Case studies : Sales engineer: Collette MacNeil

Collette graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2008 with a BEng in Electronics with Music. She is a sales engineer with Wolfson Microelectronics based in Edinburgh.

I used to pass my company, Wolfson, from the comfort of my daily train commute to Glasgow when I was a student. I was attracted by the fact that they specialised in audio electronics as my own subject was electronics with music and the fact that they were local to Edinburgh where I wanted to be based.

My company is a global leader in the supply of high performance mixed-signal semiconductors to the consumer electronics market. Put simply, this means we design chips for consumer applications such as electronic gaming consoles, TVs, mobile phones to name but a few.

As a sales engineer, I sell our products to customers in several European and Asian countries. The job combines customer service and technical expertise. As a student I had lots of jobs in cafes, bars, hotels and even running shops, so I knew I enjoyed contact with people, but I was also keen to use what I had gained from my university course. To effectively sell our products, I have to know and understand all aspects of how they are made and how they can be used and be well versed in their benefits. My customers are all engineers, so it is essential that I am one too.

Generally speaking, outside the company, I work with two groups, distributors and customers. As a fabless company, we design our chips, but they are actually manufactured in Asia. So, we have global distributors who place our chips with customers all over the world and one of my responsibilities is to train them in their uses and benefits and also set targets. I spend time on the phone answering their questions and making sure that they have good training materials to help them understand the product. My job involves a fair amount of travelling: to France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Israel to train distributors. I also sell our products directly to companies. For example, I have just come back from Turkey where I was persuading some companies to buy our products.

The variety of the job: dealing with several issues at once, answering questions and with many different people both inside and outside the company really appeals to me. But this is also the most challenging part of the job as each time I speak to a customer or distributor, I have to remember their relationship to the product in question and what they are likely to be thinking about at any given time. For example, when a country is switching from analogue to digital technology, this affects the kinds of questions my customers and distributors will ask me about our products.

I have a lot of responsibility to get the message right and that’s exciting and a little scary at the same time.