Blog
Notes:
I’ll be honest, I hated mentorship. It felt like every time I was paired with a “mentor”, I would end up guessing most of the work or asking other people all the questions. But I understand how it feels when you’re new to the field and lack practical experience and/or in-depth knowledge. The bad news is that I don’t think mentorship works (at least not how most people picture it). The good news is that there are other options for learning and improving your sales engineering skills besides relying on a mentor who can be slow to respond or might not even be available due to their own demands. Tune in to the episode below and find out how you can gain better insights and still learn to become a better sales engineer without relying on the mentor assigned to you.
Key Takeaways:
- Why I think assigned mentorship sucks based on my personal experience
- The things that were lacking from the mentoring I had at my first three jobs
- When I eventually got an SE mentor, I still did not get better as a sales engineer
- How I overcame these mentor deficiencies by finding unofficial mentors
- The turning point for me was when I knew I needed to improve my skills as an SE
- Shifting from being just an order taker to being more of a consultant
- Figuring out what my weaknesses were as a sales engineer and finding mentors who could help me improve that area
- Realizing that the past mentors I had were also doing some wrong or outdated methods of sales engineering such as the spray and pray technique
- Three reasons why mentorship sucks
- Two options sales engineers can do to overcome this reality
- Reasons why I think coaching is so valuable for sales engineers
Three Reasons Why Assigned Mentorship Sucks :
It’s not their job to mentor – It’s a small part of their job potentially but their main job is to sell, not to mentor somebody else.
Most mentors are never taught how to mentor – They end up just checking in, but they don’t dig in or seek to understand what the individual needs mentorship in.
Most companies don’t have a system for mentorship – They cannot answer these questions: What is the mentor supposed to do? What is the job description of a mentor? Am I supposed to just be there to answer questions? Am I an encyclopedia for whoever’s coming new? Am I supposed to do a roleplay with them? Am I supposed to give them homework or her homework? What is the system? What is the process of mentoring people?
Three Reasons Why Assigned Mentorship Sucks :
Find actual mentors – I started the We the Sales Engineers Podcast specifically for that, so I can talk to people outside of my employers’ purview or even my industry.
External Coaching – This is something I wish I had a long time ago
Reasons Why Investing in External Coaching can be so Valuable: :
- Coaches can be honest.
- Sales engineers can also be honest with coaches.
- Coaches are a great external source of information.
- 2 is better than 2
- Coaches can provide attention to the individual.
- You get focused time, practice time
- You get to increase your skill, you get to know what you’re doing wrong, what you’re doing right, and then you can practice doing things right
This Post Has One Comment
Pingback: 4/1/1 Common Struggles That Sales Engineers Have, Old and New | We The Sales Engineers