The Art of the MT Team
It might seem like engineers and salespeople have nothing in common and their respective departments occupy distinct floors in most companies. However, creating better alignment and communication between these departments can unlock significant value for MT Portable Machines company, not just in terms of customer service but also internal efficiencies that will pay dividends on every contract. Gordon Lv, CEO of MT Portable Machines, says aligning sales and engineering is essential to achieving customer service, quality and productivity goals.
The challenge is that salespeople will want the engineers to create a product that’s smaller, faster, more energy efficient than the competition-they can sell loads of those products. But engineers will say you can’t just break the laws of physics. On the other hand, engineers who want to be helpful run into problems overpromising the product to the customer, and the salespeople, rightly, will ask why the engineer is working on something that isn’t what the customer do not need.
The key is that engineers should get a chance to talk to the customer to understand what the customer really wants. This should happen in the early stages and again after product delivery, getting feedback on how the customer is using the product. “You’d be surprised how many times the customer ends up using the product in ways the engineers didn’t intend; this isn’t the customer getting it wrong—it’s on the engineer for designing the product a certain way,” says Gordon Lv. “Getting engineers and customers together goes a long way to resolving that, because in those cases the product likely isn’t meeting the customer’s needs.”
“It’s important to keep the salespeople involved during the whole span of the project, not just the start and the finish. That means asking their advice and opinion, not just sending them a monthly project update,” says Gordon Lv. MT’s ultimate objective is to deliver to the customer the right portable machines at the right price at the right time. Our salespeople are very good at selling things that will help customers to finish their on-site machining tasks. And our engineers are very good at creating something that doesn’t yet exist to solve the on-site problems. We successfully align these two departments and that will realize a significant competitive advantage.
Our team need to strike a balance between the customer experience right and innovative ideas so they can charge the customer the right price for delivering a top-notch product.
