Training engineers into industrial salesman

[MrG]

Hi there, i've been long thinking about a business model that fulfills CENTS, has relevancy with myself and speaks to a market that I know.

I started out as an engineer, later on I was in marketing for industrial products and machinery and eventually became a head of sales and marketing managing about 25 full time employees and 15-20M revenue, pretty much grown from 0, from start-up to scale-up. I sold product from 3-10k a pop to 100-500k per installation.

During this 10 year journey I learned quite a lot, mainly:

• There are a lot of frustrated engineers that understand the technical/industrial space due to their studies but do not enjoy being part of R&D
• There are a lot of frustrated engineers that see how promoting within R&D is much more difficult than within sales and marketing
• There are a lot of industrial companies that struggle to market or sell their product because their commercial departments do not understand their industrial customers
• These industrial companies struggle to find marketeers and salesman with technical backgrounds

I've been on both sides of the story, a frustrated engineer moving towards the commercial space AND the hiring manager having to settle for business administration / sales / marketing background hires instead of someone with a technical background that can sell.

From the 100+ people I've hired or interviewed for industrial sales or industrial marketing roles I'd always hire the engineer with a bit of sales experience than the full blown salesman or marketeer. It's much easier to teach an engineer how to sell to engineers than to a marketeer or salesman to lose their B2C sales speech that put off the industrial customers.

So basically I am envisioning an industrial sales academy/agency where we have two main propositions, although it may be smarter to start only with one:

1. Training for engineers: industrial sales course to help them land an industrial sales or marketing role, get a higher salary and get out of the lab. These apply to seasoned engineers or juniors, wether they want to promote internally within their company or jump to a new one.
2. Training companies: provide training to their engineers to become salesman as part of a career development plan. The training could also be for their current sales/marketing workforce that does not have an engineering backgrown.

The training for engineers would be mostly an online course, maybe include a community offering and 121 consulting for a couple of hours in every sale of the course.

The training for companies could be online or tailor-made on-site. The on-site would include some strategic consulting to tailor-make the product to them. This is a bit of what I am doing nowadays as an independent consultant when I can't take more work, I'll accept to do part of the job whilst training someone from their team.

I believe that the B2C side of the proposition, training for engineers, is much more scalalbe. There's no shortage of potential customers, they are customers that typically have money to spare and a lot of them were pushed into engineering by their parents.

I envision the course to be at least 1,000€ and the main channel for marketing paids ads on instagram, youtube and linkedin.

For the pilot I'd basically build the front-end of the whole thing without building the product, run a 500-1,000€ paid ad campaign and look on LinkedIn for profiles of engineers to cold message. If any of those convert that's the validation of the business so I can start building the course.

What do you think?

 

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