Brett Dooley | Technical Sales, Nuclear Reactor Technology, & Freedom

hi everyone we've set up this being an engineer podcast as an industry knowledge repository if you will we hope it'll be a tool where engineers can learn about and connect with other companies technologies people resources and opportunities so make some connections and enjoy the show the sales engineer job has a lot of freedom in your day-to-day job that i'm not sure a lot of people would want to give up to be honest once you've got a taste for it so [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today we're speaking with brett dooley who is a mechanical engineer at bosch rexroth brett collaborates with business owners and engineers to develop targeted solutions for motion control and automation challenges he uses his wide experience in business development industrial repair and a decade as an electronics tech in the u.s navy submarine force to ensure delivery of an effective and robust automation system and because i've known brett for several years i'll add that he's also just a really nice guy and a pleasure to work with so brett welcome to the show thank you very much aaron i appreciate you having me on it's a great podcast absolutely yeah so um brett we've worked together for several years actually and um i don't think i've ever asked you the question what made you decide to become an engineer that is such a long answer overall but i'm gonna really try hard to summarize that a little bit um so i don't know what it is about me as a kid but i knew i was going into some sort of science and engineering for as far back as i can remember um even went to space camp back in the day yeah so we're actually talking about uh sending my son soon just because it's it's interesting it's kind of fun uh but i remember always being really into trying to figure out how to do things make things work you know i took our broken vcr apart when i was a kid thinking i'd be able to fix it not realizing that it's all pcbs and stuff like that where no no 10 year old kid can do anything to fix something like that right but i took it apart i thought i'd be able to put it back together and then it went into the trash uh so if that isn't a tell-tale sign for an engineering engineer in the making i don't know what is taking stuff apart and throwing it away well at least the first part taking it apart with the intention of fixing it yeah just the confidence that you that you had to do that in the first place i think is that's a telltale sign of an engineer yeah i'll figure it out right i'll take it apart and i'll figure it out oh i had no doubt in my mind i'd be able to fix it right up until i got it apart and realized there was no chance um but that's the kind of stuff i did i you know i i went through high school i always really concentrated on science and math and things like that um and then after high school you know i was gonna go into college and go into an engineering program but uh you know i was talking to relatives and stuff and so i i actually ended up deciding to go into the military for a little while instead so i just delayed uh going to college for the engineering degree for about a decade but i still ended up here great well i definitely want to dive into the the military portion of your career as well before we get there let's talk a little bit about where you are right now which is in in sales and you've been there for some time what prompted you to make that transition from i i think correct me if i've got the timeline wrong here but i think directly out of college you went into a technical sales position is that right uh yeah so i guess just not to get into the military part but uh timeline wise uh 11 years in the military then i went to asu well i actually went to chandler gilbert community college for a little bit finished the associates and then i went to asu finished mechanical engineering degree and then right out of the box or right out of the of school i kind of had several options like palo verde nuclear power plant had a job offer there because they wanted engineers with nuclear experience a couple other companies had very traditional engineering roles open for me and then there was a company that was a distributor for automation and motion control equipment that had a job opening and made an offer and i just saw what they did there and looked at how they got to see five different projects every day and every week you were you're jumping for project project project and i don't know if this says something about how my brain works but that was very attractive to me versus the concept of sitting in one spot and working on one project for an extended amount of time before you see any results um so i just really like the fact that i'm bouncing between anywhere between five and 20 projects in a day and it really keeps me active and engaged and i really enjoy that side of things and it lets me really focus on conceptual design in a lot of ways coming up with ideas and concepts and things like that a kind of daily basis without ever having to do the uh i would say the hard work which is actually sitting down and making it all work which is what you guys do but uh i i can fortunately stay in the conceptual world quite a bit that's a really good way to put it i'm not sure i've heard someone put it in such an effective and concise way that the the role of a technical sales or application engineer you get to work on kind of the fun stuff right coming up with the high level ideas and then you get to hand it off to someone else to work out all the details that's that's a a really good sales pitch for a role like yours i think and i i don't know i could be wrong but i get the sense that um engineers who are uh in training you know they're going to school they might they might sales technical sales applications engineer might not even be on their radar and if they were to hear about it they might say well that's the sales position i'm training to become an engineer why would i want to do sales and that's i think a really good pitch for why someone training to be an engineer might want to go into technical sales applications engineering because they get to see all these fun things and work on the high level ideas but but not not need to get bogged down with working out all the details which anyone who's ever done any manufacturing drawings will tell you is no fun oh absolutely i would agree with that now we do get bogged down in a lot of details quite a bit you know when one of my customers asked me for a pin out for a drive to make sure all the wiring diagrams are done correctly i can't stay in the conceptual realm for that you know we need to dive in we need to give them the correct answers but i'm doing 10 to 20 of those a day versus concentrating on that one cable that he's trying to design right and so yeah so it just i i hate to throw this word out there that i'm about to throw out anyway because it has kind of a uh it has a connotation behind it and it's not even that true probably but it's a good way of saying i think the mindset but you know you hear about add right add people who who need a lot of stimulation and a lot of change and a lot of things happening and that seems to be kind of the mindset of where i see is i really want to move from thing to thing to thing and and and do a lot of things at once and this allows me to do that and and i have a lot of fun doing that so i think that's the key what's the correct title for your role what would you describe yourself more as technical sales or um applications engineer or or both or something else entirely i'm very much falling into the technical sales category uh now my official title is account development manager uh that that implies i think a little bit too much of a business role for what i would say i really do on a day-to-day basis right now because i really do get into the technical weeds and help people make things work and use my engineering degree for what i do so i don't want to i'm not sure i like the official job title for to describe what i actually do so technical sales is great applications engineer is actually a separate person at our company and it deservably is a separate person they really do spend a lot more time uh getting into the weeds and getting into the details of making sure everything works in fact i really rely on those guys to make sure that i don't give somebody bad information because they tend to be experts in a a more narrow range of technology and so it's very difficult for me to be a broad encyclopedia of all knowledge i in fact i can't do that i will freely admit that i'm not that uh i really rely on the applications engineers when i have a question that needs a correct answer it has to be 100 correct from day one uh to make sure that i'm i'm on track got it okay thank you for clarifying that um all right so you went to school to become an engineer you spent you know four years there whatever it was and you come out the other end and you you go into a sales job how how did you know that you could do sales you just spent the past four years of your life uh in school to become an engineer so you have that background and you mentioned that you certainly use that that degree in technical sales but what about the other aspect of the job which is sales how did you know that that you could do that did you have some kind of special training before you got into it what what happened there well i do have a cheat code for that um that made it actually very easy now now i'm gonna tell you what it is in a second but i gotta admit i was actually very frightened that i was making a very poor decision when i first got into it because i felt like once i made the jump into sales technical sales even even though it still has a lot of engineering components there that i would pretty much be guaranteeing that i would never be able to work as a traditional engineer ever again that was the that was the big fear i had going into the whole thing is that i was basically writing that career path out of my life right and i was going to be stuck even though i don't feel stuck now but that was the fear at the time is that i would be stuck in a job that oh what if it doesn't work out right so i absolutely had that fear going in however in my navy experience i actually did about three years as a recruiter uh in there uh which i i would call okay i would call that about as intense of a sales program as you can ever go through um and i gotta be honest i did not enjoy being a recruiter that much that that was not but that was there was no technical there there was no engineering there and that's that's where we started this whole thing is i really enjoy science and engineering and things like that a military recruiter fills none of those buckets right so i i knew i could do it because i do done it even if i didn't enjoy it that much and then you bring the fun stuff in the science the technology all the all the new stuff like that and all of a sudden i felt like it it could make it a lot of fun got it okay that makes a lot of sense so it wasn't so difficult for you to go from an engineering background into sales you mentioned that you're really scared that what if i made the wrong decision what if i don't like this and i want to go into more of a traditional engineering role i'm not sure if i can do that after having gone into sales at this point have you seen many people make that transition spending whatever it is five ten years in technical sales and then moving into more of a traditional engineering role is that how how feasible is it for someone to make that change that's a great question and i i have very rarely seen it and it that might just be because the people that gravitate toward this job from the get-go are a good fit and and don't always want to go back the other way i sometimes i see business development guys for companies kind of fall over into the engineering side because they do it internally with their own company by helping and doing things like that i'm trying to think of an example i've ever met a sales engineer who actually went to an engineering job i'm sure they're out there but i can't think of one so i'm just not sure that happens very much yeah i yeah i think i think there the sales engineer job has a lot of freedom in your day-to-day job that i'm not sure a lot of people would want to give up to be honest once you've got a taste for it so so i i don't know it's uh there it's it's a it's a fun job that i keep saying that word it's a it's a lot of fun to be able to do do what we do uh so i i just don't know how you would go back the other way and at this point i'm not really looking so yeah what are some of the freedoms that you enjoy being in technical sales uh so first and foremost you know any good organization that you're going to work for in this type of job allows you to run your area whatever it is kind of as your own business as long as all the goals and the targets are met at the end of the day uh what you do on a day-to-day basis to meet those goals is very much up to you if you're not meeting the goals and numbers then obviously uh there could be some management discretion on what's going on but i got to be honest there's no difference between that and the ceo reporting to his board right there's no difference in how those two things go together uh that ceo has to meet his minimum numbers needs to meet everything to for the board not to take over or remove him so to me it is completely like running your own business uh other than the fact that i didn't have to buck up all the startup capital which is really nice uh not to have to do that not to have to do fundraising on the side i just get to do the fun part of the job so uh yeah i i would say that's that's the big part of that that that i enjoy that's a great point i can see how that would be attractive to a lot of people um so it sounds like it's it's a much more results oriented role as opposed to you know here's a task that you're going to be micromanaged on absolutely um that's a great way to say it and hopefully everybody's not out there being micromanaged too much but uh it it's it's nice to uh to to be in a role where uh you have the freedom to set your daily schedule in a way that will maximize your usefulness and uh productivity now that that infers something else which is that people who go into technical sales really have to be they have to be motivated of their own accord right i mean they can't be relying on someone else to motivate them they need to be of the personality type that is internally driven or else seems like that would be a tough role to handle if that wasn't the case absolutely if it would be very easy for anyone in this role to just not answer emails or phone calls and take the day off right but that is there's the flip side of this whole thing is you are the point of contact for anyone you're working with um and so if the phone rings the impulse is to answer the phone answer the email uh and and that's always going to be there uh if if you ignore those too much you're going to find that your customer base doesn't really want to reach out to you anymore which is a death sentence in the sales industry right yeah you you want people to reach out to you to ask you questions to find out what they need um and you have to be available for that and you you're right you have to be driven to set things up you have to reach out to people if you haven't heard from them in a while and keep track of that and and hopefully and i wish i could say i did a great job of that but i i every day find myself finding someone i haven't talked to in a couple months and should probably reach out to them and so i add them to the list for that day well i imagine that there are some engineers listening to this who who might be considering going into technical sales either now or in the future what should they be thinking about um that that maybe they don't even know that they don't know at this point about that that type of role i would honestly be very surprised if there were that many people who knew that technical sales was a career path for an actual engineer i think a lot of people think of the the sales force for any kind of engineering company as a dedicated salesman that may not even have a technical background and there are some companies out there that do it that way uh i know when i went to college i had no idea technical sales existed the only reason i found out about it was because i applied for a random job that was talking about automation and motion control uh precision things like that you know all the the terms that kind of grab your attention the cool stuff and so i applied to the job not even realizing that it was a technical sales role and that's the job i ended up going with is as i went through the interview process and met everybody i started to understand what the job entailed and and a lot of light bulbs turned on about how how fun that could be uh but no one in college ever mentioned that that was a role for an engineer i don't know whether they look at that as a conflict of interest for an engineering program or or why that is but i've actually been asked to speak at high schools and colleges in the area specifically on this topic because nobody knows about it and they want to educate their students so there's a few schools that have been uh trying to to broaden everyone's perspective about the type of jobs that are out there uh so anyway so i guess it's like it's like you found this amazing vacation spot and and the people there they don't want to tell others about it right they want to they want to keep that vacation spot nice and calm i don't i don't know if i don't know if the sales guys are trying to keep it a secret because we're the ones out there telling everybody about everything all the time so we're very outspoken about what's going on i i just don't know why i don't know why students don't know about that as a career path so i guess that doesn't answer your question at all you ask me what they should be thinking about it and i answered you why they don't even know that they should be thinking about it because they don't know it exists but once they know it exists because now they're listening to your podcast and they know that this is a job and a career path the things to realize is that you need to have a just what we said before you need to be able to set your schedule you need to be able to determine what is the next step at any given point uh you could look at it as a as a a different school of thought on project management it's it's all how to manage a project from start to finish and at any given point what is the next thing that needs to happen to keep the project on track and if you can keep doing that and keep reaching out to the right people uh that that's all it takes to be successful if you can do that and it sounds easy it's a sentence but there's a lot going on there there's a lot of technical skills that you need to have there's a lot of engineering skills you need to have you also need to know business you need to be able to read a contract right there's a lot of a lot of items in there that have to be taken care of to be able to fill that role uh but that that's really the key one thing you don't need is to be an extrovert or some sort of super people person you don't need that oh that's a that's a big point because i bet a lot of people think sales and automatically oh you have to be very jovial and outgoing and extroverted to do a good job in that role and and i will agree that it probably helps although it can be taken too far where there's actually it gets to the point where you're working with engineers who aren't always the most outgoing some of them are some of them aren't right and if you have a flamboyant boisterous personality coming through the door that isn't always that welcome either right so right so there does need to be some personality matching there for there to be a good working relationship just like a team of engineers inside of a company there needs to be some sort of synergy between those guys or women men whoever it is they need to be able to talk together and get along and it's the same thing with sales guys that's why technical sales you don't necessarily need that because you need to be able to work with engineers that's what we do so if you come from an engineering background and you have a personality that likes engineering stuff you're going to get along just fine yeah well said well you were a um a chief petty officer in the u.s navy submarine force for a decade which i never knew until i started preparing for this podcast and i was reading through your linkedin page and i was like what that's so cool um so you're heavily involved with with operating and maintaining nuclear reactor plants now nuclear reactor plants i'm assuming that's the the that's the nuclear reactor in the submarine is that right or is this like an external plant it's the it's the one that sits inside the submarine in a big compartment there okay now what can you tell us i'm sure there are a lot of things but maybe if you could pick you know a couple choice nuggets what can you tell us about working with nuclear technology that most of us probably don't even realize or appreciate okay well i think one of the most interesting things that i always thought was just crazy blew my mind and this is gonna everybody that hasn't that hasn't been involved in this industry before is gonna think i'm nuts for saying this but you get more radiation exposure on an airplane flight than you do sitting on that submarine really that's so fascinating so the dissimitars that we wear on the submarine when we're going you know we get we get them read periodically and there's hardly ever anything on there because everything's shielded the way it should be we are warned specifically never to wear that thing on an airplane flight because it'll come back and we'll all get uh flagged as having a huge exposure on the submarine and they'll have to do all these reviews yeah absolutely oh my god so they'll have to do all these reviews on how you got exposed and what what did we do wrong blah blah blah and it was all just a plane flight so i mean extrapolating from there a little bit this is outside your expertise i'm just rambling a little bit does that mean that flight attendants and airline pilots are at higher risk of of um radiation poisoning than you know your average joe well i think radiation poisoning is pretty strong because that takes a very severe severe dose to actually get any kind of radiation poisoning but there might be elevated risks of cancer or something like that yeah absolutely wow interesting okay all right great i cut you off please continue oh no no that's fine that was always the thing that blew my mind the most uh the other thing i guess which is not nearly as exciting i don't think i'm going to get the same reaction out of you is that the day-to-day job of a nuclear reactor operator is to stare at a wall of gauges that doesn't move and if it ever does move well that's a problem but i can see why you transferred to sales yeah it was very much sitting for hours and hours and hours watching things not move and hopefully good so you had to come up with ways to pass the time that didn't uh distract you from the job what uh uh please share an example of of some of these ways i mean what what do you do to keep yourself occupied but not distracted mainly just a lot of conversations uh in the room where you sit in there's four people there's a you know an engineering officer you've got the guy running the throttles that make the propeller move and you've got the guy to your right that's actually running the entire electrical distribution network he's got control of all the main breakers and everything to to make sure that no emergencies happens on the electrical side you're sitting right in the middle of all that and everybody just kind of talks uh because there's nothing else you can do you're not allowed there's no cell phones you can't have a cell phone in there to distract you you're just stuck talking uh the guys outside that are actually out in the engineering spaces the engine room uh they're walking around they're they're taking logs they're cleaning up as they need to things like that but when you're stuck in the box actually monitoring the reactor there's not a whole lot you can do because your job is literally to stare at that panel yeah yeah wow okay well uh what what were the scariest and most exciting times during that period working with with nuclear reactors hopefully nothing too crazy but anything that stands out so the only time i was actually scared like actually scared is our submarines this is the uss georgia if you want to look it up 729 it actually got converted to a guided missile submarine while i was finishing my tour there but we were in dry dock uh at the shipyard where we dock and that's banger uh over near seattle west side of seattle west a little west of bremerton we were in dry dock uh this would have been in the 2003 2004-ish time frame there was a big earthquake i i don't remember the exact number but it was like seven or eight i think six or seven or eight it was a bit it was big enough to be really scary damaged a lot of buildings but a submarine on dry dock that means you're sitting on concrete blocks which are sitting on a big pile of concrete which is directly connected to the bedrock of the ground so if you want to talk about a easy path for shockwaves to get through it's it's all perfect it's like it's like it's like it's like copper for electricity right everything was just perfect to transmit all the shock and vibration right to the hall of the submarine so and also if you ever find a picture of a submarine sitting in dry dock the blocks that you're sitting on are actually only kind of under the middle they don't go very far out because normally everything's still and it's there's so much mass there that nothing could happen so you're actually on a pretty narrow platform uh and then the the the walkway the gangway that goes between the submarine and the edge of the dry dock for people to walk in and off it's just sitting there it's not tied down because it's so heavy that normally it's not a problem yeah so yeah this earthquake kicks off i'm back in the engine room and the entire place just starts shaking more than i can ever imagine and uh we it we all assumed that one of the turbines or something like that through a bearing yeah we had no idea we're getting calls back from the captain over the the speaker system asking us what's going on we of course don't know what's going on so we're asking them what's going on nobody knows it's an earthquake because there's no way to really transfer that information that quickly and by the time anybody figured it out was over fortunately nobody got hurt uh everybody took cover the the gangway actually somehow managed to stay in place the ship managed to stay on the dry dock blocks uh but it was probably as scared as i've ever been sitting in that thing yeah yeah wow how lucky that nothing happened it was it was amazing yeah absolutely yeah count your blessings all right well in in in what ways do you think being in the navy has helped you as an engineer and and are there ways that the rest of us can develop those skills or behaviors without being in the military not that we don't want to be in the military but if we just don't have that opportunity that's a great question um i did think about that a little bit before we came on what what kind of advice i could give you it is a very different job there's there's there's so many differences to what you're doing between the two i think the one thing i really thought of was that the military when something happens and it needs to be taken care of your focus is a hundred percent on that problem from start to completion and it never stops unless somebody comes and completely takes over for you and there's a complete turnover of responsibility but that only happens you know once a day or maybe a half day or whatever the long shifts are so it really is your project and you're focused on that project that problem 100 start to finish to the exclusion of a lot of other things um and when i just said that i thought about how i'm going to contradict myself in just a second but but just to finish the thought the same way when someone calls me up and asks a question about something that kind of becomes my focus a hundred percent for for a time period until i get the answer and i get it to them um now maybe i have three of those standing in line and there's only so much you can do about that but you you need to get them an answer and it needs to be right and it you need to get it to them as quick as they can so they can keep doing their job so i i would say the military really gave that focus where i don't think i would have had that before and maybe that was all that staring at gauges for hours at a time that or or maybe it was boot camp or maybe it was something else but it really really gives you that focus and and that's an important behavior i think is for just any job is to be able to to focus your attention okay now i'm going to contradict myself okay i am in the middle of stuff all the time and then an email comes in with a quick question or something that i just need to get back out of my hands into somebody else's hand so that something can continue and and it's also a very important skill to be able to identify those kind of things something where if i take five seconds out of my day right now and reply to it and get it out of my hair then i don't have to have it in the backlog and i don't even really have to do that much because it's not me that has to do it it's this other guy but i am in the way because the person reached out to me with a question i need to pass that along to someone else and if i sit on that that time clock of that other person doing their job doesn't even start until i get my email out right so so if there's enough people in that chain reaction you could be looking at weeks before you get a response if everybody waited to get to that thing in their queue if that makes sense yeah yeah right so so i i i i can identify with that and i say if that's something i could take her five seconds and then get back to what i was doing then i should just do that and so so there's both of those in there which are completely contradictory now that i say it but but the ability to focus and i guess leave that focus and then come back to it quickly is important i don't know how good of an answer that was how can you learn that that's a great question for psychologists i'm not sure i can really answer that practice it be aware be aware that any roadblock you put up can get magnified as it goes through everyone putting roadblocks up so that whatever you can do to minimize that roadblock on your end can can help significantly in the long run it i'm going to go in a little bit different direction here it it sounds like your experience watching gauges that never changed and thus having to figure out some way to distract yourself which ended up being just talking with other people there in the room it sounds like that may have been a pretty good training ground for um getting into sales as well just learning how to talk with people and have conversations is there any truth to that that's probably true although i'm sure everybody's heard uh the expression talking like a sailor uh and and what that in clients i'm pretty sure this is a family-oriented podcast so i don't want to say more than that but there's a lot of undoing that had to happen in there too yeah but yeah but yes i don't know i i agree with you uh there's just a lot of talking but now granted it was the same people you know for months at a time you know the same three or four people so but yeah absolutely there's probably a lot of that there all right well i'm going to take a very short break and share with the listeners that team pipeline dot us is where you can learn more about how we help medical device and other product engineering or manufacturing teams develop turnkey equipment custom fixtures and automated machines to characterize inspect assemble manufacture and perform verification testing on your devices we're speaking with brett julie today who is currently working with bosch rexroth brett what can you tell us about about how engineers leverage the products that bosch offers i thought a lot about how to talk about our product line without being a sales pitch i've thought a lot about this i'm excited to hear how you're going to pass out yeah i i cuz because i don't want this to be a sales pitch i'm i'm not doing this as uh to try to convince everybody to run out to walmart and buy some bots or xrat stuff however what engineers find and let me preface this nobody on the west coast hardly knows who bashr xraf is we have always our our key industries have almost always been the auto industry which means you know uh the rust belt all those areas they all know who we are uh we're industry standard in a lot of the factories there and on the west coast very few people know unless they've been involved in that industry or we do have a small foothold in some semiconductor manufacturing equipment things like that but that but that's about it most people don't know that we exist and what our product line is the people who do know and here's the part i've been struggling with and i and i didn't figure out a better way to say it we have you can you can look it up you can you can go across any company we have the broadest line of automation equipment of any company out there uh we have everything from hydraulics to robotics to servos to motion control um it's we have mobile robots we have we have everything you can think of we have it in our catalog and it all works together and it all does a good job of communicating and doing the job it needs to do okay so that doesn't answer your question yet so so why do engineers like working with our stuff in general it's because it's just easy to get configured it's easy to use um and it saves them time in their design process so whether that's through our help helping them with their design process and answering their questions and getting them what they need but a lot of the equipment just works well uh it and it had a lot of good design behind it and there is uh several tools in the toolbox to make things easy um yeah i don't know how great a question or a great answer that that was but that's that's that's how we help i thought i thought that was terrific and i don't think you need to be that worried about coming off as too salesy i mean legitimately people listening to this their engineers and some of them are doing automation so to learn about a new um a new supplier a new vendor like this i think that's uh that's useful so i think that's totally fine and um maybe talk a little bit about what in what ways can engineers lighten their load um and help multiply their efforts by by leaning on i'll say you but i'm gonna refer to like the global you you know whoever their um technical sales representative is how can they multiply their efforts by leaning on their sales reps absolutely um so first i would suggest looking and developing enough of a relationship with the sales reps for the companies you want to work with and develop some trust there do some do some work with them enough that you can trust what they're doing is accurate and going to help you because the next thing i'm going to recommend is to stop doing so much work yourself i have teams i mean literally teams of applications engineers sitting in our offices around the united states who are who are there to do engineering work for us and for you they come in we have a project for them someone wants to know the best way to do this and they look at the catalog and they do all the specs crunching and they do the calculate calculations see how much torque is needed to do the job and they put all that together into a final configuration and they present it to you along with the work they did to get there and show you why that's going to do what you need it to do and all of that was just a matter of the engineer at the company that we're talking about being willing to throw this information over the wall and and get the results back with almost zero work on their part uh there is some pre-work in there so uh you know they need to have a set of specs to begin with right we need to know the mass we need to know how fast it needs to go things like that so there's some pre-work those things need to be figured out and we can't answer that stuff because it's not our system at the end of the day it's not our product getting made or manufactured or so we need to know certain things about the process but then a lot of work can get done for you and having some trust with the sales organization to be able to get you the right answers is a huge huge help uh to lightening your workload yeah i'll second all that um one of the younger engineers here at pipeline the other day or maybe it's a few weeks ago or something i was talking with him and he had an experience with it i don't know if it was you if it was someone else but it was with a technical sales represent uh representative and this this young engineer here uh was was telling me i was blown away at how much work that they would do for me i i had no idea that there was a resource out there like that i thought i would just have to do all this work but no i just you know handed it off to the the sales rep and they came back with all these answers uh another um another uh experience i'm thinking about right now another engineer on our team which i think was working directly with you on on this one recently and he was quoting a project he was doing actually a concept phase of a project for which one of the deliverables was a concept design and a quote for the full development and he was able to get all the cad models from you for the automation equipment and there was some like acceleration curves and things like that that he got and all this stuff that he would have had to spend you know hours and hours and hours trying to dig up himself or or just create outright from scratch he was able to get from you and your team and put together this like really nice looking concept it looked like it was fully engineered you know because they had all the right cad models in there all the automation components were were in there uh and and he had all the graphs and everything and he was able to put that together in in you know a pretty reasonable amount of time given all the content that uh that that we ended up delivering to our customers so situations like that it's it's so it's so useful and valuable to have good uh technical sales reps that that you can work with and i think especially a lot of younger engineers just don't realize how much um how valuable a resource that is and and that it's okay not not just that it's okay but you're supposed to tap into that resource you don't have to feel guilty about it right absolutely there's there's absolutely no reason for guilt because if you don't tap into it somebody else is and they're taking that valuable engineering time that you could have had access to uh that is something that i see a lot in younger engineers not mainly because they don't know about it but it's across the board uh there's there's a lot of people that have trouble letting go of the process right and and it's hard to let somebody else and so even if we do something for them they still go back and redo it all which is fine uh for the first few times do that if that makes you feel more trust in it but but we're hoping at some point we can develop a level of trust where everybody's comfortable kind of throwing things over the wall getting the answer back and moving on and i would like to clarify there's no right time in the process to get that started uh well i guess the sooner the better is the way i look at it a lot of times i work with people they don't even know what the project really is yet they're just kind of in a very conceptual phase it's maybe it's something new maybe it's a little bit r d ish uh because it hasn't been done before things like that and i've heard people say well i'm not going to reach out to you yet because we don't know what we're doing yet and i say okay well that's fine however we have all these nice little sheets that you can fill out to ask about specs and targets and things like that that maybe you don't know the answers yet but guess what we're going to ask for those answers someday and if you go into your design process knowing all these parameters that are going to have to be defined at some point it's going to make your job a lot easier because it gives you some focus it'll make you think of things that you wouldn't think of otherwise right and so there's there's all these ways you can leverage uh just all the stuff that we've got sitting there uh to help the design process and then if it's later in the process maybe you've got a full fully featured uh statement of work everything's ready to go well that's even better as far as you know our work is concerned because we can just take that and turn it around and give you a final proposal without you having to really be involved too much more at that point so there's lots of scales in there but but the earlier the better is the way i look at it but at any point the process please reach out and let us know how we can great yeah great great well i can say from experience brett that you've always been such a delight to work with you're you're smart and you're responsive and you're creative and always willing to share your knowledge with us even if it isn't directly related to a sale and i i'm curious to hear about kind of what your philosophy is on sales and and what principles you follow that make you so easy to work with and and maybe you can answer that within the context of let's say that i'm an engineer listening to this and i'm not fortunate enough to be in your particular uh area what what attributes should i be looking for in the sales person that i might work with that that are going to say to me yeah this is this is a person that i want to establish a relationship of trust with and start working with sure uh what first 100 percent first thing is responsiveness if somebody emails me or gives me a call even if i don't have time to talk to them right away i let them know that i got their message as soon as i can so that they're not sitting there wondering i don't know if you've ever been ghosted on a text chain right where you sit there a week later you say hey this person never got back to me that does that's no good right projects don't stop while you're waiting for answers so maybe i don't have time today and i can get to at the end of the week i'm going to let them know that i got the message i don't have time to do it right now and and i'll i will get to it at whatever that date might be just so there's no question and if that's an issue then they can come back and say hey i hear what you're saying i i have a report due tomorrow and i can't wait for that is there anything you can do and then i could say ah let me let me see right and work on that so somebody that's willing somebody that's willing to uh to really be responsive is a hundred percent the person you wanna you wanna be spending your time with in this type of role the second thing is don't i guess i should say they right because you're asking about sales engineer qualities they should have a not they should not have a scarcity mindset i don't know if you've ever heard people talking about that before but if you go out into the world realizing that there's so much business out there that all you can try to do is keep up with the amount of work that you can keep up with if that's kind of your mindset uh rather than every time a project comes your way you're going to pound it into the ground until you get that money right those are kind of two different ways of looking at it i am i am much more on the side of believing that there's so much work out there that i would never have time for it all anyway i need to focus on relationships when something comes my way if it isn't a good fit for what i can offer them i need to tell them that and even better tell them where to go that is a good fit because i've been around enough to have seen what everybody specializes in and i could probably save him a lot of time by just referring him to the right person that would even save him time versus doing it through me if i tried to shoehorn my company into a project that just isn't a good fit for them uh it's just better for everyone if we know where our our niche is and we stay there and we and if and if something doesn't fit we let it go and you can't do that if you're so worried about tomorrow's paycheck or tomorrow's commission check or whatever it is that you you keep leading people down the wrong path that's that's that's a recipe for failure in the long run nobody's going to want to talk to you anymore yeah amen well said um well just a couple more questions and and we can end um see i'm trying to decide which ones i want to ask let's start with this what what what are the biggest challenges that you face at work so i would say probably the biggest challenge is just brand recognition name recognition right now and people knowing who to call like i said rexroth does not have a big footprint in the western side of the united states right now and part of the reason why i came on board was to be somewhat of a brand ambassador uh and and provide a lot of outreach about what we can do to try to change that a little bit um so so having the name recognition so when somebody has a problem in front of them they know who to call that's that's 100 of my job in a lot of ways and so that's also the challenge that i'm uh focusing on um doing a lot of things to try to increase that through networking through referrals uh things like that but that's that's most of it i i just i need people to to he to know about us and have it in their mind okay all right well um brett how how can people get in touch with you okay um so best way is either email or a phone call um i would say if you just put my email address in there brett.dooley bosh.com that's about as easy as a email i think i can get you're welcome to give me a call on my work phone 510-605-6751 and then if you throw bosch rexroth into google you'll get right to our website you can see everything we've been talking about uh and there's ways to contact you there but they're not gonna go directly to me great and uh we'll have some links in the the show notes as well all right well uh brett anything else that we haven't talked about that you think we should oh man it's really hot outside and i'm a little tired of the summer uh so i'm i'm getting ready for uh for wintertime although in the winter time i always sit there and say i'm ready for the heat so so it's just an endless cycle that's about all i can think of right now yeah yeah we're having a little reprieve from the heat this week even here in arizona it's it's only supposed to be up to about 100 degrees this week as opposed to the 110 plus we've been having lately yeah it sounds a like a lot still but man it feels good it's great yeah all right brad well what a delight talking to you thank you so much for spending some time with me on the podcast and i'm sure you and i will talk soon again sounds great thank you for having me i'm aaron monker founder of pipeline design and engineering if you liked what you heard today please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing turnkey equipment custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design visit us at teampipeline.us thanks for listening [Music] you

2022-08-25 12:45

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