From Cost to Value: Lessons from an Industrial Sales Engineer

I attended engineering school at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri S&T), graduating in 1981 with a BS in Chemical Engineering. I paid for my education through UMR’s co-op program, alternating semesters at school with semesters working for Caterpillar Tractor. Early in my schooling, I envisioned myself as a design or process engineer.

But as fate would have it, during my final co-op semester, Caterpillar assigned me to a manufacturing plant where I worked with three different purchasing agents. Salespeople would often call those purchasing agents to introduce their products to Caterpillar. The purchasing agents would instead have them call on me. I listened to their pitches, consulted with Caterpillar manufacturing engineers and production supervisors, and reported back on whether I thought the offers provided value. To my surprise, by the end of that semester, I knew that my career should focus on technical sales!

The AIN’T Principle

My first sales engineering job was with Exxon’s Specialty Products Group. I sold wholesale fuels to consumers, along with a wide variety of industrial lubricants, solvents, process oils, and base stocks. Over time, I learned to use what I called the AIN’T Principle.

• AWARE: Customers needed to understand how I could help.
• INCENTIVE: They needed to see the profit-improving incentive my product or service provided.
• KNOWLEDGE: I needed to advance their knowledge of how my product improved profits, safety, or product quality.
• TOOLS: I needed to provide tools that continued to prove the value my products delivered.

I later continued my sales engineering career at Nalco/Exxon Energy Chemicals, providing additives to refineries and fuel and lubricant additives to marketers, and then at Nalco Water as a process additive specialist. During my many years at Nalco Water, I used these skills to develop corrosion inhibitors for fuel ethanol, antioxidants for biodiesel, and a corrosion inhibitor for the liquid fertilizer urea ammonium nitrate (UAN). Through this work, I identified opportunities and earned four patents.

Putting the AIN’T Principle into Practice

Of course, success as a sales engineer starts with listening to customers’ concerns and needs. During one of my first visits to a nitrogen and ammonia production facility, I learned of a serious leak from one of its UAN storage tanks. The customer asked whether we had a solution.

That question started an investigation involving lab work, inspections of UAN storage tanks and railcars, and discussions with production managers about how and why UAN was produced. From that work, I identified the cause of the corrosion and formulated an effective corrosion inhibitor. Beyond that, I learned that better control of certain key production parameters could also reduce UAN’s natural corrosivity.

• AWARE: I showed my Nalco Water sales colleagues and the customer that we could provide an effective, affordable solution.
• INCENTIVE: I quantified the financial incentive: lower repair costs for tanks and railcars, along with a lower risk of bad publicity from a leak at one of the producer’s sites or a customer’s storage site.
• KNOWLEDGE: I prepared summaries of our investigation so the customer and our Nalco Water sales representatives understood how the product worked and which production changes could further reduce corrosion.
• TOOLS: We turned that knowledge into tools, including operator training and an easy-to-use method of analyzing whether the producer was maintaining those key production parameters.

In each of these activities, I had the honor of working with talented process engineers, chemists, and manufacturing managers who taught me about their industries and how they made their products. In each case, I looked for ways to add value through the additives or other systems I could provide.

One thing I learned about adding value is that when your solution becomes part of the customer’s product, it becomes value to maximize, not just a cost to minimize. Sales engineering can provide that opportunity.