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Sales engineers play a significant role in bridging the gap between internal teams and customers. This shared services team has product experts who possess a sound technical background and a deep understanding of customer expectations. With that, they support several business functions like Sales, Customer Service, Research and Development, and so on.
Sales engineering professionals can wear many hats because of their in-depth understanding of the products and the business itself. Their ability to understand industry-specific problems and identify business opportunities makes them unique. Now that we have discussed who sales engineers are and what this shared services team does, let us figure out how they help businesses grow.
The technology and software industry’s average lead conversion rate ranges between 5 to 10% which is much lower than other sectors. If you are wondering why that matters, it is time to look at the bigger picture. Lead generation is expensive and not keeping this under control can increase customer acquisition costs considerably. Unless an organization’s resources are carefully channelized, its revenue margins shrink.
Businesses can overcome this hurdle by letting the sales engineering team identify customer segments. The sales and marketing teams can use those inputs to plan highly targeted lead generation campaigns. As these professionals are aware of the product’s technical capabilities, they can be instrumental in identifying sectors that need them.
If you do not have an in-house sales engineering team, don’t let that stop you. Instead, consider partnering with business consultants specialized in strategy development and product marketing. They can identify the weaknesses within your current sales and marketing approach and help improvise it.
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Lead generation sets the wheels into motion, but then comes the crucial part — interaction with interested prospects. Sales professionals who address these queries may not always have the technical know-how to identify or recommend the best products or solutions. This needs to change, and your sales champions must either be trained to handle such queries or must be permitted to pass them on to your sales engineering team.
Your sales team is the face of your brand and that is how the present-day customer perceives it. Therefore, if they cannot make a credible recommendation nor facilitate that, the customers may not trust your firm. In fact, an astonishing 82% of B2B customers have felt that the sales representative they spoke to had little or no preparation on the topic. Sales representatives can be detrimental to your business unless you provide them with adequate training and grooming.
In the meantime, sales team managers must have the infrastructure to re-assign such tickets to the sales engineering professionals. Gradually, this can be reduced by training the sales team, creating FAQs, automating responses through Chatbots, and more. This entire process becomes easier for businesses using shared services centralized tools such as StartingPoint. It lets users automatically reassign specific customer queries to the shared services team based on predefined parameters. Also, users can identify common queries to create FAQs or self service responses.
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Back in the day, businesses used to compete on the pricing factor but that no longer works. Nowadays, 9 out of every 10 American customers make buying decisions based on the customer service offered by the service provider.
Therefore, you need to have an impeccable reputation for providing quick and effective issue resolution, which can be a challenge for businesses offering scientific and technical products and services. Such businesses require subject matter expertise, which sales engineering professionals possess.
The Solution:
Businesses can step-up their customer service by splitting service requests based on the type of query or the level of technicalities involved. Accordingly, it can then be routed to the customer support champions or the sales engineering teams. These professionals are adept at aligning business problems with technical solutions.
Identifying current and future customer service requirements is one of the key responsibilities of sales engineering professionals. Therefore, they can greatly contribute towards product improvement and development. Technical products and solutions — whether digital or not — require constant improvements, which is only possible through market research.
Here, the sales engineering professionals can provide invaluable insights and pinpoint industry-specific requirements. Also, they can extend support throughout the product development lifecycle. Particularly, during the idea generation phase when the foundation for new products is laid down.
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Conclusion
A sales engineering team provides quick and easy access to in-depth product knowledge and service requirements. These insights help the product development, sales, marketing, and customer support teams deliver exactly what the customer wants. Moreover, this shared services team’s ability to anticipate customer needs brings along a host of growth opportunities. It paves the way for groundbreaking innovation and technological developments to solve real-world problems.
Sales engineering resources can turn tables even in adverse economic conditions. With their in-depth product knowledge, these professionals are known to create the right set of opportunities even in the toughest market conditions. To get the most out of their expertise, businesses must organize interactive sessions between other teams and the sales engineering team. Also, regular product training sessions can be of great help. It ensures that every individual working for the firm remains aligned with its business goals.
