Application Sales Specialist in Houston, Texas at Robbins Recruiting

The Application Specialist is a key member of the sales organization, serving as a product application expert. This role supports customers and the sales team in selecting appropriate merchandising solutions based on established product standards, common applications, and retail best practices.

You will support the sales process by translating customer needs, store layouts, and merchandising constraints into well-aligned product solutions, ensuring a seamless experience from initial inquiry through accurate quotation.

This position is ideal for someone who enjoys customer interaction, problemsolving, critical thinking and collaboration. The Application Specialist plays a critical role in helping customers feel confident in their purchasing decisions while enabling the sales team to deliver accurate, timely, and valuefocused proposals.

Customer & Sales Support

• Act as a primary point of contact for internal sales teams, providing responsive and knowledgeable product support.
• Engage with external customers as needed to understand project goals, merchandising challenges, and application needs.
• Build credibility with customers by offering clear guidance, practical recommendations, and dependable followthrough.

Product Expertise & Advisory Selling

• Serve as a product application resource, guiding solution selection and configuration within approved product offerings and application guidelines.
• Develop and maintain strong knowledge of merchandising solutions (e.g., pushers, roller shelves, retail racking).
• Support Sales by explaining product features, benefits, and use cases in customerfriendly language.
• Help position Company solutions as valueadded investments by aligning product benefits to customer objectives.

Quotation & Proposal Support

• Support the proposal process by interpreting product compatibility and standard configuration options, ensuring recommended solutions align with Real world store conditions and known installation requirements.
• Collaborate with sales to ensure proposed solutions align with customer requirements, budgets, and timelines.
• Analyze and interpret store layouts, cut sheets, customer planograms, and bill of materials to drive accurate quoting and solution alignment.
• Contribute to customer proposals by providing clear product descriptions, solution summaries, and supporting documentation.

CrossFunctional Collaboration

• Partner cross-functionally with product management, operations, and procurement teams to confirm product details, lead times, and availability.
• Communicate effectively across teams to resolve questions and support both standard and non-standard requests.
• Assist in documenting, coordinating, and routing non-standard requests, ensuring appropriate internal review and timely follow up with sales and customers.

Customer Experience & Continuous Improvement

• Support onboarding, training materials, and product documentation to help customers successfully implement solutions.
• Identify recurring questions or challenges and provide feedback to sales and product teams to improve tools and processes.
• Maintain a customerfirst mindset, focused on responsiveness, clarity, and longterm relationship building.

• 1+ years of experience in sales support, inside sales, customer service, retail/grocery operations, project coordination or related role OR a bachelor’s degree in a related field.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and apply deep working knowledge of physical products and their standard applications within real world environments (e.g., retail, merchandising, fixtures, consumer goods).
• Strong technical aptitude and ability to understand complex product specifications.
• Strong interest in consultative sales, customer support, and solutionbased selling.
• Coordinate projects or requests across internal teams, helping ensure information is accurate, complete, and routed appropriately (engineering, product management, operations, etc.).
• Proficiency with common business tools such as Excel, Smartsheet, ERP systems (e.g., NetSuite), and CRM platforms (Salesforce experience a plus).
• Clear and professional communication skills, with the ability to explain products and solutions in a simple, customerfocused way.
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent requests and deadlines.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment that values responsiveness, process discipline, and collaboration.
• require travel 25-30% of the time to support customer installations