Business Development Sales Engineer, Off-Highway Machine Sensing and Control
A brand new Carolinas seat with a German sensor and controls manufacturer that sells straight to the people building the machines. No distributor layer, no cold list to assemble, and a car in the driveway on your first Monday.
The Opportunity
Think about who builds the machines you pass on the interstate and at the job site. Excavators and loaders. Refuse packers and street sweepers. Combines and sprayers. Baggage tugs and de-icers. Every one of those machines is full of sensing and control hardware, and our client is the company that engineers it. They are a family-owned German manufacturer, in the business since 1969, and they sell it direct.
The industrial mobile group is adding this seat to put someone on the ground in the Carolinas for the first time. Until now the region has been serviced from several states away, which is exactly as effective as it sounds. There is business here that already buys and has never once had a rep walk through the door, and there is a much larger set of builders in the region who have never been called on at all.
What this is not is a numbers game. The buying group is engineering. Evaluations are technical, they involve prototypes and design reviews, and a specification can sit for a couple of years before it turns into a production release. The team is staffed and compensated with that reality in mind. Sellers who have run a defined region as an outside sales representative or a territory sales manager in the industrial space will recognize the rhythm immediately.
Why This Role
Nobody Has Held This Job Before
The position was created, not vacated. There is no predecessor's mess to clean up and no inherited reputation to overcome. How the Carolinas get worked is a decision you get to make.
A Region That Has Never Been Covered
Current customers here have been managed at a distance and are buying a fraction of what they could. Beyond them sits a regional manufacturing base, heavy in truck and equipment assembly, that has barely been touched.
The Factory Is Your Employer
No principal juggling. No line card where your best product competes with the other eleven things in your bag. One manufacturer, its engineering, its pricing authority, and its name on your card.
Bring an Expert to the Meeting
The applications and software group behind this territory is unusually deep. Their newest engineer has been in this market 21 years. They go on calls with you and they own the technical answer.
Marketing Feeds the Territory
Company databases are licensed and direct campaigns run into the region ahead of you. The accounts are already named and already touched. Your calendar goes to meetings instead of research.
Your Manager Eats the Noise
Backorders, margin fights, and past due invoices route to leadership rather than to you. The group is under a dozen people, most of them long tenured, and results are judged as a team.
What You Will Do
- Take the region's current customers, who are buying well under capacity, and build them into real accounts
- Win new equipment builders across construction, municipal fleets, agriculture, and transportation and logistics
- Sit with design engineers, applications engineers, and purchasing to understand what the machine actually needs
- Hold a specification through prototype, design review, and validation until it becomes a production release
- Bring the applications and software engineers into accounts and use them well
- Live in the Carolinas and be physically present in the territory, not on a phone from somewhere else
- Speak for the manufacturer, with nothing sitting between you and the customer
Who We Are Looking For
Here is the honest filter. Our client will teach you their sensors, their software, their applications, and how they run a deal. What they will not teach is who buys mobile equipment components and how those buyers make decisions. That has to walk in the door with you, which is why this section is about your customers rather than your catalog.
- Roughly five to eight years selling technical product to builders of on-highway or off-highway equipment
- New logos you personally opened, by name, with the story of how each one happened
- Credibility in a room full of engineers talking about sensing, control, and machine architecture. Nobody is asking you to write software
- The temperament for a sale that takes years and involves half a dozen people
- A discovery-first approach. This does not reward closers who arrive with the answer
- Living in the Charlotte area today, or genuinely ready to move there
- Relationships you can already name at equipment builders in construction, municipal, or transportation and logistics
- Time spent at a distributor or an integrator selling into mobile equipment shops
- Technical schooling, engineering or physics or similar
- A record of putting genuinely complex technology into OEM machines
- You have sold for a manufacturer before, or you can articulate exactly why you want to
- Fluid power, motion control, or electrical distribution calling on mobile equipment builders
- Mobile machine control system integration
- Component suppliers in the mobile controls space
- The OEM side itself, engineering or purchasing, where you have specified and bought this category
Never carried a sensor or controls line? That is fine and it is not the point. Your customers are the asset. The catalog is learnable.
Compensation and Benefits
- Cash: $127,000 to $145,000 base depending on what you bring, with an individual sales bonus and a commission plan layered on
- Car: A leased vehicle from the company with every dollar of maintenance covered
- Health and time: Medical with a zero deductible, dental and vision offered voluntarily, short-term and long-term disability paid entirely by the company, and a 401(k) matching every dollar of the first 6 percent once you hit six months
- Time off: 15 vacation days, 5 sick days, and 11 company holidays
Location and Schedule
You will live in the Charlotte area and work a Carolinas region from there. Nearly everything is a drive, and the car is provided, so this is a windshield job rather than an airport job. Once a year or thereabouts there is international travel, and inside your first couple of years that includes going to see where the product is engineered and built.
Out at customer sites across the region, often with an applications engineer in the passenger seat for a technical review.
Charlotte anchors the region. Planning, forecasting, and working through applications with the engineering group happen from here.
A trip to the engineering and production sites, typically landing sometime in your first two years.
About Precision Sales Recruiting
Precision Sales Recruiting is a veteran-owned manufacturing and industrial B2B sales recruiting firm based in Fort Worth, Texas. Every candidate presented for this search is evaluated through a structured, methodology-driven process built specifically for manufacturing and industrial sales roles. Explore more open roles on our jobs page or visit our candidates page to join our network.
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