Buying decisions in these markets are made differently than those in many consumer contexts, being based more on technical information and rational analysis and less on style, fashion, or impulse.
Toward that end, sales engineering increasingly relies on any information technology that can help quantify ROI.
[1] This is summed up in the aphorism that "at the end of the day, the customer just wants to know for sure that they will gain A dollars over the next B years (via reduced expenses or increased sales) if they pay C dollars up front for product D." Another function of the sales engineer is to introduce modified, improved, and/or advanced technology to potential users who may have an application but who have not yet acquired knowledge of the material or technique in question.
Inventors and R&D people create new tools and processes; but they do not disseminate into the business world (to do any economic good) without some amount of applications development, teaching (from exposing decision-makers via trade shows to providing workers with training), and sales.
The sales process also may require some technical proof of concept or tech demo to be assured of the practicality of the solution.
In order to prepare the commercial proposal, once the scope of the proposed solution is finalized, the sales engineer is typically also in charge of gathering all the inputs from internal stakeholders (product, R&D, delivery, services, finance, legal, etc.)
so that profit and loss (P&L) can be calculated, pricing can be established and final commercial proposal can be approved and submitted to the customer.
The companies that employ sales engineers need to sell their products or services to generate income, but since engineers and scientists usually have substantially different personality traits than those required for sales work, there is a role for people with a combination of abilities.
The North American Association of Sales Engineers has done much to advance awareness of the field across all industries and has further resources available.
They also have to sell the idea of why customers need to make a change to move forward to the solution offered.
Sales engineering uses a lot of discovery questions to uncover the challenges that customers have in their business or the outcomes they can't drive.