How can SE training improve your team's ability to handle objections and close deals?

Many SEs are trained in product knowledge. The SE job is much more than knowing the product. Provide training to: - understand the sales (and buying) process - know industry trends - understand customers' main goals and challenges - get more out of discovery conversations (asking the right questions, active listening, building rapport) - do better demos - handle objections

Enable your team by improving their skills to stay ahead of the competition. Improve their skills to make them happy and to reduce attrition.

Building an ecosystem to support SE's to explore and learn about technical solutions and materials is important. Every SE should be doing this as SE's should be curious and want to learn new technologies and solutions. However, sometimes this gets lost when very busy supporting multiple departments and crucial sales so creating internal frameworks to learn and share amongst the team is a great method in my experience to support continuous learning.

First, learn an objection handling framework. Second, create a list of all common objections. Follow these steps per objection: 1. Appreciate that someone shares the objection (now you can do something about it). 2. Ask questions to narrow the objection. 3. Check if your understanding of the objection is correct. 4. Empathize by using a success story (I understand that you feel that way. Our customers when they first saw the software, felt the same) 5. Verbally respond to the objection by highlighting an aspect of your proposition (training, customization). 6. Pivot the objection by using a success story to highlight the 'unexpected' benefit from the objection. 7. Redirect attention to someone else in the audience.

Learning from Sales Engineers who were once customers and decision makers makes our objection handling training better. Our role is designed to add value and not waste our customers' time. Former customers turned SEs have been in the customers' shoes and know what objections feel like. They help us understand better and lead with empathy. SEs with this experience can share real examples that make our objection handling skills stronger. They remind us to always put the customer first when dealing with objections. The same approach can be followed with customers who are very proactive and generous with their feedback.

Choose a program that is made for SEs. General workshops on presentation skills or storytelling won't help your team as they won't be able to translate what they have learned into their demos and presentations.

Immediately after the training encourage the team to use the new skills. Monitor. Assign mentors and coaches. And measure: Measure before the training. Measure immediately after the training. Measure 3 months after the training.

Sales Engineering training is very different from Product Training. Every firm must have dedicated Sales Engineering training program as every SE requires enough of domain knowledge, Competition Landscape in addition to product knowledge.