Knowledgeable technical engineering sales can contribute to increasing sales. Here are tips to streamline your process for better customer support and sales.
Technical sales engineers are instrumental in promoting and selling specialist equipment and services to business clients. They provide leads with expert technical knowledge in sectors such as biomedical and manufacturing industries. Their knowledge and expertise are at the heart of the sales process, enabling the business to identify new potential customer targets, negotiate new dales, and assist lead throughout the sales journey.
But, at the same time, your technical engineering sales process is also a commercial operation that requires targeted customer support, strategic marketing and follow-up activities, and transparent communication with a variety of technical and non-technical teams within the business.
Needless to say, delays and frictions can arise before, during, and after the technical engineering sales process as a result of:
- Inaccuracy in content
- Slow lead generation strategy
- Loss of leads between sales steps
- Lack of customer follow-up information
- Conflicting goals
At Purple Potato Software, our team of experts is dedicated to helping you maximise your technical engineering sales potential. That’s why we’ve produced the following guidelines to help you streamline your process and reduce frictions.
Communicate clear strategic goals and plans
Regardless of your industry sector, it is essential to clarify goals related to your sales process. These goals will affect both the marketing and the sales teams. Indeed, each team plays a crucial role in increasing sales revenues at a business level.
The marketing activities focus on raising brand and product awareness to create leads. The technical engineering sales team is charged with nurturing leads and generating sales.
Challenges arise when the goals set for each team are conflicting. This can happen for different reasons:
- Lead identification criteria vary between the teams
- Unrealistic goals drive poor quality leads
- Lack of cooperation between teams leads to confusion and duplicate tasks
- etc.
To ensure both the marketing and sales team can be productive and effective together, meaningful goal setting is a priority.
Centralise all customers information in one place
How do you know if a contact is a first-time lead or if they are already part of the lead nurturing process?
Picture the situation: A prospective buyer who has already been in touch with a qualified technical sales engineer contacts your customer service team for more information. Unfortunately, the agent finds no trace of the contact in their system and, therefore, handles the call as if they were talking to a new lead. As a result, the prospective buyer is frustrated, which can slow down or cancel the sales process.
How can this be avoided? Using a reliable CRM tool that can reflect all business operations related to each contact will make a big difference. Indeed, the customer team could track individual leads’ journeys and avoid costly confusion.
A similar situation could arise when a lead who has already received a quote gets in touch with the sales team. In the absence of the sales rep who worked with them, the sales team might miss the opportunity to close the deal.
Develop automated lead sales path
Lead nurturing is a time-demanding process, especially when it comes to technical engineering sales. Within the technical sector, there is no such thing as a shelf product that can meet the needs of all your customers. Indeed, unique industries, trends, and operations will require unique tech standards and implementations. As a result, a technical sales engineer can’t rely on automated emailing campaigns that blast the same product to hundreds of clients.
On the contrary, unique customers will need tailored solutions. From a lead generation perspective, this means individual communication, a bespoke quotation system, and custom follow-up. But, there are strategies to automate even a custom sales process:
- Identify and assign tasks to the right interlocutor
- Produce custom templates for emailing
- Create lead reminders
- Attach relevant files to each contact
- Collect and store information for each contact
- Mark each lead generation stage
Provide enhanced customer support
The last thing you need is to delay a potential sales deal through inaccurate information. Therefore, whether an existing client or a lead gets in touch, providing excellent customer support is essential. However, when your teams aren’t equipped with tools that let them see the customer journey, they can struggle to provide the best customer service.
Are the right tools enough to do the trick? The answer is no. Using the right tools without appropriate training at a business level could also cause delays and frustration for the customers. At Purple Potato Software, we are committed to providing you with the educational resource you need to make the most of your tools. We also encourage businesses to embrace transparent communication at all levels by updating relevant customer tabs and integrating with everyday operations.
In conclusion, avoiding friction in your technical engineering sales process requires transparency in your business strategy, tools, and communication. Our CRM solution is designed to improve transparency and flow for your sales process.
