Sales training for engineers & techies over the years has gained strength, as engineering and information technology industries has grown and competition worldwide has become tougher. The Industries hire fresh candidates and spend millions of dollars on their training to make them more compatible to present situation. Persons who are experts in this area are highly in demand.

Sales executive in engineering and technology
Sales trainer are itself sales people from same industry. Sales in engineering are always carried out by lead sales engineer. Sales engineering is a mix of sales and engineering for a company. A sales engineer will not only sell but also provide advice and support.

                                                     Engineering products

In sales, you as an engineer will think about what you are selling, the market you are targeting, the people you will meet in the selling process and using which skills will help you sell better. If you are training sales people, the best people will be those who will work to their strengths. Each individual is different in terms of going for the sales.

Sales job for engineer is to help potential engineering customers understand, compare, and understand the engineering solutions that are available for buying. He must see how to solve problems with their implementations. His job is to ensure that the solutions work effectively once the buying decision has been taken. And he should also help in maximizing sales for the sales engineer’s employer by providing such help to the customers. These aspects of the job put the word “sales” in the title of designation of an engineer.

If you are someone with experience into sales of engineering products and technologies, and have been looking to train new individual, then the simple thing you have to do is understand the sales system.

Sales system
Sales system has mainly four components.

• People
  You got to have good people. Most of the time people placed by companies in engineering and technologies on project are wrong people.
• Product
  You must understand as sales engineer that you have the best technology or product or solution. A sales engineer must understand how to compete with the best in the industry. It is not necessary to have best product in the business but at least an effective product is necessary in engineering and IT selling space.
• Price
  This is where you see how you are priced. If you are expensive, you must know why you are expensive with proper technical reasoning. This is where you show how you articulate that to a new potential customer.
• Process
  Process is the part most of the IT and engineering firms are derailed. When training a team of sales engineers you will face lots of problem in the process. Big problem you will face is being random. Being random means you know how to do things but you never have set order or plan, you never have set time, you never develop calls, you never develop having one sheets, you never develop leaving perfect voice mails and you never develop perfect ways of sending emails. You never spend time on calling physically. It’s like your day is a complete mess.

People

                                                     Fresh Trainees

In Training you must know whom you are training. You will be given a pool of fresh and raw talent who has no idea how the industry actually works. These fresh graduates are from bunch of colleges with years old curriculum. They have their basics clear, but other than that they will be just like big fat potatoes on couch. This is not their fault, it’s the institution they have graduated from as at wrong end. Academic institutions have over the years failed to keep up the latest trends in engineering and technical advancement in the world. So in these you look at your students who are ready to grasp new technology. You have to present the new technology in digestible manner because they are going to sell the same technology to others. A Company before applying the people into something needs to give them complete idea of what they are going to sell. This is completely based on company they will be working for. What are their products? You need to help them understand the product they will be selling. As in engineering and information technology world, main product is solution. This solution is different for different clients. Mostly they will be selling companies capabilities. They will be selling the company’s products who are their engineers and software developers. So it is important to teach them about products of the company and project they are handling. They also need to understand what kind of client domain they will be looking for. People you will be training are themselves engineers by graduation, so they will be first line of people who face the problem provided by their client to solve. They should be trained in a best possible way so that they should be able to interpret the problem in manner that they can help their developers to find the solution.

Product
Products will vary from companies to companies. Basically companies are two types, one is consulting company and the other is contracting company. Nowadays, there is the third kind of company which has come to existence called EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) and this company is both consulting and contracting company. If you are training employees of consulting companies, you have to train them according to consulting companies. Main job of the consulting company is to provide the engineering design or solution to the client’s problem. Let’s take example of an oil and gas company. If an oil and gas company tells consulting company, that they want to open new oil refinery. The consulting company will prepare a complete design and plan of that refinery. Their engineer team will work on the model of the refinery. For consulting company, a sales engineer will be responsible for bringing such type of contracts.

Contracting company’s main job is executing the design. Take same example of refinery project. After the consulting company completes the design and modeling, it will contract company’s responsibility to execute the design and construct the complete refinery. In case of IT industry this contracting company will build the software which has been designed and planned. The function of the sales person will be to get such contracts from the company who is in the stage of construction of same project. Sales engineer of contracting company will be trained differently and he will have more knowledge on the level of execution of design.

On the other hand EPC Company is a company that will take the complete work of designing a project on their shoulder and once they are done with the design, they will execute. Even they will procure the necessary building materials and complete the construction. Sales engineer of these companies will be three types, one will bring engineering projects, second one will bring procurement projects and third will bring construction projects.

Price
                                                       
Price tag

Price is something your sales engineer will be negotiating on company’s behalf. Each Company has basic price of their services. For a consulting company, your sales engineer will negotiate on the fees you will be charging for your services. Some do not have high charges as per market standards, as the service offered may be too common. You will get the sale only if you charge less fees than others. But if you are someone who charges reasonably high than the market, then you will have to explain to your client. Here your sales engineer skills will be tested. You will have to train the sales engineer with such situations. Most of the high prices are associated with quality products which are unique in their way. Your sales engineer will be responsible for those unique features, he must be trained enough to explain the never seen technology to the world.

Process
Process as described earlier, when training a team of sales engineers you will face lots of problem in their process, especially the randomness in the organization’s system. Being random means you know how to do things but you never have set order or plan, you never have set time, you never develop calls, you never develop having one sheets, you never develop leaving perfect voice mails and you never develop perfect ways of sending emails. You never spend time on calling physically. First thing you will have to train your sales engineer to have organized system of sales. You will have to teach them how to be organized in their approach. You will have to teach them how to approach a client, how to convince him/her about your product, and how to get a closure. Most important thing that brings a closure for sales person is follow up. Follow up is something which will always give you results.  Follow up will not only help fasten your process of sales but it will also help you in saving time. If they do not follow up, they might end up losing the sale or even keep wasting their time on someone who is not interested at all. You must also provide them some information on post sales service.  Once they are done with sales with a client, they must be in touch with that client in order to get further sales in future.

Basic sales process

These are some basic topics you will be training the engineers and techies on. Training is just a part; you will have to deal with whole lot more things. You could be a trainer whom the company has employed just for training the individuals. Usually it happens that a company appoints only those people who have experience as a sales engineer. Whatever you will be teaching, you will be teaching from your experience. You will be providing insights on how you handled different situations.

But sometimes there are people who work as a freelancer.  They usually, do the training for several companies at a time. If you are looking to do some freelancing, then you will have to work your way through several contacts to train employees for good companies. Initially you can start with a small firm and with small number of trainees. Once your experience as trainer increases, you can take up new challenge of training bigger companies employees. To find work as trainer, there are many sources available. You can look at job portals, company websites, local newspapers, employment newspapers etc. You will get your first work as a trainer based upon your experience as a sales engineer or IT. If you have never been a sale engineer, getting a job of being a trainer will be harder unless you have some contact with good companies. If you have capital you can start your own training center with few experts working for you.  This way you will be able to approach bigger companies with large number of employees.
The price you ask from the company you will be training their employees will completely depend on how experienced you are. Most of the companies invest well in training their assets. Most of the IT companies have well built training programs and they constantly look for quality trainers. If you are well qualified and highly experience as a sales engineer you can ask for fees which is according to you. The companies happily pay for experienced individuals.

Training is a kind of process that does not depend on recession. Every day new firms open and old firms keep expanding. Every year new graduates are hired by the engineering and IT firms.  To train these individuals, there will always be a demand for trainers like you. You will be able to make money with sales training for engineer and sales with ease. You will have to always keep an eye on the new firms. Always keep an eye on the business news for new ventures, new business opportunities, new happening in engineering world. This way you will have good opportunities coming your way which will give new challenges as a trainer. You should not be just looking to work for some firm. As a trainer you will have the opportunity to set yourself as a brand in training business. As a brand you will have the big corporate organizations reaching out to you to train their valuable employees.

Make Money with Sales Training For Engineers & Techies