Here's how you can cultivate resilience in Sales Engineers.

Failure is inevitable—embrace it. It's not a reflection of your worth but a tool for growth. Review every setback without ego, pinpoint what went wrong, and extract the lesson. Each stumble sharpens your approach. Resilience is built not from avoiding failure, but from learning how to pivot and push forward stronger.

To cultivate resilience in Sales Engineers, start by fostering a supportive environment where challenges are seen as opportunities for growth. Encourage continuous learning and development through training and mentorship, helping them build confidence and adaptability. Promote a culture of open communication and feedback, allowing them to share experiences and learn from setbacks. Provide tools and resources that enhance problem-solving skills and stress management. Recognize and celebrate achievements, no matter how small, to boost morale. Finally, encourage a healthy work-life balance to prevent burnout and maintain long-term resilience.

There is never a straight path in life and failure is as much a part of it as success. The main thing is to use knock backs as learning opportunities to develop and hone both the proposition and the way that it was delivered. A key element I always insist on after a bid has closed is detailed feedback from the customer. Whether you win or lose you should always sense check why. For a win the reason you were chosen could be totally different to that reasons you thought internally. For the losses, this type of feedback is essential to allow you to evolve your messaging and the solution.

This is a bit topic! Resilience touches on so many areas of someones personal and professional lives. I always try and bring resilience out of people through experiences in their personal lives. I start this process during the interview phases, so that I can already assess whether someone is coming to the workplace with built in resilience through challenges they have overcome at home or at previous jobs. Having an already established threshold of 'resilience' coming into a role, is actually quite important - especially in high growth start ups. I then try and tap into this resilience, to help build on it. Things like closed lost and closed won deal reviews - are just a simple practical example of building resilience through learning.

As a manager, I've always made it my responsibility to ensure my team is adaptable to change - which then helps with their resilience. Especially in high growth start ups, change is second nature and something that staff need to get used to - but it can get quite tiring and sometimes demotivating to constantly see changes being made to comp plans, remote working policies, etc. Adaptability to change, therefore, is something that I feel should be looked for in the recruitment process. This will help understand how adaptable someone is likely to be. Although I took it on as my responsibility to foster adaptability, there had to be a baseline for me to work from.

I think networks are such an important way to build resilience! I've always encouraged teams to find networks, whether professional or personal, where they can turn to in order to alleviate some of the stresses of the job and ways to tackle certain challenges. Practically, I used to buddy up my younger reps with old colleagues of mine who had since moved on, where they would meet together to share stories. I always found this to be effective in helping younger reps feel less lonely in their roles, and also for them to know that someone else had 'been there and done that'.

Managing stress in the team is as much about company culture and team management as it is the individual. If your company is supportive it enables you to work in a high pressure environment whilst making sure that there is a work life balance. If the managers know their teams well enough to be able to spot potential stress triggers and intervene to offer support, assistance, additional resource etc then a lot of the negative elements of stress can be mitigated. An element of Stress for some is however how some employees perform best, so it is a fine balancing act.