Building a Sales-Engineer Academy on a Budget, Fast

You don’t need a full LMS and six-figure budget to train SEs. You need clarity, consistency, and content that doesn’t waste their time.

We had to scale technical sales enablement with no headcount, no platform, and new hires can land easily.

Here’s how;

Start with the Demo Story

What should every SE be able to show, explain, and adapt in the first 30 days? Write it down like a script. Record it. Break it into chapters: intro, setup, walk-through, objection handling, close. This becomes your core module.

Build Around First-Call Confidence

Focus on what gets them through the first customer meeting. Product overview, positioning, key integrations, common landmines. Keep it tight. No 50-slide decks.

Use Tools You Already Have

Use Notion for the curriculum, Loom for walkthroughs, Slack for async Q&A. No fancy portals. Just fast access.

Assign a Buddy

Pair each new SE with a tenured one for shadowing, mock demos, and weekly sanity checks. It scales better than recorded content alone.

Track Progress by Outcomes, Not Checkboxes

Can they run the demo solo? Handle basic objections? Explain a customer use case clearly? If yes, they’re ready. If not, they keep training.

The trick isn’t building more content. It’s building the right reps. SEs don’t need to learn everything. They need to learn what wins early, and fast.

So skip the big academy dreams. Ship a version that works. Then improve it while your new hires are already selling.