Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E10 Clint Biggs | Sales Engineering, Relationships, & Earning Potential
In this insightful episode, Clint Biggs shares his extensive experience in test engineering sales, discussing the critical intersection of technical expertise and customer relationships. With over 30 years in the industry, Clint provides valuable insights into sales engineering, team collaboration, and career development for engineers.
Main Topics:
- Test Engineering Across Industries
- Sales and Engineering Collaboration
- Building Professional Relationships
- Sales Engineer Compensation and Incentives
- Effective Communication Strategies
- Value-Based Service Delivery
Clint Biggs is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Testeract, a company specializing in automated test systems. Since March 2023, he has driven revenue and market growth, notably overseeing the merger of SOLUbit into Testeract.
Previously, as President of SOLUbit, Inc. (October 2015 – May 2024), Clint led significant growth, expanding the team and tripling revenue. The company served industry leaders like Agilent Technologies and Intel, providing solutions across mechanical, electrical, and software engineering disciplines.
At National Instruments, Clint held leadership roles over a 23-year tenure, including Principal of Key Accounts & Sales Excellence and Department Manager for Americas Services & Support, where he led over 250 engineering professionals.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Park University, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Clint is recognized for his leadership development, strategic growth, and aligning engineering with market needs.
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You know, you remember the old school, you know, calculator watches. You know, you could buy those things for, you know, 10 bucks. And then you contrast that with something like a Rolex, that all it does is tell time, where's the value, the values in whatever the consumer is ultimately choosing. So again, that's, that's the world that the salesperson is in.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Clint Biggs, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at tester act with over three decades of experience in sales leadership and a proven track record in driving growth and innovation, Clint has been instrumental in shaping strategies that bridge the gap between engineering solutions and market needs. Clint, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely.
Clint Biggs:It is great to be here with you, and I appreciate the discussion.
Aaron Moncur:All right, maybe you can tell us just a little bit about your background and some of the companies that you've worked for.
Clint Biggs:Yeah, absolutely, so. But yeah, by way of introduction, I have spent really the entirety of my career in the test engineering space. I initially, coming out of school, really wanted to focus on electronic design, computer development, things of that nature. And really kind of found myself by circumstance, in a role with National Instruments way back in 1992 spent 20, almost 24 years of my career at NI in a variety of roles. A lot of that in around sales, sales development, applications engineering series, a variety of roles in that regard. And really kind of fell in love with the idea of test engineering, and ultimately what that means. Following my time at at National Instruments, I went out on my own, and rather than focusing on individual product resale or product sales as then I was doing, I focused more on solution development. My company was solubit, headquartered out of Colorado Springs, and enjoyed that for another eight or nine years before merging our operations in with Tesseract, and enjoyed that for the last two years. Oh,
Aaron Moncur:interesting. I didn't realize that so you were acquired by tester act. It sounds like that's correct. Okay, very cool. When you say Test, test engineering, what kind of testing are you referring to? Typically, we do a lot of testing, and it's always, almost always mechanical testing. You know, how much force does it require to move this lever, that sort of thing. What kind of tests are you most familiar and comfortable with I love that question.
Clint Biggs:The kinds of tests that we do are really all of the above. And it's electrical test, it's electrical, mechanical test, it's simulation. In some cases, it's really the whole gambit. It's a beautiful and this is part of why I've enjoyed my career. I think in test engineering, we're not focused on any one industry per se, so semiconductor, prisons or transportation or aerospace, we really service all of them the when you look at the the focus of test engineering, specifically, the question is, does your company, or do you individually, make something, and if you make something, particularly something that's going out to the consumer world, you need to test and validate that that doing exactly what you think and expect. And so really, the experience and the opportunity to market that goes around test engineering spans the breadth of anyone or any company that makes really anything. So is
Aaron Moncur:this anything from like, you know, an inexpensive consumer product, maybe a cell phone case or something like that, through medical devices, through a sophisticated defense system, like all of the above? Yep, that's
Clint Biggs:absolutely right. So take, take the first example there, you know, inexpensive cell phone cover. You know, whatever the case may be, what are the things that you may be interested in looking at that? Well, one may be the tensile strength of the material. You know, at what force or at what angle, do do these things bend or break? Looking for durability, right? You want to be able to say, for instance, you've got the most durable product on the market. You test and figure that out. It may also be things like, maybe the way the material looks and wears, is it able to maintain its color and its pattern and other aspects of that? So sometimes it's. It's literal physical tests. And these are the things that, for instance, you guys work quite a bit in as you're looking at that, but sometimes it may be non contact vision based measurement systems. And again, everything in between is fascinating, and
Aaron Moncur:you do this all internally correct.
Clint Biggs:So with Test Track specifically. And one of the reasons why I was so excited to merge in here and work with the team that we have. We're not just a group of really good test engineers that build test systems. We are that. But for us, we've built enough test systems out there that we've learned the lessons that we need to learn in order to shorten that process up. And a big part of that is the creation of a standardized test framework in the software side that you know that really gives you a 30 to 50% start on any given test that you may ultimately wind up doing, the the device that you may be testing, or the thing that you ultimately interested and that's always going to be unique to a given manufacturer or given customer, but the approach to testing that is is relatively the same. You've got a design, you've got some requirements, you've got some specification that you also need to approach. You're going to have some hardware pieces. How do you interface to it? How do you communicate to it? Then you're going to have some common software pieces. How do I want to visualize that? Want to visualize that? How do I want the operator to interact with it? And and as much of the commonalities you can take and and deal with, and, um, in a standardized or modular way up front, the faster you're going to be ultimately developing that test. And that's that's really the exciting part for me.
Aaron Moncur:Now, does Test Track focus mostly on building custom systems that you then deploy at a customer site or receiving customer product, whether it's software or hard goods products, performing the testing and then providing a report, it's more
Clint Biggs:the former. So for us, the the most common engagement would be a design engineer, a production engineer, R and D just, just more broadly, and they got an idea, and, you know, what are the steps to take that idea ultimately to markets? You're going to go through some level of simulation and some level of characterization, and then you're going to validate, you know, maybe a proof of concept that ultimately goes with that. And at some point you start building up potential articles, release candidates, first articles will tend to call that at the point you're comfortable with that, you move really more into production, where you're moving, you know, testing masses of these things and and the tests themselves, the information you're looking for, ultimately, maybe the same, but what you're doing with that is different. And so in our case, we want to collaborate and consult with with these engineers to get them through that process as fast as they can.
Aaron Moncur:How about things like inspection or metrology, measuring? Does that fall in or out of scope of what test track does help me
Clint Biggs:understand that a little bit more so metrology, you know, calibration,
Aaron Moncur:like CMM inspection, you're putting a part on a coordinate measuring machine and pulling discrete dimensions off of it to see if A part is within tolerance or out of tolerance. It's kind of test adjacent. I guess. I think that's probably not the kind of work that test direct does. Is that accurate?
Clint Biggs:Yeah, I think your language is appropriate. It's test adjacent. We would work with and support something like that. But the most common use case is someone needs to someone, this case, an engineer, design or technician operator, wants to move beyond the individual manual range of pushing a button on a on a digital multimeter, or turning a knob on a scope or something, taking a reading and then manually doing something with that. And instead, if we could say, okay, what are all the measurements, all the steps that you need to do. What does you know? What does that script ultimately look like? That test procedure? Let's automate that and run through that as accurately and as fast as possible, and make sure that we're capturing the data, providing the reporting and an insight with that data that they ultimately need.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. Okay, you've worked between sales and engineers for a long time. What are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen when when sales and engineering teams try to collaborate?
Clint Biggs:Oh, that is great question.
Aaron Moncur:Let's open up a can of worms here. Hi. It is. So
Clint Biggs:my own experience has been built around the concept that really good engineers can go out and be really good account managers and good sales managers. And the reason for that is ultimately, there's this desire to get in and understand what their customers are doing and why they're doing it that way, so that you can all. For them, the best solution. And so kind of putting my sales hat on here, I am a huge proponent of just fundamentally a needs based selling approach. The traditional image of what a sales professional looks like, probably for most people, smells like a car salesman or a real estate agent or something like that, where they're pushing something on you that really you probably don't want, you know, they took a notional idea that, you know you made the mistake of walking onto that parking lot, and you know you're going to get the what's it going to take to put you into this 78 Cutlass Supreme, you know, today, and that is the most horrible sales experience you can have. And you contrast that with more of a technical sales, or kind of these engineering sales that we have here, and it is more consultative, and your goal ultimately is to go into these places, understand what they're trying to achieve before you ever get to the recommendation side of things. And it's an art, it's a science, and it's all together fulfilling.
Aaron Moncur:How does the business behind that work? Because it takes a lot of time to really understand at a deep level what a customer is going through, right? So not even necessarily specific to test direct, but just generally based on your experience in the industry, are are these consultative approaches, typically like paid engagements, just to understand what's going on, or is this just cost of doing business, where an engineer to engineers go out, meet with the customer and spend however long it takes to really understand the problem and develop candidate solutions.
Clint Biggs:Yeah, it's a good combination of both, which, going back to your previous question, is why I think engineers that choose more of a business approach to their careers and that want to enter into the sales world, I think do so well because you can, you can cover a lot of ground technically with what the customer is trying to do just on a given sales call. If you understand fundamentals of electrical measurements, of mechanical you know, tests, and, quite frankly, my own experiences, it kind of doesn't matter if you're an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer or computer engineer or an aerospace engineer biomed doesn't really matter. The core is, is that you've got the capacity of seeing and learning and understanding problem solving, and you've got the technical basis that you can ultimately build on. Now, that said, there is only so far you can can take a given sales engagement, and at some point you really do need to enter into that space where you're doing probably more of a proper design engagement, and that's where you roll up your sleeves and either take a statement of work or a raw set of requirements and really dig into what the solution is going to be, either standing that up by yourself or maybe, you know, working collaboratively with your customer in the case, but It really is a bit of a bridge there. My own humble opinion is, the further you can take it in, that sales engagement, that self qualification effort, the better you are, and certainly the more smooth it works later.
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Clint Biggs:Well, I'm gonna probably grind a little bit of my own personal axes I go through here, please. I'll give you a bit of a macro trend that I've I just it's it's in not just this industry. It's in the world at large anymore, but it certainly comes into play when. When you start looking at the interchange between engineers and and sales in our industry, for instance, and the issue, quite frankly, is over, over dependence upon operational efficiency, operational process. We happen to live in a world where we don't want, really for anything. We have information at our fingertips. People go and find to get what they want. And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing that's out there, but, but many times, companies will take that idea and say, Okay, I'm going to force my customer base, potential customer base, the public at large, to approach me a certain way, to have to jump through these hoops to get certain information, or to, you know, heaven forbid, if, you know, pick a phone call and you get the automated self serve thing, or you go to their website and you have to navigate 20 different things just to get a simple question answered or something. And we created an over dependence of that. And again, that's a personal pet peeve of mine. I it flies in the face, ultimately, of where I feel you need to be, one as a salesperson, but particularly as a sales engineer, and that is building relationships, building rapport, and meeting the customers where they want to be met. Some of them want to at an arm's length and 100% okay, you want to service that. But if that is your only approach, boy, you're really going to mess that up and secondarily, just if I can kind of stretch that a little bit internally. Sometimes there's a little bit too much reliance on process as well, which forces people to swim in lanes. Right. In my experience, the the best engagements that you're going to wind up having, the most successful projects that you're going to wind up putting are out there or where the right people are collaborating the right way. And quite honestly, nobody cares how much you know until you know they know how much you care. Like you got to engage. And so right? Big question for me, for sure,
Aaron Moncur:I have to agree with you there. I remember many years ago, we had a pretty rigid process for how we created and assigned tasks to engineers, and at some point, we did an audit on this process, and what we learned was that, for the most part, people were not following that process, and things were going well, like the work was getting done efficiently, but we weren't using that process. And what we learned was most of the communication, it was just happening with conversations, you know, people at the office sitting next to each other, talking about what needed to be done, and that's how the information was getting passed back and forth, as opposed to, like, filling out this detailed task in a task management application and assigning it to a specific person. And, you know, all the communication going through this, this purpose built application, it really came down to just conversations between people, and that seemed to work really well. So we didn't altogether abandon that process, but we definitely loosened it and relaxed it and said, okay, just make sure that the work gets done. And here's a tool that you can use, but if it works better for you, just to have a conversation, great. Just do that. And that seemed to work well. We do everything with and through people. So your point about building relationships is very important, for sure, in a sales role. But you know what? We're all we're all selling something at some point. So it's important for all of us, especially us engineers who don't like to go out in daylight and interact with human beings, to understand how to develop relationships with other people. What are, what are some pro tips that you can share for how to develop relationships with, you know, new people.
Clint Biggs:That's also a really good question. I would say step one kind of built into the questions you have. You have to put yourself out there in some regard, a lot of people, I don't want to say, hide that. A lot of people kind of hide behind the keyboard, you know, live in this, you know, kind of digital world where here you and I are, you know, miles and states apart from one another, having a very good dialog here, and it's fantastic, but it's not the same as if you and I were sitting across, you know, the paper from each other little cafe and just having a, you know, a discussion there. There's, there is no substitute, fundamentally, for for human interactions, like real human interaction. So, you know, my single best advice, I guess, for engineers that that may be a little bit more introverted is is just understand that there's nothing wrong with being introverted. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get in and focus on a job and move forward. But I always like to say we are naturally analog creatures and trying to fit ourselves in. Squarely in a digital world. Just it doesn't work. You have to, you have to put yourself out there a little bit. So there's all sorts of clubs and things that are there. Yeah, there's all sorts of still areas. I'll give you kind of an old school one that I saw thrive at National Instruments back in the day. And that was, you know, the old Toastmasters club, you know, learning the basic skills for standing up and speaking in front of a crowd, never something that I wanted to do, never something I had interest in. But at the point that my career started going a certain way, I realized the value in it. And it turned out, hey, it was, it was pretty darn fun. The other side of that, quite honestly, is you're going to wind up meeting a lot of people in your career, and if you this is good advice just in general, not not just for engineers, but if, if you can remember to just maintain a relationship with them after the project. You know, maybe you're maybe you're connected on LinkedIn or whatever. Send them notes from time to time. Actually look at the at the prompts, it'll give you their birthdays or whatever. Those small touches actually make a difference in heaven. But forbid, if you ever find yourself on the outside of a job looking in one of the other differences that's in our world today, nobody cares about resumes. You're not winning anything by paper resumes. Everything is done through referral and by maintaining your networks and actually having some semblance of the genuine relationship, you'll serve yourself well there
Aaron Moncur:too. Well said, well said, let me take a short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services, Learn more at Team pipeline.us. The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave. Dot engineer, and we have the privilege of speaking with Clint Biggs today. Clint, can you think of a time when sales and engineering really came together well to solve a problem for a customer? Is there a story that comes to mind that you can share something like that
Clint Biggs:in our world that is literally business as usual. So let me, let me start by answering that question by saying, again to me, the worst technical sales process there is when the salesperson only cares about uncovering a lead, receiving the PO and then throwing a project over the wall to another team. And you know, there's language and roles that are out there that go with that, but it but, but the idea of actually having account management really is the goal of sales, as opposed to just pure POS and revenues is a big difference maker. And so at tesra Act, for instance, our teams stay engaged completely on projects. We're just working with a group. I'll probably leave them unnamed at the point, but they're a major government prime contractor, and we're looking at thrust vector control systems, rocket gimmel to somebody, for lack of a better word. And again, these are complex engagements, complex problems and and on the one hand, it's quote unquote easy for the for the salesperson, the sales engineer, in this case, to go and talk with them, get the initial requirements, talk them into an idea of a solution with the team. But no, no, we stay completely engaged in, and when problems invariably surface, is that account manager, they're helping to make sure they understand and have the customers interest at heart and understanding where the project management team has come together, creating some some key solutions and and literally, we just went through an example of that just this past week. And you know, you put yourself out there a little more because it's the right thing to do with the customer. And everybody wins. It truly is a win. Win. You make someone successful. It comes around.
Aaron Moncur:In your opinion, what do you think is the relationship between sales and marketing? Oh,
Clint Biggs:that is two sides of the same coin. For sure. Are all salespeople, good marketers? Absolutely not. And I'm probably in that definition. I'd like to think that I've got cool ideas, marketing ideas, but I don't. And are all good marketers? Good salespeople? No. But fundamentally, you're moving towards a common goal, and that is generating awareness of who and what you're doing, either whether it's a product or a service or whatever the case may be, and then ultimately crafting messages that resonate with people so they understand why they should care about that for themselves, individually and really at that point, you know, marketing is generally the tip of the stair that regard. Going out and and capturing that awareness, or those leads, for lack of a better word, you know, the general expression of interest in whatever it is that you're doing. And it's typically the salesperson's responsibility to then convert that interest into, you know, business, whatever that is. But the reality is that is a hand in hand role sales informs the marketing side on what they're seeing and what they're doing, and marketing informs sales on kind of the larger macro. And by the way, in the interest of engineering, some of the absolute best marketers I've seen also have engineering backgrounds, and it's because they see and approach things from a logical perspective and and they're looking at, what does this product or service actually solve? And let me think of all these derivatives and how it's going to play out there, and, and how do I put that language that somebody would appreciate? And so it's, it's a very viable career for someone that perhaps has gone to school to be an engineer, to then pursue a technical marketing role, Mark Holms role, you know, marketing communication just as well as it might be for a Field Sales Engineer or something like that.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, this next question is is not specific to you in any way, and hopefully you're comfortable answering it. But if you're not, that's fine as well for engineers who are listening to this thinking, huh? You know, sales engineer, maybe I'd like to try that out. What, what is the money like for a sales engineer? Like, how does, how does a salary and bonus work for a sales engineer, what's the earning potential versus, like, a straight up salaried engineer? Yeah, fantastic
Clint Biggs:question, and I'm 100% comfortable talking about that. In general, sales folks have the I have a hat bump a higher earning potential, and the reason why is because there's inherent risk that also comes with that. So traditional sales jobs, many times, will be 100% commission. My experience is in the technical sales world, and particularly in the test engineering world, the automation world, such you know that you're in that's not a good combination. And people tend to be engineers, tend to be much less risk tolerant in that kind of regard. So typically, and I've seen this play out across the full 30 plus years of my career, typically what you're going to wind up seeing is some sort of combined on target earnings model, which means the engineer is going to receive some portion of their salary usually about 60% it'll range between 50 and 70% but a 6040 model is probably the most typical. 60% of that target salary is guaranteed base. And they're just like, this is for you going out doing your job, and this is to make sure that you're doing all the other stuff that goes ultimately with that. And then you'll have like, 40% or so of your target salary at risk. And that's contingent upon how well you're able to achieve your quota, your goals, the revenue goals that the company needs you to bring in. And you know, it's a it's a direct prorated portion. If you hit 50% of your your quota, a lot of times you'll make 50% of that. It's not always that way. Sometimes it's, you know, more of you know, a curve that goes on with that. But almost all plans also allow for and gladly pay accelerated rates once you exceed your goals. So usually, earning is ultimately Unlimited, but from a salary range depends upon which industry, which roles you'll get in. But you know, 100,000 200,000 you know,$300,000 those are not unheard of numbers as as a sales engineer.
Aaron Moncur:Well, that's great. Thank you for walking through that. Let's talk about incentives, because I think sales engineers have incentives that are often different than the actual engineer doing the work, right? Sales Engineer, they want to make the sale because that's where, like you said, maybe 40 or some percentage of their income is coming from. And then the engineer, I mean, the engineers incentive is, just do a good job, right? Complete projects on time, on budget, work efficiently, manage your time. How? What are some good solutions to align the incentives of the sales team and the engineering team? And do you see problems arise based on different incentives very often or for the most part, that's just not an issue.
Clint Biggs:No, yeah, that's absolutely an issue. And let me kind of take a step back the successful sales engineer in a perfect world is always meeting or exceeding their their quota, their sales goal. But if you're if you're meeting that goal 100% of the time, you know, you could argue maybe the goal isn't high enough, and organizations aren't dumb, you know, they're going to put numbers out there that they're. Innovation needs, but they also want to stretch you right? And so those things kind of go in play. And so you're always kind of navigating that. The reality is sales people are not just responsible for revenue, they are also responsible for feedback. They are many times the voice of the customer back into the organization. And so there's other ways that that they are adding value back in, and there's other metrics and KPIs or whatever that need to be captured and pulled back in as well. So you can look at a given sales job and say, Hey, let's boil this down to, you know, a set of activities or metrics. And this kind of gets into that, that over processing that I was talking about earlier. But, you know, they could say you need to do a certain number of customer calls a week, or you need to do a certain number of demos or visits and and those are fine proxies for what you have out there. But really, the ultimate goal is to say, Okay, what's it going to take the to achieve your revenue goals? You know, within, you know, reason and what's it, what's it going to take to capture this feedback in a way that allows us to accelerate our own development internally? You know, you're hearing the features that the customer needs. You hear these other things. So that's a really long background. Ultimately, get to your question of, how do you, how do you then incentivize that? And the simple answer for people is, well, we'll sell guys, they only respond to money. Well, they, I mean, it's true, they do respond to money many times that one of the driving courses of people perhaps choosing that. But it's not always that way. There is recognition, there is engagement that goes to that sometimes has nothing to do with money. And for engineers, I find that that seeing that successful completion go around, and, you know, getting to, for lack of a better word, a customer satisfaction score, a net promoter score, from that customer that says, Yes, you guys really took care of us, and we're going to recommend you, and getting that referral, that there's a lot of a lot of interesting metricing and valuing that goes around those types of thought lines. Very
Aaron Moncur:thoughtful answer. Thank you. Yeah, what advice would you give to an engineer who wants to be to improve his or her ability to communicate effectively with the sales team? Yeah,
Clint Biggs:the best thing that I would say is don't just speak in facts. I mean, engineers look at facts and detail and and again, it's, it's a it's a pretty black or white world many times. And just understand that. Again, the sales person this regard usually has a foot in that world, but then a foot in this, this other analog world of the customer, that's, it's not about a fact, it's about what that person cares about. So let me kind of define that a little bit. It would be easy to assume, for instance, that the more features your product or service has, the more valuable it is. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You remember the old school calculator watches. You could buy those things for 10 bucks, and they did all sorts of little cool things or whatever. And then you contrast that with something like a Rolex, that all it does is sell time, where's the value, the values and whatever the consumer is ultimately choosing. And in one case there, you know, it's about the materials, it's about the procedure, it's about the whatever. And the important thing is to understand that. So again, that's, that's the world of the salesperson is in what does that end customer, or the people that we're interested, what do they care about? And it's, it's taking some of these, you know, truths or or bits of information that engineer hands, and putting it in a way that those people care about. So if an engineer wants to learn to work better with sales or to communicate better with sales, speak more than in closed sentences. Like, open ended questions are good, open ended answers are good. Like, like, have a bit of a dialog and and ultimately, try to understand what's what's really
Aaron Moncur:important. Terrific, so you've worked with a lot of different industries over the years. Does your approach change much based on industry, or is it always kind of the same process that you go through? Yeah,
Clint Biggs:each industry has its particulars, for sure, I will tell you you get to, for instance, consumer electronics and semiconductor. It is about speed to market, and they are ringing every bit of profit. They can't have a system. They will grind on you. One of the things that's that's a true reality that every engineer on here probably needs to understand is nobody likes paying for your time. Nobody likes paying for your time. They will pay for a product and usually not argue. With you. But if it's your time, they're going to argue, you know, you can do this in a week. You should be able to do it in four days, by golly. And you're going to go down that route. And some industries are just harder on you than others that way. So in consumer electronic, semiconductor, it's pretty brutal. There you get into the medical space, the biomedical space, for instance, it's not about that. It is about probably more accuracy and lack of failure than anything else. And so you move into the more heavily regulated industry. So I'll say, like medical or like aerospace, for instance, nobody is interested in how many airplanes Boeing can run out the the you know, their hangers in a given year, they're more worried about what's the quality of the airplanes going out of there. And so those things will come into play. Now the approach in test engineering, fundamentally, is the same. What is it that you need to test? What kind of data you ultimately want? Is it digital data? Is it analog data, the visual data? You know, are these kinds of things, and what do you want to do with that data? So I can overly simplify it that way, but again, ultimately, what they care about is making sure that it's reliable or it's robust, or it's fast, or it's cheap, or some combination of those things.
Aaron Moncur:When you said nobody wants to pay for your time, that that really resonated with me. I mean, we we get that because we sell our time basically at the end of the day, and so we've certainly experienced some some of that. I wonder if you have any pro tips about what, what has test rack done? Or you personally to to overcome that and to package your time in a way that it's more of a product or productized service, as opposed to just selling hours?
Clint Biggs:Yeah, you've got to get yourself away from commoditizing. And so every engineer again on here will probably resonate with this as well, but you don't want to be and also ran like you can go to upworks, wherever, and say, Hey, what's, what is it? You know, what's the hourly range for a C Plus Plus programmer out there? And you're, you're gonna see there's a C of those folks. And if all you care about a C Plus Plus programmer, there is no differentiation out there. They'll, they'll talk about their experience and different things. But, but to somebody out there looking at that who's actually paying for the time, they probably don't care about that so much. And and the more you move yourself or your service towards a commodity, the more you're going to have pressures around what people are willing or not willing to pay for that time, the more you can show the uniqueness of what you're bringing. And again, it's not, it's not just experience that's a part of it, but it's, the value of what you're doing in terms of the in deliverable to the customer. So in my case, if we're going to talk about test, there's a bunch of people out there that can help them test their widget, but if I can help them test their widget faster or with more quality or whatever, and I've got a proven track record, that farmer to sell that and it's, it's a value based engagement, as opposed to a commodity based engagement. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that's great. Clint, this has been wonderful. I think that you've shared a lot of information that most of us engineers just never really think about, right? Because we're not, we're not in the sales space, but we probably should at least have a basic knowledge and understanding of and I think that's what you've given us today. So thank you so much. You're
Clint Biggs:welcome. Thank you for having me. This has been fantastic. This is a great series. You're very kind to allow me to contribute a little bit here. I hope that it is helpful, and would love to hear from you or anyone else that they may have following on questions. Well,
Aaron Moncur:that's a great segue into the last question, which is, how can people get in touch with you? Absolutely,
Clint Biggs:I am on LinkedIn, Clint Biggs at test rack. Find me.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron pipeline. Generally, you're welcome. You like what you heard today. Please share the episode and how your team can leverage our team and I will welcome advanced manufacturing process and help you on automated machines. Terrific, and thank you so much. Complimented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
