WHAT DOES A SALES ENGINEER DO?
Published: Dec 05, 2025 - The Sales Engineer develops and implements business strategies for the water and power industries, focusing on achieving sales revenue and increasing market share. This position involves building strong customer relationships, conducting sales visits and presentations, preparing quotations and project costings, and aligning with the company’s strategic goals. The engineer also provides both sales and after-sales support in coordination with internal departments and delivers market feedback to the country sales manager.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Sales Engineer
1. Sales Engineer Responsibilities
- Sales Analysis: Identify bottlenecks in the sales process
- Customer Support: Suggest solutions promptly and present quotations to key customers
- Customer Research: Research key customers' wants and needs, and suggest solutions
- Proposal Writing: Negotiate and draft comprehensive written proposals for the sale of products
- Opportunity Discovery: Visit existing and prospective customers at their job sites to identify future opportunities
- Pipeline Management: Maintain an updated sales funnel and participate in regular sales reviews
- Stakeholder Liaison: Serve as a contact point for key customers and internal teams
- Complaint Resolution: Resolve customers' complaints in an effective and respectful way
- Feedback Reporting: Gather, report, and communicate customers' feedback on service, technology, and product delivery
- Metrics Analysis: Measure, track, and analyze key account metrics
- Management Reporting: Create reports for upper management
- Market Awareness: Keep abreast with industry and market trends and best practices
2. Sales Engineer Accountabilities
- Opportunity Sourcing: Partner with Account Executives to identify, qualify, and pursue new revenue opportunities from new and existing Enterprise customers
- Trusted Advisory: Build relationships with and serve as a trusted advisor to a prospect or customer’s technical teams
- Prototype Building: Build and demonstrate custom prototypes that allow prospects to understand and evaluate capabilities within the context of their own data, technical requirements, team workflows, and business process needs
- Technical Management: Manage technical relationships with pre-revenue enterprise organizations, overseeing proof-of-concept work and pre-sales implementation
- Solution Strategy: Speak to the platform and integration capabilities, and any solution strategies that may be required to successfully implement them using best practices
- Deal Support: Support multiple Account Executives and deals simultaneously, proactively communicating with stakeholders to ensure on-time solution delivery
- Process Development: Develop processes and workflows that allow us to build and scale a best-in-class Sales Engineering organization
- Use Case Sharing: Identify and share the most valuable use cases and user stories with the Engineering and Customer Engagement teams to inform the product roadmap and market potential
- Security Advising: Work closely with Security and Compliance Teams to advise on questions related to security posture
3. Sales Engineer Job Description
- Pre-sales Support: Provide pre-sales support for pre-qualified opportunities for all products in the Platform.
- Technical Presenting: Craft and deliver technical presentations of offerings to new potential customers.
- Solution Architecture: Conduct technical working sessions to jointly architect solutions to business problems, leveraging the Platform with prospective new customers.
- Product Knowledge: Remain up-to-date on solutions and products and maintain familiarity and adherence to all company methods and procedures.
- Team Mentoring: Mentor team members through observation of their work and develop learning plans to improve their abilities, skills, and knowledge of the platform, sales engineering strategies, and client-facing skills.
- Sales Enablement: Work with sales management to drive sales through optimizing processes, training of team, and developing a culture of collaboration, learning, and success.
4. Sales Engineer Details and Accountabilities
- Strategy Development: Develop and maintain business strategies for the water and power Industries by achieving sales targets and increasing market shares
- Sales Presenting: Visit customers to drive sales pitch and product presentations
- Revenue Achievement: Be responsible for achieving sales revenue and profit targets
- Strategy Alignment: Align and link the business strategies set by the company
- Relationship Building: Build strong relationships with existing and new customers
- Customer Support: Provide sales and after-sales support, in coordination with the internal departments and customers
- Quotation Preparation: Prepare project costing, project, and sales quotations for customers
- Market Research: Market studies and feedback to the country sales manager
5. Sales Engineer Additional Details
- Needs Assessment: Serves customers by identifying their needs and engineering adaptations of the product.
- Rapport Building: Identifies current and future customer service requirements by establishing personal rapport with potential and actual customers in a position to understand service requirements.
- Technical Support: Provides product technical and engineering information by answering questions and requests.
- Cost Estimating: Prepares cost estimates in collaboration with the Sales team by studying all related customer requirements.
- Technical Consulting: Consulting with engineers, architects, and other professional personnel.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: Determines improvements by analyzing cost-benefit ratios of services and products in the customer environment.
- Solution Suggesting: Suggest engineering solutions and propose changes in services.
- Customer Enablement: Gains customer acceptance by explaining or demonstrating benefits and operational improvements.
- Staff Training: Supports the customer’s staff by providing technical information, insights, and training.
- Report Preparation: Prepares reports by collecting, analyzing, and summarizing information from sales and engineering teams
- Professional Development: Maintains professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops, reviewing professional publications, establishing personal networks, and participating in professional societies.
- RFx Management: Manages the RFx-s and structures processes to make them more efficient
- Sales Effectiveness: Contributes to sales engineering effectiveness by identifying short-term and long-range issues that must be addressed, recommending options and courses of action, and implementing directives.
6. Sales Engineer General Responsibilities
- Product Knowledge: Learn and maintain current knowledge of the products and be able to describe key features and benefits of each
- Pre-sales Support: Provide pre-sales technical support to sales teams, partners, and ultimately customers
- Remote Presenting: Deliver remote product and solution presentations and demonstrations
- Sales Training: Assist with the training of sales personnel
- Technical Responding: Develop and deliver responses to customer and prospect technical inquiries
- PoC Support: Provide evaluations and proof-of-concept/pilot assistance to partners and customers
- Product Testing: Assist product development in testing new products
7. Sales Engineer Responsibilities and Key Tasks
- Implementation Guidance: Guide new potential customers with their initial basic setup and implementation
- Demo Delivery: Build and deliver custom demonstrations for potential customers, focusing on key business drivers and functional requirements
- Proposal Support: Collaborate with Account Executives in the production of sales proposals that outline differentiators, and maintain ownership of technical RFIs and RFPs
- Roadmap Alignment: Work closely with the product management team to convey customer requirements and review roadmap items
- Demo Environment: Assist with the support and ongoing development of demonstration environments, including examples of custom development and integrations with 3rd party applications
- Industry Awareness: Keep abreast of relevant search and e-commerce industry trends