Building Relevant Work Experience in Sales Engineering Jobs

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.