How do Sales Engineers learn differently? Is their attitude towards training different? What are the onboarding needs of an experienced vs. a novice SE?  When should the handoff from the Enablement team to the SE leaders occur? What are the 3 critical legs of onboarding SEs?

John Care, Author and Managing Director of Mastering Technical Sales shares his insights with me in this 2 part series. In Part 1 we focus on defining and understanding the Enablement needs of SEs and how to design an effective onboarding experience for them.

During his career, John built world-class sales engineering organizations at Oracle, Sybase, Business Objects, Nortel, CA Technologies, and HP. His responsibilities have varied from an individual level up to a VP of Presales running teams of over 200 people. He also has diverse experiences as both a quota-carrying salesperson and a senior IT executive/ CIO listening to salespeople and presales engineers trying to sell him their “solutions.”