Reps need sales engineers more than ever
If you’re selling into a technical market, you know the dilemma. Increasingly complex solutions and expanding product lines are adding multiple stakeholders to modern sales cycles. To match cutting-edge tech with customers’ biggest pain points, revenue teams rely on a growing roster of internal specialists beyond the account executive (AE) to progress and close opportunities. These include:
- Sales engineers (SEs)
- Solutions architects (SAs)
- Overlay teams
- Product specialists, and much more
As co-pilots on the deal, these experts support 10+ stakeholders, and influence as much as 50-70% of overall deal activity – running everything from customer discovery and qualification to technical scoping, implementation, deployment, and beyond. They play a key role in whether opportunities gets marked closed-won or closed-lost.
Your CRM can’t drive technical sales
Team selling is the new normal. In fact, studies show adding 3 or more internal seller personas can 3x your win rate. But, because the specialized work by these experts happens beyond the sales rep, even relatively mature CRMs often can’t see it. A high-level Case or Record object might theoretically track activity, but these static records only serve as a backwards-facing artifact, not a live template that aligns and guides your team execution, or helps triage deal resources in real time.
Without the ability to track clear and consistent metrics, SE culture suffers as a result. Your teams want to understand what's important to prioritize and how they're doing relative to how they're measured. This is especially true for your most ambitious players.
Ad-hoc sales motions are especially costly for high-stakes evaluations or proof of concepts (POCs), which are often table stakes for larger enterprise deals but can require months of deliverables. Nearly half of POCs fail, despite hefty investments, but those that are organized and move swiftly in under 90 days win 3x more often.
Turning technical KPIs into revenue gold
By centralizing your deal support tracking and technical sales KPIs, revenue leaders and SE teams can uncover what’s really driving deal outcomes, which variables influence deal progression, and how to improve conversions throughout the customer journey.
Understand why deals are lost
Separate the technical win from commercial fumbles or losses.
Deploy resources, strategically.
Say “no” to the 30%+ of activity that’s unqualified (e.g. early-stage demos).
Speed up the sales cycle.
Cut your buyer evaluation time to 3x your win rate.
Track more activity with less effort
KPIs are never one size fits all. Your most important metrics will vary depending on the maturity of your business, the number of SEs and AEs across your organization, how many product segments you serve, and other factors. Still, there are general benchmarks that every revenue team can use to standardize and improve their sales-presales alignment.
Our team has gathered this shortlist into a free guide that includes 9 top KPIs, industry benchmarks, case studies, insider tips, and much more. The image below offers a preview of this framework, along with simplified tracking solutions, which can help your team eliminate blindspots and double-down on work that drives the biggest revenue impact.
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