Author: Mark Roberts
For over thirty years, I have trained and coached engineers to become salespeople. Large manufacturers, particularly in the mechanical product industries, Chemicals, and medical supply products, often recruit top-tier engineers for sales positions. The logic is straightforward: Who better to sell complex technical products than someone who deeply understands their design and function? However, while engineers bring valuable technical expertise, they may lack the sales acumen to thrive in a client-facing role.
To ensure engineers make this transition successfully, companies must design and deliver tailored sales skills training programs that help these professionals apply their technical education to sales strategies. Below are key training elements and a recommended design for such a program.
1. Sales Skills Sales Engineers Need
While engineers have a strong foundation in technical problem-solving, I have found through assessments, training, and coaching they require a skill set for sales.
The following areas should be the focus of their training:
Customer-Centric Communication
Engineers are accustomed to solving problems using technical language, but clients are more interested in how a solution benefits them. In other words, we must train engineers to share solution outcomes, not how products are designed. Training should focus on translating technical features into customer benefits, addressing pain points, and avoiding jargon. Engineers deliver substantial value when a client or prospect asks a question but often struggle with prospecting and starting conversations.
- Training Focus: Teach engineers to simplify complex information. Train them to ask discovery and qualifying questions and use active listening skills. Develop their ability to listen to customer concerns and present solutions that align with business outcomes. Provide professional prospecting system training, and they will follow it.
Consultative Selling
Engineers are natural problem-solvers. Consultative selling leverages this strength by encouraging sales professionals to act as trusted advisors, helping customers solve their challenges with tailored solutions rather than pushing a pre-packaged product.
- Training Focus: Provide engineers with frameworks for uncovering client needs, asking insightful questions, and customizing solutions. Train them to share value and how what they sell impacts the customers’ bottom line.
Building Relationships and Trust
In many industries, relationship-building is as important as the product being sold. As we share in our training.” How you sell is more important than what you sell.” Buyers buy based on trust and competence. Engineers must develop emotional intelligence (EQ), situational awareness, and interpersonal skills to establish rapport, foster trust, and maintain long-term client relationships.
- Training Focus: Role-playing scenarios to help engineers practice empathetic listening, networking, and managing client relationships beyond the initial sale. Train them in trust-building processes and how to demonstrate their competence through storytelling.
Negotiation and Closing Techniques
Engineers often avoid aggressive negotiation, preferring logical conclusions. Here, we frequently encounter a limiting belief: I don’t want to seem like a pushy salesperson, so I won’t ask for the order. They will buy when they are ready. However, sales require presenting a solution, negotiating value, price, and terms, and asking for the order. Learning how to handle objections professionally and close deals is crucial.
- Training Focus: Focus on strategies that help engineers become comfortable negotiating and asking for commitments while maintaining their consultative approach. In training, we share skills but spend much time role-playing common scenarios we know the new sales engineers will face. Train sales engineers in closing and negotiation skills and practice them in role-play exercises.
Time Management and Prioritization
Engineers transitioning into sales roles must balance time between product research, client meetings, and internal collaboration. This requires strong organizational skills to prioritize opportunities that offer the highest ROI.
- Training Focus: We provide training on managing pipelines, using CRM systems effectively, and focusing on high-value leads. We also train sales engineers in time-blocking techniques and how to build their internal relationship matrix.
2. Sales Training Program Design
Given engineers’ analytical and structured mindsets, the sales training program must cater to their strengths while addressing their skill gaps. Below is a recommended design for the training program. The science of designing and delivering impactful training recommends assessing skills, prescribing training, coaching, and assigning experienced mentors.
Interactive Workshops
- Key Elements: Role-playing as both the salesperson and the client, real-world case studies of successful sales interactions, and live customer interviews.
Blended Training Design
- Key Elements: Courses are designed and delivered following sales motions. The courses alternate from sales skills to product and market applications. This design keeps sales engineers engaged.
Stacked Design
- Key Elements: The training program is designed with the desired end in mind. Once we define the sales engineer roles, responsibilities, and future performance metrics, we start at the end and build the training sequence backward.
Spaced Design
- Key Elements: The training design is spaced over time, and content builds on prior learning. Each application exercise and scenario role play become more complicated, and sales engineers must apply and demonstrate what they have learned
Sales Mentorship Programs
- Key Elements: Regular one-on-one sessions, shadowing sales calls, and collaborative strategy meetings with the mentor.
Sales Playbooks Tailored to Engineering Products
- Key Elements: These include templates for presenting to different customer types, decision-making personas, common objections and responses, and detailed product use cases that focus on the customer’s ROI. We often add a content library guide that explains where to find content like business cases, presentations, and success stories.
Business Acumen
- Key Elements: We teach them how to run a business and what an income statement and balance sheet are. Through simulations, we teach them how business decisions impact net income.
DISC for Sales Training
- Key Elements: Teach them to recognize decision-makers personality styles and adapt their presentation pace and tone accordingly. Practice scenarios for various personality types.
Companies can unlock their full potential in sales roles by designing a structured and interactive sales training program that caters to engineers’ strengths and learning styles.
With the right blended and stacked training design, engineers can combine their technical expertise with new sales skills to become top performers.
Author:
Mark Roberts is a senior-level sales and marketing leader with over 38 years of experience driving profitable sales growth in market-leading organizations.
He has done so at Timken Bearings, Alpha Enterprises, Vantage Mobility, Gardner Denver, and Frito-Lay. Mark is an author, public speaker, Scaling-Up coach, sales skills trainer, and sales acceleration coach. He has helped scale several manufacturing companies.
In 2018, he received the Business Excellence Award from NSME, and in 2019, he received the Highspot Sales Enablement Award. Sales Hacker Inc. also recognized him in the Sales Enablement Category. He was recently recognized in Soar to Success Magazine for his data-driven approach to growing sales and profits and for his human-to-human sales training and coaching in Top Sales Magazine.
Mark is the founder of OTB Solutions, LLC, and the popular business development blog www.nosmokeandmirrors.com, which is ranked #1 in fixing sales problems. As founder and president of OTB Sales, he helps clients diagnose and improve revenue, profits, and shareholder value. His new book, Driving Explosive Growth, is a no-nonsense approach to growing your business profitably. It was released in 2023, along with his book Voice of Customer which shares how to gain actionable strategic insights from your customers to drive revenue and profit growth.
