Marketing or sales career?

Is it good for an engineer who would be pursuing MBA in future to go for sales and marketing profile for the start of his/her career?

• I mean sales and marketing profile is very high risk job and for an engineer is it safe to opt for this profile at the start of the career

• Answer:

  Yes. Engineering minds work best for sales based on my experience. If you can truly listen, are thirsty to learn and have an engineering mind - you will have wild success. Sales can be broken down into a methodical science. Once you learn the sales steps - you can recognize the patterns in any human interaction. These patterns can be repeated for a methodical process that yields insanely good results - over and over again. I would recommend going to Dale Carnegie sales training prior to your MBA if not already enrolled. This process, if taught by the proper professor, is the cornerstone of sales and forever will be - as it is based primarily on principles. The high level breakdown is as follows; Listen. Listen. Listen. But really - here are the steps. Build rapport Discover the customer’s needs Identify sales opportunities embedded in those needs and develop a solution Recommend the solution to the customer and motivate the customer to take action Follow up to ensure that customer needs have been met The number one step is the discovery / investigation. If we were putting time frames around these, we would spend 90% of the time in the discovery investigation and 10% of the time the following steps. Investigation looks something like this: asking questions around – as is, should be, benefits, payout. Basically the questions for as is would look like this: how does your dishwasher work today? Should be: How would you like your dishwasher to work? Barriers: what is stopping you from having your dishwasher perform (customers should be answer)? Payout: if your dishwasher were able to perform (with should be answer), how would that affect your day/life/stress/monetary gain/time/opportunity costs, etc? Once there is a full understanding of needs you can start to link benefits to needs which will directly tie into what the customer actually needs. Best of luck!