Lead Sales Engineer
Position Overview
NC Sound is hiring a Lead Sales Engineer to serve as the front-line technical leader of NC Sound's Sales Engineering team while maintaining an active workload of customer opportunities and engineering responsibilities. This is a working leadership position, not a purely administrative management role — the Lead Sales Engineer is expected to spend roughly 60–70% of their time on direct sales engineering and opportunity work, and 30–40% on team leadership, technical review, coaching, and process improvement.
This person is responsible for scoping, designing, quoting, and developing proposals for assigned customer opportunities, from initial qualification through proposal and handoff, while also providing day-to-day direction, technical oversight, coaching, and support to the Sales Engineering team. The role ensures opportunities are properly prioritized, solutions are technically sound, proposals are complete and accurate, and projects are effectively transitioned from Sales to Operations. The Lead Sales Engineer reports to the VP of Sales and works closely with Account Executives, Project Managers, and Operations.
Qualifications
- Minimum of 5 years of progressive experience in sales engineering, systems design, estimating, technical sales, or a related role within the low-voltage systems integration industry; 7+ years preferred.
- Prior experience providing technical leadership, mentoring, coaching, or day-to-day direction to other engineers or technical professionals strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to personally manage and engineer complex customer opportunities while simultaneously supporting the work of others.
- Demonstrated ability to interpret construction documents, specifications, drawings, RFPs, RFQs, and related project requirements.
- Strong competency in system design, product selection, bill-of-material development, labor estimating, scope development, exclusions, and proposal preparation.
- Strong customer-facing communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business solutions.
- Demonstrated leadership, coaching, problem-solving, and conflict-resolution capabilities.
- Experience with CRM, ERP, estimating, and opportunity-management systems; experience with Q360 is preferred.
Personal Attributes
- Strong verbal and written communicator, able to explain technical recommendations clearly to both customers and internal teams.
- Detail-oriented, with a disciplined, organized approach to documentation, pricing, and follow-through.
- Comfortable balancing hands-on opportunity work with day-to-day leadership, coaching, and workload coordination for a team.
- Responsive and dependable under time pressure, given the pace of proposal development and customer response expectations.
- Collaborative team player who takes pride in raising the technical bar for the Sales Engineering team, not just their own output.
- Committed to accountability, continuous improvement, and the development of others.