This week I chatted with Kerry Sokalsky, the Founder of Presales Mastery. He has watched so many demos throughout his career and although the conversation was about demos, we ended up talking about coaching and mentorship, well mostly coaching. If you want to listen to the full show, click the link below:

 

 

So now, onto the 4/1/1:

 

 

 

1- Mentors are usually assigned. Many managers use this as a way to test the mentor’s capabilities to lead, and if they deserve a promotion. That implies that they were not trained to mentor and some, not all, do it as a way to prove their worth. 

 

2- Challenge your mentor, and don’t limit yourself to one. I was assigned a mentor who did not love the idea of working with me for one reason or another, but I was able to build a relationship with him to get him over that hump. He left the company 2 months later and the only mentor I had was my salesperson. He had been in the industry for 17 years, so I thought he knew what he was doing. He did not and never reached out to someone else to learn from.

 

3- I love talking about athletes and how they have coaches. But Steve Jobs had a coach. Jeff Bezos has one. So it’s not limited to athletes. How do we know we’re improving? How do we know we’re improving in the right skills? I improved so much in the spray and pray, but there was no one to tell me that I’m better off improving in discovery and demo. If you can afford it, hire a coach. If you want to hire a coach, reply to this email as although I have not advertised it, I’ve been coaching SEs for a while now.

 

4- If you cannot afford a coach, build relationships with SEs outside your company. I found that SEs within the same company are in a bubble, they make the same mistakes.  Find another source of information, and since starting We The Sales Engineers, there are so many free resources. Also, Sales Engineers have formed the greatest community in the world who are always willing to help.