Your mission as an industrial sales engineer?

CLOSE…MORE…DEALS!

Pure and simple.

That’s why so many smart, young, and ambitious people enter the field. They see the sales engineer salary reports and they know they can fetch around $62,872 a year, according to a 2024 report on Salary.com and much higher as they gain experience and improve their sales skills. But what really excites most industrial sales engineers is growing in this field to the point of bringing home $166,000 a year, which is the salary of high-level sales engineers, according to a 2023 report on Glassdoor.com.

What’s the difference between the first category of people versus the latter, high-six-figure earners? The high earners mastered the ability to ‘close’ more deals. If you learn how to master the lead generation and sales process, as well as how to close deals, you’ll have the total package as an industrial sales engineer. That’s why sales engineering training is so critical to becoming a top performer.

Learn more about ISU’s sales engineering training program

Let’s boost your sales engineer education with some of the proven ingredients needed to attract the right clients and close more deals, starting today!

Do you want to be like Steph Curry when shooting your shot at prospects?

Curry, who holds the record for the most three-point shots totaling 2,977 points in 789 professional games, is considered to be the greatest shooter of all time.

So, yes, you should aspire to be as good at shooting your shot as a sales engineer as Curry.  To score more points on the board, you need to set your aim correctly. In other words, you need to target the right people. This means that you should target the right kind of companies and the right titles within those companies.

You should know the products and services that you are selling and know the pain points they solve and the goals that they help people reach. Once you know this you can more accurately target niches, companies, and job title avatars who have a burning DESIRE to achieve everything your solutions help them achieve.

Once you’ve fixed your targets in your mind and written them down, you need to take daily actions to get in front of these people. LinkedIn is a great tool to use to do just that. Far more than just a place to find a job, LinkedIn is the number one place where you can find endless qualified prospects to target for your promotions. You’ll learn more about this in ISU’s sales engineering training.

As you reach out to people and engage them, you want to offer valuable resources for them to consume to gain their interest in you. You should eventually make an invitation to them, offering a free gift of even greater value that they would be willing to opt-in to receive.

When they do this, they’ve just raised their hand and gone from being a ‘cold’ lead to a ‘warm’ lead. That’s why having a good CRM in place is so important – you need to be generating warm leads who become ‘prequalified’ by opting in to receive a free report, checklist, video training that pre-sells them on the value of your products and services. The people who consume this are prime prospects that you should target with an invitation to a free consultation.

When you get the opportunity to speak with a prospect, do NOT do the ‘show up and throw up’ method of presenting. Good sales engineering training emphasizes a focus on their desires and goals instead. Uncovering the challenges faced by prospects is a crucial step you must take before pitching your products and services. Various techniques can help in this process.

Actively listening to prospects allows them to share their pains, problems, and requirements without being sold.

Using open-ended questions encourages prospects to provide detailed information, leading to a better understanding of their specific issues. Showing empathy and comprehension further enriches the dialogue, fostering an atmosphere where prospects feel understood. This feeling builds incredible rapport with prospects.

Adopting a problem-focused approach involves steering conversations toward addressing particular issues and highlighting the results that will occur for these unresolved problems. You want to be positioned more as a knowledgeable ally who is there to address prospect needs and resolve pains that they have held than a salesperson. Sharing past experiences and engaging in collaborative problem-solving discussions contribute to effectively uncovering client pain points.

Trust is the number one bargaining chip in the marketplace. If you establish trust with your prospects then you will clear the runway for a smooth landing when it’s time to close the deal. Building a trusting relationship is important for industrial sales engineers to encourage clients to express their concerns. By combining active listening, thoughtful questioning, and industry insight, these professionals can identify pain points and customize their approach to offer effective solutions. This is another topic covered in ISU’s sales engineer training program.

Develop Proposal Writing Sales Engineer Skills

When prospects hit the proposal stage, it’s time for you to smash on the gas pedal and bring this deal to a swift close. You let that iron get cold, it’ll be impossible to mold with your hammer. That’s why they say, “strike while the iron’s hot.” If they send you an RFQ or RFP then you need to return that as quickly as possible. You want to make sure the feedback you provide in a proposal or quote is accurate. As you develop our proposal writing sales engineer skills, you’ll craft proposals that prospects love.

This means hitting on all the points and specific questions and concerns they expressed to you. That’s what makes the ‘show up and throw up’ strategy of selling so bad, if you’ve done all the talking then you have no idea what your prospect actually wants.

Proposify.com is a good system that we use to create proposals (as of 2018). It’s the best system we’ve seen at this point for crafting winning proposals. In ISU’s sales engineering training program, we show you how to use a simple system like this to create boilerplate templates that look great and then customize various aspects of it based on the unique needs and requests of your prospects.

Watch Kyle Milan’s video training on How to Pitch

When you get to the proposal stage of the game, it’s critical that you make a show of speed and accuracy. This is your first big test, where the prospect is viewing you as a vendor. They will judge you based on how quickly and accurately your proposal delivery is.

Usually, when companies are ready for a quote, they actually needed you yesterday! Most companies will drag their feet until the pain they experience is so great that they are virtually forced to reach out to you for help. You want to keep the momentum going and move them to the close, ASAP.

Takeaways

You must target niches, companies, and job titles with your outreach efforts. Doing this is the first step towards closing more deals. You then need to engage these cold prospects and invite them to take advantage of a valuable free piece of content that they must opt in to receive. This generates a warm lead! These warm leads then need to be reached out for a complimentary consultation. During these consult calls, ask key questions to discover their wants, needs, and pain points. Use this information to tailor your pitch as a solution to their problems and the key to goal achievement. When they request a proposal, get it done swiftly and accurately. But if you really want to maximize yourself as a closer…

Enroll into Industrial Sales University’s Sales Engineer Training Program today!