ignoring jobs that help build relevant work experience can spoil sales engineers' career prospects in the long run and block them from advancing far beyond their entry-level positions. This article deals with a few little-known secrets for building relevant work experience in sales engineer jobs.

As a sales engineer, you need to demonstrate both technical knowledge and sales skills to impress potential employers. Most sales engineers confine their career strategies to gathering knowledge of products of increasing technical complexity in the latest market categories. While this may have been an effective career strategy for yesterday's sales engineers, it is no longer sufficient for those who want to rise fast, reach the top, and stay there.

First of all, to stand out from the crowd as a sales engineer, you need to realize that the sales aspect of your job comes before the engineer aspect. The drawback of the career strategy most commonly used by sales engineers for building experience is that it focuses more on the engineer part of the professional profile than on the sales part. Every sales engineer in the market focuses on technical product knowledge in his or her resume, but very few showcase relevant sales experience.



While building technical knowledge should remain an ongoing and essential process for the engineer in you, the path to building relevant sales skills includes the following steps:
  1. Selling existing products to existing clients: This will significantly boost your interpersonal skills.

  2. Selling new products to existing clients: Another rung on the ladder of sales skill development, reaching this stage demonstrates that you have developed the interpersonal skills necessary to sell new products to people with whom you have established relationships. This may seem like a small step, but it is significant—both in terms of your professional development and for anybody reviewing your portfolio in the future.

  3. Selling existing products to new clients: This is another step toward fully developing your selling skills that is incredibly relevant to potential employers. In the first two stages, you moved within a known periphery while increasing your interpersonal skills. At this level, the skills you must develop are radically different since they relate to developing client relationships on your own and serving new clients. A sizeable portion of these new clients may stay with you when you switch companies.

  4. Selling new products to new clients: This stage cannot be reached through shortcuts. At this level, the sophistication of one's interpersonal skills depends on considerable knowledge and ability.

  5. Stepping into management: Once you have covered steps one through four, you should be well enough equipped as a sales engineer to move into management and move your career forward.
Any sales engineer who successfully follows this path (either at different companies or at the same company) and early in his or her career acquires a solid technical foundation will be in a position to rise through the ranks of the organizational hierarchy and will always remain employable.

Reference

Weitzul, James B. Personality Traits in Professional Services Marketing. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1994.
If this article has helped you in some way, will you say thanks by sharing it through a share, like, a link, or an email to someone you think would appreciate the reference.

Popular tags:

 potential  developments  work experience  employers  management  prospects  careers  degrees  sales engineers  interpersonal skills


By using Employment Crossing, I was able to find a job that I was qualified for and a place that I wanted to work at.
Madison Currin - Greenville, NC
  • All we do is research jobs.
  • Our team of researchers, programmers, and analysts find you jobs from over 1,000 career pages and other sources
  • Our members get more interviews and jobs than people who use "public job boards"
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.
EngineeringCrossing - #1 Job Aggregation and Private Job-Opening Research Service — The Most Quality Jobs Anywhere
EngineeringCrossing is the first job consolidation service in the employment industry to seek to include every job that exists in the world.
Copyright © 2024 EngineeringCrossing - All rights reserved. 21