Selling this pen again by Tony Green

I described the scenario in an earlier entry when I asked to ‘sell the pen’ question during an interview. As you may recall from my previous entry I was on a quest obtain a sales position. The question is a good question to ask because it tests a potential salesperson persistence to overcome rejection and their listening skills, key components of any successful salesperson.

When I was asked the question I failed miserably as I stumbled to describe how this was the pen that they wanted. I resolved that would never happen again reading everything I could get my hands on how to answer the question. Now that I was prepared for the question I figured that I would never be asked again.

Of course, I was asked. Since I had learned from my previous nightmare I was going to jump all over the question. I remembered that I needed to focus on the benefits and not the features and if I got an objection, naturally the interviewer would make it challenging, so I tried to convince the interviewer that a pen was what he wanted regardless of how many times he objected. Once I finished I took a breath.

After I answered the question I thought I was in good shape until the interviewer asked me had you considered whether he wanted a pen? The wind went out of my sails as clumsily tried to recover. I guess I will be asked the question until I get it right.

An Engineer After All by Tony Green

A few weeks ago I took a day off from work to attend a Comsol hands-on workshop at their Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto, Calif. Comsol, formerly Femlab, sells engineering software that models the governing equations of mass, heat and momentum transport using numerical methods to the differential equations that govern many real life processes.
I was considering going back to graduate school to pursue my Masters in Engineering and wanted to see I could really delve into engineering at a higher level.
During my Chemical Engineering undergraduate studies I was not the best student, looking back after 15 years in retrospect. It was not that I had not learned anything but there were so many things going on my in life at the time, mainly growing up, that my main focus was not where it should have been.
During the half-day session a demo version of the Comsol Multiphysics was installed on my laptop and the participants and I were able to work through an example where the voltage of was simulated on a wafer after it had been processed.
I enjoyed working through the technical topics such as Navier-Stokes equations and convective heat transfer equations with my fellow participants. I had been a while that I had used by ebgniernig background since I left my position where I was an application engineer part-time.
Of course, Comsol was not offering demos for people to tinker around with its software. The application engineer whose job was to get people to buy software following the demo period did a wonderful job of following up and giving every opportunity to see the full value of the software. For the record, I would recommend the software for anybody thinking about using it. Ultimately, I felt almost sad that I could not buy the software. The price tag was a bit pricey to buy just to fool around with it once every few months.
Currently I am trying to get into technical sales and marketing and though I have worked to prepare myself I am not sure that it is meant to be. While I explore other career options going back to my engineering roots seems to be an option I should examine closer. Maybe I am an engineer at heart after all.