Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

Pini Sagi, Regional GM, Sales

3. Demonstrate technical knowledge and be sensitive to customer needs

Quectel sells complex products with many variants to a wide range of customers, therefore, being able to communicate the capabilities, advantages and quality of our solutions is vital. The main challenge is to make the customer feel comfortable with our offering in terms of the products themselves, the services, and our people. Most of our customers are engineers that need to add the cellular connection solution to their product and usually cellular is not their main expertise. In my opinion, the best way to approach them is to guide them through to the right module and solution, walking them through the process of design, certification and deployment and avoiding being overly pushy and over-selling.

The goal should be to speak to them in engineering language, rather than relying only on the sales pitch. If you can do that, you are on your way to success – and a baseline for that is having the technical knowledge that enables you to hold this type of engineering conversation.

Selling complex technical products such as cellular modules and solutions requires good technical knowledge – this is essential to ensure that our customers are convinced and trust who they work with. On top of this, confidence, human touch, good negotiation, and deal closing skills are significant capabilities for becoming a successful salesperson.

As a global company we serve customers in markets with very different socio-economic situations. It’s important that our teams keep their eyes and ears open to the situation in each country and understand if and how our customers are affected by a country’s politics and actions. However, we are a technology company so it’s not our role to get involved in the country internal issues or politics.

Instead, our job is to see how issues relate to our business and determine whether there are short or long-term effects that we need to be aware of. We can then act accordingly. For example, if during COVID-19 lockdowns, people bought fewer cars, we can take that information and use it to understand that the automotive ecosystem will have felt an impact. We can then tailor our approach accordingly, being aware to each market and serve it better.

Market knowledge is not only about preparing for challenging situations, but also about developing for future opportunities. We may have the chance to contribute to the acceleration of IoT usage by proving to our customers that we have an easy to use, affordable solution that they can feel more comfortable with and expand the use of. This can contribute to IoT development.

We are in contact and collaborating with local mobile carriers as part of our effort to offer public IoT solutions that are powered by Quectel – that can generate more demand and use of IoT.

Look out for my next blog in this series: “Get to know your customers to build trust for the long-term.”