Jobs / Sales and marketing / 41-9031.00
Sales Engineers
Sell business goods or services, the selling of which requires a technical background equivalent to a baccalaureate degree in engineering.
- US jobs
- 51,790
- Median wage
- $124,900 a year
- Job family
- Sales and marketing
Can agents do the work of sales engineers?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Sales and marketing:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from 2025. On Salesforce's CRMArena-Pro, which tests sales, service, and configure-price-quote requests inside a CRM, the best recorded agent succeeds on 58.3% of single-turn tasks and on fewer multi-turn tasks (Gemini 2.5 Pro, May 2025). No newer results are published.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes sales managers among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests running a campaign or a sales pipeline over weeks.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in sales and marketing, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Develop, present, or respond to proposals for specific customer requirements, including request for proposal responses and industry-specific solutions.
- Collaborate with sales teams to understand customer requirements, to promote the sale of company products, and to provide sales support.
- Create sales or service contracts for products or services.
- Visit prospective buyers at commercial, industrial, or other establishments to show samples or catalogs, and to inform them about product pricing, availability, and advantages.
- Keep informed on industry news and trends, products, services, competitors, relevant information about legacy, existing, and emerging technologies, and the latest product-line developments.
- Identify resale opportunities and support them to achieve sales plans.
- Confer with customers and engineers to assess equipment needs and to determine system requirements.
- Plan and modify product configurations to meet customer needs.
- Prepare and deliver technical presentations that explain products or services to customers and prospective customers.
- Recommend improved materials or machinery to customers, documenting how such changes will lower costs or increase production.
- Maintain sales forecasting reports.
- Document account activities, generate reports, and keep records of business transactions with customers and suppliers.
Other job titles for this occupation (36)
Business Development Engineer · Inside Sales Engineer · Product Sales Engineer · Sales Applications Engineer · Sales Engineer · Technical Marketing Engineer · Technical Sales Engineer · Aeronautical Products Sales Engineer · Aerospace Products Sales Engineer · Agricultural Equipment Sales Engineer · Ceramic Products Sales Engineer · Channel Sales Engineer (CSE) · Chemical Equipment Sales Engineer · Customer Engineer · Electrical Products Sales Engineer · Electronics Products and Systems Sales Engineer · Enterprise Sales Engineer · Field Marketing Representative · Field Sales Engineer · Field Service Representative · HVAC Commercial Salesperson (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Commercial Salesperson) · Inside Sales Representative · Marine Equipment Sales Engineer · Mechanical Equipment Sales Engineer · Mining and Oil Well Equipment and Services Sales Engineer · Missile Navigation Systems Sales Engineer · Nuclear Equipment Sales Engineer · Outside Sales Engineer · Outside Sales Representative · Pre-Sales Engineer · Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer · Product Support Engineer · Product Support Specialist · Regional Sales Engineer · Sales Engineering Manager · Sales Specialist