What's a sales engineer do for a HVAC company?

Question

This is a second part question from a previous question on what an HVAC is. Okay, I'm going on a date tomorrow, and the girl I'm dating is this really beautiful sophisticated sales engineer for a large HVAC company. What do they actually do? I'm a technical person, and my dad was an engineer for IBM but I'm more of a marketing kind of guy. I'm looking to maybe ask her questions that make me seem knowledgeable as well as interested in what she does. As she's explaining it to me, I"d like to know what she is talking about!

Answer 1

You know, it might make for a more interesting conversation if you ask HER what she does, and let her explain it, rather than you trying to impress her with fake knowledge. People usually love to talk about themselves.

I assume from the job title that she tries to sell equipment to companies -- like heating & air conditioning equipment and systems. Ask her to describe a typical day at her job, and then have some more specific follow-up questions based on what she actually says (ask her to define certain terms, or ask for more specific details about some vague thing that she said). If she continuously gives only short answers in spite of your attempts to draw her out, then after awhile you can safely assume she probably doesn't like her job that much, and therefore doesn't want to talk about it.

Go buy a few women's magazines from the grocery store and figure out what kind of subjects interest women in general -- you will probably see that gossip about famous people is typical of many of these magazines-- and educate yourself about these topics as a back-up conversation starter. You cannot talk about work ALL night anyway.