9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team

Sales engineers are technical product experts tasked with helping qualify, close, and renew relationships with customers. The actual job varies from company to company or even product to product.

The job title also varies. Your company may use the title “presales engineer” or “solution engineer” or something similar.

In addition to having various responsibilities and titles, the performance of the sales engineer (SE) is measured in a variety of ways. As of today, there doesn’t appear to be a standard set of metrics in place. In fact, some companies do little to no number-crunching to assess SE performance.

Clearly, they should. Companies with strong sales engineering performance achieve far higher win rates and renewals. And, as all managers know, you can only manage what you measure. So

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It’s time to define sales engineering metrics

When we set-out to tackle this task, our suspicions were confirmed: little has been written on the topic and experts are few and far between. However, we managed to cross paths with Matt Darrow, the CEO of Vivun, a newly launched company focused on developing tools to transform sales engineering into a technology company’s most strategic asset.

We interviewed Matt and delved into nine metrics he believes are most useful to assess and optimize SE performance. In turn, we assembled an eBook, the first of its kind. In it you’ll learn more about why and how to measure:

• Outcome
• Time spent on sales opportunities
• Attach rate
• Support ratio
• Open volume
• Outcomes by effort
• Outcomes by deliverables
• Deal efficiency
• Effort efficiency
• Bonus: POC Metric

The eBook is yours free. Download it instantly here.

Learn how to analyze POC data too

The “9 Metrics” eBook features a bonus section too, which explains how sales engineers can effectively analyze data regarding how a proof-of-concept they offer prospective clients is consumed.

CloudShare tracks the progress of POCs and presents dashboards enabling managers to track the status of virtual POCs, total activity time for each, and much more.