Junior sales engineers rarely fail because nobody shows them how all the moving parts fit together under real pressure.
Throwing them into demos and hoping confidence appears is not mentoring.
They need to understand the product story before the product detail.
Why the company exists? What problem it actually solves? Who buys and who blocks?
They should sit in on calls without speaking. Listen to objections. Watch how silence is used. Learn how deals move when nobody is rushing them.
This is also when they should shadow support and customer success. Nothing teaches product truth faster than seeing how it breaks or how customers misuse it. Confidence later comes from recognising patterns early.
Then, there is the guided exposure.
Now they speak, but with a net. Small sections of demos. Controlled environments. Friendly prospects.
The goal is not to impress. It is to learn how to recover when something goes wrong. Recovery is the real skill.
At this stage, feedback matters more than praise. After every call, walk through what happened. What question shifted the room. Where confusion appeared. Why a feature landed or did not. Make the invisible visible.
Later, test ownership. Not full autonomy, but responsibility.
Let them run a call end to end with backup present but silent. Let them prepare the environment. Let them handle objections. Let them feel the weight of being the technical voice in the room.
This is also when specialisation starts to emerge. Some will lean towards architecture. Others towards storytelling. Others towards troubleshooting.
Do not force uniformity. Strong sales engineers are not clones. They are reliable in different ways.
Throughout the first 90 days, one thing matters above all else. Context.
Junior sales engineers need to understand why something is done a certain way, not just how. When they understand intent, they can adapt. When they only memorise steps, they freeze under pressure.
Mentoring is about creating judgement slowly.
Do that well, and by day 90 you do not just have a capable sales engineer. You have someone customers trust when the room goes quiet.
Add These Mentoring Layers
- Weekly 1:1s: Focus on deals, blockers, and tactical feedback
- Call reviews: Pick 1 call/week, watch together, dissect
- Pairing: Rotate mentors if needed variety builds resilience
- Win/loss breakdowns: Use real outcomes to teach what lands
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