Empower your business with airSlate airSlate SignNow's solution for planning sales for engineering

How to create outlook signature

hey y'all ryan here with millennial tech zone if you have a knack for technology and can overall hold a great conversation i have the perfect job that was made for you so what if i told you you can earn upwards of 250 000 per year work less than 40 hours a week or no more than 40 hours a week travel the nation explore new locations create lifelong relationships with both customers as well as your colleagues would you be interested yet that's exactly what a career and sales engineer could afford you if you're new to the concept of sales engineering no worries this video was made for you i'll walk you through things like what a sales engineer is what are the qualities that make up a good sales engineer how the salary and commission structure works my own personal experiences as a sales engineer over the last seven or eight years as well as everything in between and of course if there's anything i don't cover um you can go ahead and ask those questions within the comment box below and i'll try to answer those as quickly as possible all right now that i hopefully have your attention at least a little bit if you liked today's video i'd really appreciate it if you hit that thumbs up button give me a like subscribe to my channel if you want to be notified every single time i create a new video again these are newer videos for me hit that little bell notification so you get notified when i post a new video um it doesn't cost you anything and it really helps out my channel with the youtube algorithm if you go ahead and do that so i'd really appreciate it if you hit that thumbs up button now all right now that i hopefully have your attention at least a little bit today's video sponsor is no one uh it's because this channel is new i don't have a lot of subscribers but um you know that doesn't stop me from making these videos and spreading the knowledge to all of you so let's jump into what a sales engineer is so if you're watching today's video chances are you're interested in what a sales engineer is maybe you're interviewing for a position currently or you're in college and you see that as a potential career path really at the end of the day a sales engineer is responsible for bridging the gap between the solution that your company offers that you work for and the customer's business outcomes so the the challenges the customers trying to solve for that your solution can can help solve for in other words you know a sales engineer is there to help drive a sales opportunity by demonstrating how the solution can solve for those customer pain points we typically do this by we'll jump on a call with our sales rep and the customer will go in and we'll ask a lot of questions around those pain points so you'll ask things like you know what challenges are you're trying to solve for for today um you might ask things like you know talk through different solutions that you've been trialing gathering you know what are those what are those pain points is what you really want to get out of the conversation and then once you have that information you'll go in and you'll demonstrate specific features of the solution that can solve for those pain points so typically we would show some sort of tailored demonstration of the solution so we can specifically address the customer's use case if the call goes well which if you're doing your job hopefully it does we're there also as a sales engineer to help answer any follow follow-up technical questions and then we'll might we might even set up some sort of you know technical trial proof of concept where we actually walk the customer through testing the solution out in their own environment so we'll help them do that you know for driving that sales opportunity we also work very closely with our sales team so you never really run into a situation where you have to do any sort of cold calls initial outreach because you're typically tied to a set of sales reps that their job is their responsibility is to really identify that there's a an opportunity with this account and then you're brought in as a technical resource to have a deeper dive conversation of the solution so you're really there as an extension of the sales team to help drive that opportunity so there's really two types of sales engineers that i to ensure that all of you understand as you're interviewing and looking at potential positions that are out there and that's inside and field there's other positions you might want to be aware of in the future things like enterprise commercial you know federal that kind of stuff but for now let's focus on inside and field especially because this is more of an introductory of whatever what a sc is when we talk about inside typically an inside sales engineer position has no travel involved maybe you'll have an occasional travel for like a sales kickoff or maybe a conference to run a booth but that's few and far in between typically you're tied to a specific number of inside sales reps your territory is geographically going to be a little bit larger because you're on the inside you're not traveling and you have numbers tied to the reps you're you're actually working with so most inside sales engineers from my experience either work in the office on a sales floor or they work completely from home in the comfort of their own house and again they have that territory that's tied to their sales reps as a field sales engineer this is a field based resource so typically you're expected to live in your territory so for example if you win the lottery and your territory is in hawaii well guess what you get to move to hawaii and that's your territory and hopefully you have a great income that follows the cost of living in hawaii and you'll do a lot of travel within that territory and you'll be assigned to an account executive or maybe two account executives in which they become your right hand man or a woman and you're working very closely with them to help close opportunities in your specific territory so typically you'd be working with larger customers in this scenario not always it kind of depends on the company you're working for but there is a lot of travel involved when we talk about a field position versus an inside position so typically when we look at the trajectory of an sc path you start on the inside first get your experience and then a field position is usually a promotion for you all right so let's talk about the qualities that make one a good fit for a sales engineer and a disclaimer this is my personal opinion just working in the industry for the last seven eight years but really i think this is this definitely holds a lot of truth as far as the qualities that i see and that i possess to be successful in the role and the first and foremost is you have to have strong soft skills necessary to succeed in sales and what i mean by that is a large portion of the role is about relationship building if you've ever been to a used car lot as an example and you've ever had a sales person that was really pushy you didn't like them at all chances are you don't want to give him the commission so you won't make that purchase as human beings we tend to purchase from people that we like and that's true and technical sales as well right so we have to establish that relationship and connect with the potential customer as as having success within the role if you're looking to grow this skill set i personally recommend picking up the book how to win friends and influence people you might have read of it read it in high school highly recommend you pick it up and read it again it's a very easy read but this should really be your bible in sales at the end of the day this book really highlights you know how to make friends how to influence people which is our role as a sales engineer so i'll put the the link to that in the notes below so you can definitely check that out highly recommend picking that book up if you haven't already so the next thing i want to touch on is your ability to relay complex concepts in a relatable and easy to understand way outside of initially establishing that relationship the primary role of a sales engineer is to understand those customer pain points and demonstrate how your technology your solution you're selling can help solve for those so for example let's say you're someone that suffers from insomnia and i'm a sales engineer that works for a technical mattress company i might actually walk you through how the mattress has different you know features embedded into it to help ease the insomnia so i might say things like how you can adjust the level of firmness for optimal rests that i can regulate your body temperature through the technology that's built into the mattress that there's technology that can actually track your restlessness via an app on your phone and all these things are are optimized to help you sleep at night i might actually even use a customer use case of how we solved with some statistics um in some insomnia level patients and how we've given them a completely peaceful night where they slept eight hours straight so i'll actually use some personal use cases the same works with technology sales right we have to identify what those pain points are as well as how the solution solves for those pain points the next is your ability to work as a team as i mentioned earlier a sales engineer works extremely closely with his or her sales reps so that relationship is incredibly important to the success in the role so to put it into perspective right so i jokingly you know don't tell this to your spouse but i jokingly tell my friends that sometimes i feel like i spend more time with my sales reps than i do with my actual spouse and that's often true you're traveling all the time in your role as a sales engineer if you're in the field even if you're inside you're constantly on calls with your sales team so you spend a lot of time with them and you have to be willing to work successfully as a team the last trade and arguably the most important is your drive to actually learn and grow as an individual and what i mean by that is from a sales engineering perspective it's kind of this ever evolving role it's constantly facing new challenges every single week's a little bit different this week you might you know be working on a lot of demos this week you might be working specifically on a proof of concept you might be traveling this week so every week's a little different every day is a little bit different so if you excel in you know changes of pace learning new things having to be creative to help drive more sales willingness to be uncomfortable and grow from that level of uncomfortability um you'll be a great fit for the role and you'll definitely i tell you this you know from personal experience you'll definitely grow in the process so one of the most compelling and kind of obvious reasons someone might go into the field of sales engineering is its competitive salary actually if you do some research there's a couple other youtube videos on this sales engineering actually pays higher than pretty much every engineering field out there because businesses rely on sales so it makes a lot of sense and oftentimes you don't see a lot of engineers that also have the soft skills to be successful in this role and from a commission structure you know most sales engineer positions have a variable compensation structure and what i mean by this is if we take an example let's say you sign up for an inside sc role and you're making a hundred thousand and your variable is 70 30 or 80 20 if we take the 70 30 as an example that means your base is 70 000 and your commission is 30 000 whereas if we had an 80 20 you know your base is 80 000 and then your commission is 20 000. so let's say you only achieve 50 of your quota for the year um you're actually going to be only able to earn 90 000 for that year if you're on that 80 20 split but on the flip side if you over exceeded your quota let's say you hit 150 to target so you want 50 over you might earn an additional 10 000 depending on how your company pays um accelerators so you could potentially earn let's say 110 000 for the year so if you're a driven individual individual individual so individual you can actually you know you could exceed and if you're driven and you like you know having targets to hit this could also be a very good role for you just because of the nature of of how you get paid all right so i actually did a little bit of research to prepare for this video and to my surprise the medium income for sales engineering ing to the us bureau of labor statistics is around a hundred and eight thousand actually thought this was a little bit low this is around fifty dollars an hour but i guess depending on where you live if you're on the central west or east coast that pay scale can be a little different however ing to glassdoor the most likely earning potential of an experienced sales engineer is upwards of 254 000 so there's definitely some high earning potential as a sales engineer i mean a quarter of a mil is just an insane salary and you could live a very comfortable lifestyle with a 250 000 salary you know i have actually a couple of friends myself that are still in the profession and they just recently surpassed that 200k mark with just under five years of experience um specifically in software as a service type companies type technologies so the earning potential for a sales engineer is definitely there and is much higher as compared to other occupations um for engineering so personally as i mentioned before i've been in the industry just over seven years i've held numerous sales engineer roles starting as an inside sales engineer first again following that trajectory path then i moved over to being a field sc and as a commercial esee so in the commercial business which is typically 2 000 employees or less i also started supporting our channel partners with a large technology distributor so i worked in the channel and helped grow partner revenue and worked on you know high volume low margin type business and then more recently i actually just accepted a new position with a startup company as a senior sales engineer covering commercial and enterprise level accounts and you know personally like i love being a sales engineer and today almost all of my closest friends that that i've met through my work experiences are sales engineers and they love it as well they love the flexibility how every week's a little bit different and you know these are some of the most extremely driven kind personable people that i've ever met and again they became my closest friends and the best part is you know i still keep in contact with all of them and they still have an amazing work-life balance right they love their jobs um they're continuing to grow their career they do things on the side and from a from a career perspective right life rarely gets boring working as a sales engineer and every week is a little bit different i mentioned this earlier but this week i might be doing a lot of demos next week i might be going on site and doing a poc maybe i'm just going out to lunch with various customers to create that relationship i've i've gone to travel all over the world so i've been to hawaii for four weeks i got to go to germany i went to utah even small places like little towns like paducah kentucky which i found out is like the nation's quilt museum quilt area i actually went to the quilt museum there which is really bizarre but still really cool to experience my grandma was very jealous of that by the way so um don't knock the quilt museum but really you know the the role provides all this great benefit this flexibility i was even able to create numerous side businesses i started an etsy shop i started an amazon store i have a small real estate portfolio and of course i'm able to create videos like this for my channel which you know takes quite a bit of time as well but again because it's a fairly low stress position i'm able to do all these other things on the side as well and i rarely work more than 40 hours a week just depends on the week sometimes you might work a little bit more but that's very very rare and i can honestly work anywhere i want so if i want to work from you know in the mountains in georgia as long as i have good internet connection and i have my laptop i can do my work if i want to work on a cruise ship as long as i have high speed internet again i can do my work as long as i have that internet connection and i have my my laptop um you can really work anywhere within the nation of course if you're outside of the nation that's a different story and you have to look at your company's security standards in order to work outside of the country so overall if i was talking to all of you as if you were a close friend of mine if you were a family member of mine this is from my own personal perspective but i would absolutely recommend a sales engineer as a career path for anyone that was close to me and you know i would say that if you are interested in getting into sales engineering i would start by polishing your skill set to really set yourself up for success as being a strong candidate during the interview process so i've also created uh top eight tips for interviewing for a sales engineer position so i would definitely recommend checking that video out again get the the book of how to win friends and influence people start polishing your technology skill set if you're trying to get into sas based sales engineer sales engineering which tends to pay a little bit higher if there's a specific technology you want to learn there's plenty of youtube videos udemy pluralsight guides that can help equip your skill set to learn that technology and then overall you know if you enjoyed today's video don't forget to smash that like button for me subscribe to my channel if you like these videos let me know by writing in the comment box below and of course if you have any questions feel free to um write in the comments below and i'll try to get to those as soon as possible so thanks all for watching to today's video and take care bye