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Grow your firm and bolster future success by training and mentoring technical staff to participate in your firm’s sales and marketing efforts. Training engineers to be sales leaders
A popular notion in the marketplace is that most engineers are introverts, and they would prefer to do design work all day on the computer rather than get out and network to get new business. While there is some truth to this idea, the challenge for many consulting engineering firms is to train and mentor technical staff to participate in sales and marketing, which is very important to a company’s future success.
Joe Meads
In my case, I found early in my career that I enjoyed business development, maybe even more than engineering. Twenty-three years ago, I was a professional engineer managing a wide range of different types of projects. During that time, I was given the option to change positions with our marketing director. She was not a professional engineer, but she liked managing projects, and I liked marketing best. Since that time, I’ve found my engineering experience has helped me tremendously as a business development leader in our company. One of the strategic issues that we saw at Sain Associates was that we needed to increase our bench strength for participation in business development activities rather than just rely on one or two people. During an annual strategic
planning event, we came up with the idea of starting a Team Sales Leader Program so that we could grow our firm and prepare for future transition within the company. Before identifying sales leaders for each discipline, our staff completed a personal business development evaluation. The evaluation provided information on general business development activities such as building relationships, social media, volunteering, and writing articles and blogs. Each staff person gave a strength/weakness inventory assessment on their self and business development activities that fit them. Some of the strengths reported in the assessments included organization, technical writing, small talk, client
See JOE MEADS, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 28, 2020, ISSUE 1361
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