In many high-tech sectors – medical devices, computer hardware and software, and manufacturing equipment and controls, for instance – more and more engineers and other specialists are being called out of their cubicles and into sales meetings with customers. These technical professionals go by a variety of titles. “We call them sales engineers, but there are about a dozen different job titles that we’ve run into for this role,” says Phil Janus, founder and president of Salesengineering.com, a consulting firm that specializes in teaching sales skills to technical professionals. “You will hear sales engineers, sales consultants, system engineers, system consultants, solution consultants, technical sales support – all over the gamut, really.” As technical and application expertise plays an ever greater role in the sales process, the demand for technical professionals with selling skills is growing. At CareerBuilder.com, the largest online job site in the U.S., the August 2007 job postings including the term “sales engineer” grew 17 percent over August 2006.

Michael Funk, academic coordinator for the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Florida’s College of Engineering, which established the first academic minor in sales engineering, has seen the demand manifested in job fairs held there. “The past year or so there’s been a very large increase in interest and the companies that have come,” he says. “The job opportunities definitely are increasing, and it seems that companies are definitely keying in on this program – they are specifically coming to look for these students.” A driving factor in the rising demand is the relative scarcity of engineers who have sales skills. “Everybody coming out of the Engineering College has the technical base in chemistry, physics, and calculus that they need to succeed in industry,” explains Funk. “But do they have the personality and do they have the aptitude to work in a sales situation with people? Do they have the ability to get through situations where they are not always the winner and are not always getting the sale and getting it done?” It appears that relatively few engineering students do have the desire and/or aptitude for a sales career. There are roughly 5,000 undergraduates in the University of Florida College of Engineering, and of them, about 1,000 are majoring in Industrial and Systems Engineering. And the total number of these budding engineers enrolled in the Sales Engineering minor? About 120. Further, Funk believes the program itself is the only one in the nation (although the University of Iowa is in the process of developing a sales engineering minor of its own). One reason for this may be that the personality traits of engineers and salespeople are not always compatible. “In the sales world, you need somebody who is comfortable to be customer-facing,” says Phil Janus, who worked as a sales engineer and a sales engineering manager at companies such as Sybase, UniSQL, and Siemens Pyramid for 18 years prior to founding Salesengineering.com in 1997. “You can’t use the tech weenies who like to sit in a corner and code all day long. They just won’t be successful. So you need somebody who is personable, someone who can build a rapport and establish credibility very quickly with the customer. Just from a practical perspective, it’s very hard to find a single person who is competent at both skills at the same time.” So how can sales executives and managers satisfy their growing need for salespeople and support staff who have the specialized technical skills needed to analyze customers’ needs and specify viable solutions as well as the interpersonal and business skills needed to establish rapport and close sales? One company that can offer valuable insights into meeting this challenge is Trane, a division of American Standard Companies that manufactures, manages, and services heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Trane was founded in 1885 and in 2006 contributed $6.8 billion to American Standard’s annual revenues. (American Standard is in the process of divesting its other businesses and plans to rename itself Trane, Inc.) Trane’s HVAC systems and services are used in nearly half of the commercial buildings in the U.S. The company’s commercial unit, Piscataway, NJ-based Trane Americas, has a 1,200-member sales force, in which each member acts as both salesperson and engineer. “We have been recruiting engineers as salespeople for over 80 years,” says president John Conover, who worked his way up through the ranks of sales himself. The company has an enviable reputation in its industry for its ability to transform engineers into winning salespeople. Enough of a reputation that, according to Conover, competitors within the industry and companies in other sectors, such as medical equipment and devices, occasionally target Trane’s salespeople when they need to bolster their own technical sales forces.

RECRUITING THE BRIGHTEST Trane faces the same challenges in recruiting technically adept salespeople as other companies. “I think it’s no secret that it’s very difficult, and it is our opinion that it’s going to get more difficult every day,” says Conover. “We are looking at the number of engineers that are required [and] that’s up by 20 percent in the next couple of years. And the number of high school students who have applied for engineering schools this year versus last year was only up one percent. So the opportunity is growing very fast the supply is not.” Trane has an advantage in this tight talent market that many other companies don’t: It already has a well-established academic recruiting program. In fact, the majority of its salespeople are hired directly from the ranks of newly graduated engineers. “We have a very proactive program within the engineering school community,” explains Conover. “We are out there looking for young people who have technical capabilities, an interest in learning the business, and a social skill set. We have a very interesting career path for them, and that is the message that we are taking to the schools.” As part of this program, the company’s executives make time to participate in career fairs and job interviews held at engineering schools in order to personally meet the “very small slice” of students who can practice engineering and sales simultaneously. They also have had success finding qualified job candidates by going beyond these traditional recruiting venues and participating in seminars as well as reaching out to campus-based engineering associations and social groups, which Mike Malone, Trane’s director of recruiting, says, “attract technical people who are a bit more bent toward business.” As Trane identifies likely job candidates, it puts them through a multitiered vetting process. The first tier takes place at the college or university where the candidate is initially interviewed. In the second tier, students from several universities who performed well in the first round of interviews are invited to a regional Trane office, where they complete sales profile assessments and are interviewed by teams including sales managers, district managers and recruiters. At the third tier, each candidate is interviewed at the specific sales office in which he or she will eventually work. Finally, the Trane Sales Engineer Internship program, a 12-week, paid summer internship, is proving to be one of the company’s most successful recruiting tools. “We can take a college junior or sometimes a rising senior and put them into what is essentially a 12-week interview,” explains Malone. In 2007, 22 college juniors and seniors were offered internships; 65 percent of them were offered and accepted jobs.

EIGHTY YEARS OF TRAINING Identifying and hiring engineers who have the desire and aptitude to sell is only the first step in Trane’s “grow your own” sales force strategy. The second step is the Trane Graduate Training Program (GTP), an internal training program established by Reuben Trane, son of the company’s founder, in 1926. GTP is an 11-month training course consisting of five months in the classroom in Trane’s Lacrosse, WI, training center and six months with an on-the-job mentor in the field. The company’s investment per student is approximately $225,000, and it graduates two classes of 40 to 60 sales engineers per year. The classroom portion of GTP introduces new sales hires to all five of Trane’s business streams. “The first 15 weeks are systems-oriented,” says Malone. “Everybody is learning the same thing. They are learning to be generalists and how to really explore a customer’s building situation at the systems level as opposed to the component level. Once they have that base of knowledge, then they start to specialize – to learn much more in-depth, and as far as you can get in a classroom setting, about the control side or the equipment side or the service side.” GTP students spend about roughly one-third of their time on technical training, one-third learning about the company’s vertical markets and customers’ key decision points, and onethird learning an internally developed sales methodology as well as sales and interpersonal skills. “We think about the sales process with our customers in three different ways,” says Conover. “We have an account management process where as a sales engineer you are looking at your key accounts and you are putting together an account plan. Then, we have an opportunity management process that shows how we are going to work together with all the different parties in the construction trade that are going to have their fingerprints on that building. And then there is a training program around negotiation and sales tactics, the nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes program that you are going to have on a particular transaction.” Even the classroom learning is experiential in TGP. “They get a chance to practice a lot and they also have the permission to fail,” says Malone. “We actually do a full-week simulation as a kind of capstone to the class in which groups of students work in teams and attack customers, from engineers to the contractors to owners.”

PROTECTING THE INVESTMENT GTP not only prepares engineers to sell, it inculcates the Trane culture in new hires and creates connections that often last throughout their careers. “I came out of college and, not to date myself, was part of the ’77–1 class. It’s kind of a tattoo for people who go through the class,” says Conover. Scott Hearn, vice president of operations, adds, “To that point, there is an esprit de corps about the class where individuals will actually introduce themselves by stating, as John did, the class number they came from.” This is no small matter. The investment that Trane makes in its sales engineers and the demand for such salespeople in the job market makes the retention of such salespeople a critical issue. So anything that creates links to the company and encourages them to stay is an important enabler of the sales force’s continued success. “Retention is something we obviously watch closely because of the investment, but we are leveraging a strong foundation, not only in the training program, but in the culture. We boast the best retention rates, not only in our industry, but in all of technical sales,” says Hearn of the singledigit turnover rate in the sales force. How do they do it? A policy of promoting from within and a compensation system that is the most highly leveraged in the industry towards performance are two ways. “Good leaders, great opportunities, and an organization that stands behind the students and supports them in front of their customers,” adds Hearn. “When they make a sale they know that the company is going to support them after the sale and that they are going to have good products.”