What does a quant/sales engineer do?

[Aichuk]

I was reading about quants and sales engineers and it interested me. Anyone has a idea of what they do, what you need to study to become one and the job market for them?

 

[elkement]

A sales engineer is a technical expert who works with sales guys to sell complex technical solutions - in contrast to other technical jobs such as support engineers or consultants who are doing support, working in projects, and implementing the solutions products after the sale had been made. There might be some overlap though between these roles.

So these are the 'tech guys who help the sales guy in client meetings to answer the tough questions' or who respond to the detailed questions in requests for proposals.

My experience is mainly from IT - but from the related Wikipedia article (spot-on in my opinion) I conclude that the same concept is used in different fields: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering
As the article explains many different job titles are used for that roles - I e.g. came across pre-sales consultant or account technology specialist.

As for the degree: A combination of technical expertise in a specific field (relevant to the products to be sold) and know-how in business / economics would be perfect (in my country there are such combined programs and 'generalists' programs called Technical Product Management or the like...) But if companies hire graduates the business and industry-sector specific know-how is rather provided in internal trainings or as part of trainee programs.

Communication skills are of course very important.

(I cannot comment on quants).