You're leading a team of Sales Engineers. How can you cultivate a culture of innovation within your group?

Hard Truth: It’s tempting to respond with fake optimism about embracing failure, creating room for learning, or investing in [X] thing, peppered with leadership clichés from the latest Simon Sinek book. However, you need to consider the current business climate and its risk tolerance, especially in bear markets, which leaves little room for riskier skunkworks projects. Be honest! Presenting a fluffy vision of innovation can backfire if results don’t materialize during performance reviews. Focus on achievable goals—"roof shots" rather than "moon shots"—to stay aligned with business realities. Make sure your team is hedging their work. Always remember that landing your impact is just as important as launching it during the performance cycle.

Encourage calculated risks and embrace failure as a learning opportunity. This fosters a culture where innovation thrives. Thank you…

The best answer is TEST+ FAIL +TEST+ FAIL = SUCCESS As a leader, it's your job to test out for new technologies, CRM, Lead Generation, Events, Creative Ideas, Market Demand Trends, if they fail try new, if they pass motivate your team to use them.

A culture of innovation can be fostered by seeking to minimise the fear/cost of failure and promoting interests and experiences outside of the core job requirements. In practise, I ask my team to set aside time each week to think strategically about improving their role, we maintain an 80% customer focus target every week, this spare time allows distance and time to think about the job not just constantly doing the job. Genuine innovation is rare and often hard to sell to leadership, that’s not a reason to stop trying.

To foster innovation, it's essential to view failure as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. Encourage your Sales Engineers to take calculated risks and try new strategies. When projects don’t meet expectations, analyze what went wrong and how to improve. This approach not only boosts team morale but also inspires them to push boundaries and think creatively without fear of repercussions.

Do book clubs, including books both from within your discipline and outside. Encourage (or make it a stretch objective) for everyone to try one new idea, one experiment each month and report on the results. Hold brainstorming sessions to identify problem areas and explore solutions. Hire people from other disciplines. Have people from other disciplines talk about their work (e.g., Friday afternoon learning sessions).

Streamlining Processes with Technology: Implement accessible and efficient technological tools to automate repetitive tasks, enabling the team to focus more on innovation and strategic initiatives, without relying on complex or expensive solutions.

It’s remarkable how sales engineers tend to collaborate individually with their sales counterparts on a daily basis but not other sales engineers. I've observed that simply encouraging the team to communicate with one another fosters a level of continuous learning that, sales engineering leaders, we often take for granted. Initiatives such as staff calls and case-specific discussions or tag-teaming on deals significantly contribute to raising the collective knowledge within the team.

Humans are motivated by need, desire, fear, and rewards, much like in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We often resist actions without a clear return. To foster continued learning, we should embed it into job requirements, support it with calendar blocking, and encourage reporting back to the community on what was learned. For career progression, I propose that Senior Engineers complete two learning presentations per year, while Principal Engineers do one per quarter, presenting at an SE Summit. The rewards? Knowledge and a badge to recognize their achievement.

Know yourself. Realize your strengths, understand your weaknesses and work on them. Change is good, improve your pain points, and be repetitive in your actions. Educate yourself in your Industry, and find a good mentor to help give you constructive advice.

In order to be successful, a team must be able to work together and support one another. By sharing ideas and knowledge openly, we can improve sales processes and increase efficiency. Team members must trust that they can rely on one another for assistance when needed. .

A Collaborative sprit is important factor for a sales team to success. It helps a team to achieve more in less. Every team member may have different perspective for solving a same problem and everyone has its unique ability. A team sprit helps in utilizing team's skills and let us choose a efficient solution for a problem. It also support internal cross functional team working thus increasing productivity and efficiency. How to take most out of it depends upon how we handle our team & keep harmony among team members. Respecting everyone's view, equal opportunities, growth environment are among factors which may help a team leader to forster harmony in team & keep his team motivated.

To foster a culture of innovation in your sales engineering team, emphasize continuous learning. Encourage team members to view every interaction as a learning opportunity, driving them to stay informed about industry trends and customer needs. Facilitate regular knowledge-sharing sessions and support experimentation, creating an environment where new ideas are welcomed and learning from mistakes is valued. Invest in ongoing skill development and leverage the latest technologies to empower creative problem-solving. Recognize and reward innovative contributions, reinforcing their importance. By embedding continuous learning, you create a foundation where innovation can thrive naturally within your team.

Teams sollten ermutigt werden, gemeinsam an Herausforderungen zu arbeiten, unterschiedliche Perspektiven einzubringen und in funktionsübergreifenden Gruppen zu agieren. Dies führt zu umfassenderen L?sungen und innovativen Ans?tzen im Vertrieb.

Sharing knowledge and experiences is key to team growth. In sales engineering, situations are always changing, use-cases happen in real-time, and each client or prospect has unique needs that can't easily be simulated. These cases often stay limited to a specific session or individual sales engineer. However, if we discuss these situations together as a team, we can better understand them and strengthen our teamwork through collective collaboration.

Customer empathy plays a crucial role in providing exceptional customer service. Active listening is key to fostering customer empathy, creating a strong foundation for positive interactions. Miscommunication, on the other hand, can have detrimental effects, leading to mismatched expectations and eventual disappointment. It is essential to address issues promptly to prevent customer dissatisfaction. it's important to actively listen to customers and analyze their feedback so you can correct big issues that are causing customer churn.

Customers feedback on product features or issues should always be given high priority! There needs to be a mechanism that allows customer feedback to easily be submitted and reviewed by product and customer success managers. Provide the ability for customers to request features and allow other customers to vote. Those features with highest votes should get attention from the product teams.

Customer feedback is essential for innovating the sales process as it provides critical data on needs, weaknesses, and the effectiveness of marketing strategies. This information allows for the optimization of offerings and services, identification and correction of pain points, and adjustment of campaigns for greater efficacy. Additionally, it contributes to the continuous improvement of customer experience and facilitates adaptation to market changes. Systematic integration of feedback fosters a data-driven approach to innovation and strengthens customer relationships by demonstrating a commitment to valuing and applying their insights.

To encourage Sales Engineers to seek out customer feedback, it's crucial to set expectations early in the pre-sales process. Ensure the client knows that if a deal is closed, there will be five key milestones post-go-live where you'll revisit and assess whether the objectives were met. Agreeing on this upfront helps secure brutally honest feedback. I also believe in the Challenger Sales process—SEs must act as experts and proactively engage with customers. For example, at Oracle, we conducted ride-alongs, like visiting a Lululemon store to understand the POS system firsthand. This approach allows for more meaningful follow-up discussions and amplifies positive outcomes.

Ohne das Feedback unserer Kunden geht es nicht, die Kommunikation ist ein sehr wichtiger Schlüssel zum Erfolg, zu wissen was dem Kunden wichtig, was er für Probleme hat und bei welchen Herausforderungen er Hilfe braucht.

Allow and incentivize creativity in the first place! Very few organizations truly want and encourage individual creativity, because of the associated chaos, inherent high risk, and difficult measurability. To unleash a creative process onto a project that can potentially make or break a quarter's revenue is beyond scary. Doing so requires grit, a high-trust environment, and individuals ready to take ownership of the problem, fight to get it done, and go above and beyond to win. Sometimes your team will fail and there might be a feeling that now someone has to take the blame. Take the hit, assume responsibility, and prove to them that you believe in the process more than the results! Rewarding success is easy... owning failure is hard.

When our hard work and creativity are acknowledged and rewarded, we appreciate it. It stimulates team members to find new creative processes by rewarding creativity. The smallest gestures, such as public recognition or free lunch, can go a long way toward raising morale and acknowledging team members' contributions.

I've been thinking about ways to make our sales engineering team more creative. Not all these ideas will work, but I think they're worth talking about: 1. A "Failure Wall" where we put up ideas that didn't work out. It might seem weird, but it could help us learn from mistakes and be braver about trying new things. 2. "Innovation Buddies" - pairing up experienced team members with newer ones. They could learn from each other and come up with new ideas together. 3. A "Rotating Innovation Leader" role. Everyone gets a turn to lead our creative efforts for a while. These ideas might help us think differently and come up with better solutions for our clients. We don't need to be perfect, just more open to new ideas.

There's a relevant Chinese saying "将在外，君命有所不受" which translates into "a general in the field is not bound by the orders from his sovereign". While there could be many interpretations to this, it simply means we should provide space and empowerment for the team to make decisions on their own. For smaller decisions, it's ok for them fail and learn from it. For bigger decisions, we would need to carefully let them drive it but still strategically make collective decisions together with stakeholders and relevant approvers.

Giving your team the bandwidth and autonomy to explore initiatives outside the day-to-day can lead to innovation. I say "can", as I find that some team members are drawn to innovate, and others not as much. It's always worthwhile encouraging innovation, but especially for the ones that WANT to innovate, making it clear that these efforts are not only allowed but celebrated can add a ton of satisfaction and enrichment to their work. Just as important is making sure it's a safe space for creativity, success, and failure.

I support providing flexibility and autonomy to Sales Engineers, but it should not compromise brand awareness in the field. The level of flexibility should depend on the brand and its relationship with the customer. It's important to allow freedom in exploring new ideas, but the delivery must remain uniform and brand-focused. This ensures that customers, who may interact with multiple presales individuals across different lines of business, receive a consistent and clear message. This balance between autonomy and brand consistency is key to maintaining customer trust and brand integrity.

Give your team the autonomy to explore new ideas and the flexibility to implement them. Allowing them to manage their own projects or experiment with new approaches