5 Simple Ways for Sales Engineers to Decompress During the Holidays

For sales engineers, the holiday season is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a time for connection and celebration. On the other hand, it may be a period of year-end targets, clients’ pressures, and constant calendar struggles between professional and private lives. 

Sales engineers must properly recharge their batteries to prepare technically, work with customers, and collaborate internally all day. 

The holiday season can be stressful for sales engineering, and if you’re feeling the weight of it yourself, you’re not alone. It’s beneficial to find ways to decompress and recharge and also a necessity if you want to continue being productive, creative, and overall healthy. Here are five simple strategies to unplug and recharge over the holidays.

1. Embrace Micro-Breaks with Intentional Disconnects

As a sales engineer, finding yourself constantly plugged in is easy. Even when you’re in the middle of the holidays, the day is endless between client emails, last-minute technical demos, and calls to account executives. That’s why taking (intentional) micro-breaks can do so much for your mental well-being.

Pro tip: For guided meditations designed around the festive season, download holiday-themed mindfulness apps like Calm or Headspace. A few minutes of deep breathing or visualization exercises can center you when you’re feeling chaotic.

2. Imbibe “Done is Better Than Perfect” Mentality

As good as sales engineers are, they’re always considered perfectionists. After all, keeping up is your role often: you’ve dedicated hours tailoring a demo to perfection or fixing tough technical problems live. However, striving for total perfection can be the opposite of the holidays and exhausting.

Instead, live the life of ‘done is always better than perfect.’ Instead, pay attention to the completion of tasks rather than every detail. Let’s look at an example if you’re working on a client-facing presentation – think clarity over complexity. I want you to know that your audience doesn’t care about overly polished slides; they prefer actionable, concise insights.

3. Take Time Out for a Non-Work Hobby

In a sales engineering role, it’s easy to feel like the only place you matter is at work. Many professionals are discovering various ways to enhance wellness, such as spend the holidays reconnecting with hobbies or activities without connection to your job.

Baking cookies, playing an instrument, going out to play winter sports, and reading a good book are all activities that shift your focus and let you recharge your creative energy. 

You could take your chance at making DIY holiday decorations, making your way through some festive recipes, or simply hunting for local holiday markets. The trick is to be doing something that’s purely for fun without any deadlines or deliverables.

4. Set Realistic Work Boundaries

The other big challenge sales engineers face for the holidays is managing expectations: what we tell our customers about the product’s capabilities and what they believe it can do. It feels tempting to quickly wrap these up so they are crossed off your to-do list before year-end, but it usually adds unnecessary stress.

It is well-advised to set realistic limits for yourself and others. First, don’t be shy about your schedule in front of your team and clients, and then learn to be consistent. For example, if you plan to be away over Christmas and New Year, inform others in advance.

5. Practice Gratitude and Reflect on Wins

As we near the end of the year, many people reflect, and practicing gratitude can be a good way to take a break and change your thinking. Sales engineering is a tough role, but it is worth it—it is satisfying to solve a thorny problem, exciting to close a big deal, and rewarding to earn trust.

Take some time and review all the positive changes you have made for yourself in this past year. But also write down what you’re proud of or grateful for in your work. It could be a particularly hard demo you knocked out, a clever way you solved a client problem, or even how you stood up for your team when it was a precarious quarter. 

Recognizing your wins will allow you to finish out the year on a good note and help motivate you to start the new year well.

6. Quality time with friends and family.  

This is a good time to reunite with family and friends and hopefully bring more understanding and positive change toward one another. As indicated earlier, with tight daily working schedules, this is a chance for sales engineers to build meaningful relationships. These may occur in the form of celebrating affordance holidays, practices or procedures, sharing a good meal, conversation or fellowship, or the like, which can assist in bringing you back to balance.  

Final Thoughts

As a sales engineer, your role requires you to be on top of your game—technically, strategically, and interpersonally. But you can’t pour from an already drained vessel. It’s not just a luxury. It’s necessary to sustain effectiveness and happiness in the long haul: taking time to decompress during the holidays.

Thanks to the author of this article Bash Sarmiento