WHAT DOES A FIELD SALES ENGINEER DO?
Published: May 06, 2025 - The Field Sales Engineer provides exceptional customer service, educates clients on safe practices and preventative maintenance, and delivers technical guidance to uncover new sales opportunities. This position manages and optimizes energy efficiency projects by offering engineering support to large commercial and industrial clients, collaborating with internal teams to ensure project documentation and technical assumptions align with customer and business goals. This role maintains accurate customer data within the CRM system, independently prepares and contributes to complex offers, and consistently meets or exceeds defined sales targets.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Field Sales Engineer
1. Field Sales Engineer Duties
- Sales Management: Responsible for the business in the target area, making and implementing sales planning, management, maintenance, and development.
- Sales Targeting: Improve the sales tunnel and fulfill the sales targets and sales payment.
- Customer Relationship: Set up, maintain the customers' relationship, and conduct negotiations, solution planning, and follow up with potential customers and finish the regular report.
- Market Data: Collect, organize and provide feedback on the marketing data report and give an improvement opinion.
- Sales Strategy: Marketing support for the new project and good ideas for the sales strategy and valuable improvement.
- Customer Knowledge: Know the customers' management status well and keep the relationship.
- Logistics Management: Know the delivery, payment, and return goods well.
- Team Collaboration: Work together with other departments for marketing and product promotion.
- Customer Loyalty: Responsible for the customers' management, ensuring the distributor loyalty and sales ability, and preventing market risk.
- Contract Management: Guarantee existing contracts, reach long-term agreements, and obtain better prices and conditions.
- Order Fulfillment: Check the correct execution and delivery of orders and take care of the service in order to ensure customer satisfaction.
- Offer Preparation: Prepare the offers under the sales and credit policies by negotiating terms and conditions.
- Account Management: Manage a select group of customer accounts.
- Plant Inspection: Regularly visit plant sites to inspect equipment and make recommendations.
- Plant Relations: Build/maintain plant relationships.
2. Field Sales Engineer Details
- Customer Service: Provide exceptional customer service
- Customer Education: Educate customers on safe practices, preventative maintenance, and provide operational guidance which in turn leads to the discovery of opportunities
- Customer Communication: Company cell phone to respond to customers in a timely manner
- Account Management: Company vehicle to manage customer accounts
- Technical Support: Provide conservation technical/engineering support to large commercial and industrial customers with significant focus on targeted conservation programs
- Energy Efficiency: Day could consist of managing/defining/engineering energy efficiency projects, meeting with customers to discuss energy efficiency projects, attending engineering meeting discussions
- Project Development: Work with customers and account managers to identify, develop and optimize large, complex projects
- Documentation Support: Work with marketing and technical consulting team members to ensure documentation and technical assumptions adequately support the projects and optimize the opportunity for customers and for the business
- Product Advice: Advice to customers about services and products on the phone and on-site
- Customer Relationships: Nurturing relationships with existing customers
- Sales Targets: Meeting and exceeding the agreed sales targets
- Offer Preparation: Independent preparation of the offers
- Offer Creation: Participate in the creation of complex offers
- CRM Management: Maintenance of customer master data in the CRM system
3. Field Sales Engineer Responsibilities
- Sales Support: Supports the sales team in initial presentations to prospects
- Requirement Definition: Helps to define the hardware & software requirements of prospects
- Test Management: Develops, implements and monitors test phases of the IOT solutions at prospects’ sites
- Feedback Funnel: Funnels tests feedback to internal departments (Engineering, Product Management and Sales)
- Solution Validation: Finetunes/ validates the solution with the prospects and supports the draft of the commercial offer
- CRM Management: Maintains CRM for IOT prospects and conducts technical training
- Deployment Planning: Plans & monitors the deployment of the hardware & software solution
- Implementation Oversight: Ensures the implementation of the agreed terms & conditions
- User Onboarding: Ensures appropriate onboarding of users
- Account Support: Support Account Manager with Account Management activities
- After-Sales Support: Manages the after-sales support of IOT clients (RMA and technical support)
- Performance Tracking: Tracks and reports the performance of the implemented solutions
- Technical Feedback: Structures and shares the valuable technical & sales feedback from the field
- Customer Interface: Interface with customers to identify needs and streamline X-FAB’s services and process technology solutions with assistance from the X-FAB Marketing team and X-FAB design support and technical support teams
- Global Collaboration: Work closely with worldwide customer service teams and, in particular with the silicon carbide business unit at the Texas manufacturing site
4. Field Sales Engineer Job Summary
- Commercial Support: Handle commercial and sales support of foundry customers in an account manager role
- Contract Negotiation: Negotiate and maintain commercial contracts with business partners in conjunction with all stakeholders
- Back Office Support: Provide analysis and back office support to the North America sales organization
- Account Management: Support customer account management and sales process administration of the Silicon Carbide Business unit
- Sales Development: Encourages upsells and cross-sells
- Subscription Renewal: Follow-up on renewals of subscriptions of software solutions
- Trade Fair Participation: Participating in trade fairs
- Key Reporting: Reporting of relevant key figures
- Sales Target: Responsible for the project sales target within the assigned country/region
- Customer Consultation: Consult with customers on existing and new solutions
- Primary Contact: Main point of contact for direct customers and dealers in the region
- Project Management: Manage project implementation and follow up
- Service Coordination: Coordinate the service tasks
- Sales Process: Apply and improve sales processes for projects
- Progress Tracking: Track progress on Funnel and Orders monthly, and execute an action plan
5. Field Sales Engineer Accountabilities
- Partner Management: Develop close ties with assigned channel partners, providing high levels of support to each branch
- Sales Growth: Work with Distributors to grow sales pipeline, revenue and design wins
- Marketing Strategy: Implement and execute marketing strategies in order to develop new accounts
- Market Share: Grow Power Integrations’ share within new engineering projects
- Customer Forecasting: Provide detailed customer forecasts and reporting
- Team Leadership: Guide the FAE team so that they can effectively achieve the design-win target
- CRM Usage: Use the CRM system for follow-up activities with customers
- Market Research: Identify appropriate sources of information relevant to market trends, customers and competitors
- Information Monitoring: Select, obtain, analyse and monitor the most appropriate information relevant to market trends, customers and competitors
- Event Participation: Participate in Trade Fairs, Exhibitions, Conferences or targeted Customer visits, undertaking meetings and presentations
- Business Opportunities: Collect and monitor new business opportunities, including specific business e-tendering opportunities (Space Agencies, EU, Local Government) and RFQs
- CRM Updates: Keep up to date CRM (Business opportunities, Offers records, customer/competitor information)
- Bid Management: Manage pre-bid request for clarifications, gather information on the RFQ/ITT, collect relevant info from Departments, identify potential suppliers/subcontractors and find an agreement on the activity and budget distribution
- Proposal Preparation: Prepare and distribute volume(s) template(s) among the bid team, create a bid schedule, showing key milestones and bid review date, collect contributions and effort estimations from departments, and prepare the financial proposal
- Negotiation Skills: Manage post-submission requests for update/clarification, negotiate, handle objections and close sales