Sales engineering mindset combines the best of many worlds. As a result, individuals with sales engineering mindset are tailor made to help clients address the challenges of the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) business ecosystem.
Do you under estimate the value of your sales engineering colleagues?
If you sell sensor- and software-connected products, equipment and services, chances are you have bumped into a sales engineer or two. These talented professionals are the key to creating valuable and enduring client outcomes.
The key to sales engineering mindset is value creation.
Cross-functional collaboration is key to value creation within the data-driven, interconnected IIoT ecosystem. As a result, today’s Business Professionals of Worth must develop a multi-disciplinary mindset to best serve their IIoT customers.
The masters of cross-functional mindset are your sales engineering colleagues. Do you include them in all aspects of acquiring and retaining customers?
Perhaps it is time for a new role for you to take. Are you in the right job in the right professional environment to make your professional light shine?
No matter whether you are a sales professional with a strong technical or engineering background, searching for something more than old-school selling. Or perhaps you are an engineer who is comfortably cross-functional, with an acumen for business process and financial management.
Either way, developing sales engineering mindset is just what the challenging industrial Internet of Things business environment needs.
Have I just described you? If so, what are your next steps? If not, what are you going to do to get you where you need to be?
Let’s explore a few attributes of a sales engineering mindset.
Curiosity is the hallmark of team-based sales engineering mindset in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ecosystem.
To develop sales engineering mindset, you enjoy understanding how things are made and why they work the way they do. Not only that. You appreciate why it is important to understand how your products, services and equipment are connected, via sensors and software interfaces, to many other similarly-enabled smart plant devices.
The breadth and depth of your perspective makes all the difference in producing enduring and valuable client outcomes. ~ Babette Ten Haken
Sales engineering mindset in smart plant environments is about exploring the connected context of each proposed solution. There are no discrete, stand-alone options when interconnectivity is the IIoT norm.
As a result, you research the context behind the products, platforms, equipment and services you sell or engineer. For starters, you do not implicitly assume your marketing communications or sales enablement materials are relevant and valuable to clients. Alternatively, you implicitly assume that there are new engineering and scientific articles which are not to be overlooked when designing today’s and tomorrow’s solutions.
Developing an inquisitive sales engineering mindset is the key to creating relevant and valuable deliverables for clients.
Sales engineers develop hybridized professional skill sets.
Consequently, you are comfortable and conversant working across professional disciplines to seek enduring solutions on behalf of clients. As a result, you continuously seek out valuable and accessible internal and external resources to best serve team members and clients. Even if these resources do not have the same professional background or speak the same language that that you do.
No matter whether you are a technical or business Professional of Worth, a seller or an engineer.
Ponder whether you are able to connect the revenue dots back to the time-to-profitability of proposed technical and engineering designs. That is the big question your industrial Internet of Things clients expect you to deliver on, throughout the duration of the customer lifecycle.
If you are unable to answer this question, consider the next steps to increasing your cross-functional business and technical acumen. And your value to clients.
Sales engineering mindset requires you develop the core competencies to derive and communicate the line of business value of your offerings.
As a result, today’s successful IIoT sales professionals and engineering professionals realize that sales engineering mindset is applied continuously, instead of as-needed.
Enlightened IIoT workforce hiring strategy has jettisoned yesterday’s Us versus Them mindset. That’s a Big Idea, isn’t it?
First, sales teams stop taking sales engineers off the shelf and applying them as-needed as demo jocks. Hey there, sales peeps, these valuable sales engineering professionals are part of the sales process from the start! Why? Because enlightened sales teams strive to develop sales engineering mindset themselves. You both understand each other.
As a result, acquiring sales engineering mindset makes everyone collaborative instead of competitive and marginalized in departmental silos.
Then, enlightened engineering and technical teams “get over themselves.” Yes, you tend to be the smartest people in the room. However, ever wonder why many of your best ideas may never come to fruition?
If sales people are intimidated by your technical acumen, so what? And besides, if no one understands what the tech and engineering folks are talking about, stop wondering why you are marginalized in the first place.
Have I catalyzed your interest? Read more about developing sales engineering mindset. Here are 4 articles to get you started!
Isn’t it time you developed your sales engineering mindset? A great career is waiting for you within the industrial Internet of Things business ecosystem. And great clients are awaiting the enduring value you will bring to their business tables.
Take the next steps.
- Subscribe to the Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog. Receive new posts on customer retention, tech workforce hiring strategy and team collaboration.
Babette Ten Haken focuses on success for customer retention in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring, developing and implementing teams of collaborative technical, engineering, sales and business professionals. She serves manufacturing- and engineering- intensive companies, catalyzing teams to create enduring business outcomes. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.
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