Many new plants hire a hungry BD and wonder why OEM doors stay closed. Others hire an expensive sales engineer to chase fabricator orders that only needed price and availability. Role fit beats headcount, especially when every salary competes with billet.
A sales engineer earns their keep on spec conversations: alloy, tolerance, finish, die feasibility. They belong on OEM and technically demanding accounts, translating drawings into something the plant can actually run, and defending value when the buyer’s default is rate shopping. If your wedge is engineered profiles or qualification-heavy segments, this hire pays for itself in fewer bad promises and fewer doomed samples.
Classic BD earns their keep opening doors, mapping accounts, and running weekly pipeline cadence. They are strong in distributor and fabricator networks where relationships and reliability dominate, and in hunting volume once the offer and price architecture are clear. Without a technical backstop, though, they will over-promise geometry. Technical talent without BD discipline will sit waiting for inbound RFQs.
Sequencing matters. Early on, one strong commercial lead who can stretch both ways — backed by plant technical support on every serious OEM quote — is often enough. As OEM weight grows, add sales engineering capacity, in-house or fractional, before you scale pure hunters. As channel weight grows, add BD and channel managers with strict floors and account rules. Copying a software company’s sales org chart into an extrusion plant is how you get expensive confusion.
In interviews, listen for whether someone can walk a drawing and spot risk, whether they can say no to an unfit enquiry, whether they run a pipeline or only a calendar of visits, and whether they will partner with production instead of blaming it after every miss.
Hiring is part of GTM. Embedded GTM-BOT work with Vulcan often includes the commercial hiring plan — who to bring in during Operate, and what transfers to your team. If you are unsure which seat to open first, that sequencing decision is worth making deliberately.