Sales Engineer Resume

Sales engineers use their expertise — usually in the areas of mechanical, software, computer, electrical, or chemical engineering — to sell highly technical products and services. By explaining how products and services work and understanding the customer’s needs, technical sales engineers work with customers to design solutions.

Technical sales engineers are also often called:

• technical sales representatives
• sales consultants
• solutions architects

Here are four tips for writing a sales engineer resume to land you a position at the intellectually challenging interface between sales and engineering:

1. Customize your sales engineer resume to the job ad

Tailoring your resume to the job post shows employers that you’re interested in and qualified for their specific job. To better understand your target role, read the job ad carefully. Also, do extra research on the target company to answer questions such as:

• what’s the product or service you’ll be working with?
• what stage of the sales process will the company want you to focus on (technical qualification, request for proposal, discovery, presentation and demonstration, post-sales support)?
• is the position a sales role that requires technical background, or is it a technical role that requires sales?
• is it an inside, field, or specialist sales engineer role?

Then incorporate the information from your research into your resume summary (a 2-4 sentence introduction at the top of your resume), like this:

Notice how the applicant mentions the:

• specific type of sales engineer role they want
• company name
• knowledge they possess that the role requires
• familiarity they have with the product and the company’s goals

Additionally, your research will help you customize your work experience section. By only including relevant experience, you show employers how you meet their specific needs and keep your resume on one page, which is how long your resume should be in most situations.

For example, the applicant who wrote the above resume summary should provide more details in their work experience section about previous positions that closely match the software field sales engineer role. But they should dedicate less space to describing past inside sales engineer or hardware experience.

2. Quantify your work experience by reporting sales metrics

Just as sales performance metrics show your current employer how you’re doing, sales metrics give future employers a concrete idea of what you can do.

So add key performance indicators, such as the following, into your sales engineer resume’s work experience section:

• Total revenue
• Market penetration
• Percentage of revenue from new vs. existing customers
• Year-over-year growth
• Number of demos or sales presentations
• Number of proposals prepared
• Average length of your sales cycles
• Win rate
• Customer acquisition cost

If you don’t have much sales experience, focus on your technical skills. For example, if you’re applying to a software sales engineer role, you can mention personal coding projects you’ve done or discuss previous roles in software engineering.

3. Place your education section below your work experience

Employers care that you have a strong educational foundation in a relevant engineering field (typically a bachelor’s degree in the STEM fields), but they ultimately value work experience more than education. So put your education section under your work experience.

But even though your education section doesn’t get top priority on your resume, you should still fill it with relevant information. Sales engineers have to learn about the company’s specific products on the job and must continually update their knowledge as technology advances. So show employers you’re committed to learning by describing:

• bootcamps and extra courses you’ve taken, especially if these are in place of a relevant bachelor’s degree
• certifications you’ve obtained
• trade shows, conferences, and seminars you’ve attended

4. Include both hard and soft skills on your sales engineer resume

Sales engineers need both hard and soft skills to succeed. Hard skills are abilities you develop through training, like your expertise with a particular software program. And soft skills are personality traits related to working with others.

If the job role is more sales-oriented, you may want to highlight the soft skills you use to interact with customers. But if the job is more technical or an inside sales engineering role, give more space to your hard skills.

Based on the job description and your specific field, mix these hard skills into your work experience and skills section:

• Presentations & technical demonstrations
• Sales skills for various stages of the sales process, from lead generation to post-sale support
• Salesforce
• Microsoft Office
• Data analytics and visualization
• Cloud technologies
• Extract transform load (ETL)

Additionally, add top soft skills for sales engineers to your resume, such as:

If you’re a fresh graduate, you can emphasize these skills common to entry-level sales engineer positions:

• willingness to learn
• highly motivated and goal-oriented
• willingness to travel
• ability to carry a certain amount of weight (if demonstrating a physical product)