Metrics

to Help You Build a More Effective

Sales Engineering Team
Introduction
The keys to unlocking growth with sales engineering
Startup technology companies may have one sales engineer while established enterprises could
have hundreds. In companies small and large, the sales engineer comes to bat at pivotal points in
the buying cycle to help achieve the “technical win.”

It’s no secret: the sales engineer is an immense asset. And of course, any company aiming to grow
focuses on optimizing the assets that increase sales and profits.

“You can only manage what you measure” has come to be understood as a universal truth. Herein
lies a challenge for sales engineering. It’s always been difficult to measure the performance of the
role. So, the task is often ignored. Why? Defining what to measure is a challenge that still looms large.

What metrics shed light on how the sales engineering team is performing?
Most companies don’t have the answers. It’s time you did. To wrestle this issue to
the ground, we took the question to Matt Darrow, an accomplished veteran of sales engineering
and the CEO and founder of Vivun, a company laser-focused on providing the toolset needed to
transform sales engineering into a technology company’s most strategic asset. The result was
nine metrics. You’ll want to understand each. Acquiring and applying them will give you the keys to
unlocking new sales opportunities.

Note After the nine metrics, a special bonus section explains how to
effectively analyze data specific to POCs.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 2

1 Outcome
The ultimate sales engineering metric
You might call this one “opportunity outcome.” Whatever you decide to call it, understand
that outcomes are the most important thing to measure. And so, this metric simply
answers the question: “What happened when a sales engineer got involved in
a deal?”

There are three possible outcomes:

The deal was The deal was The deal was
won lost qualified out

You’re going to present these percentages to your company’s executives to

demonstrate the sales engineering team’s impact. You’ll also use them to make
important assessments about your team—not just about how it performs, but how it’s
used. Two big questions you’ll grapple with may include:

1 Do we have the right number of sales engineers to accomplish

our sales objectives?

2 How much sales engineering effort goes into deals that go nowhere?

The second question is especially interesting. The number that represents

“qualified out” deals is a very expensive problem. Talented sales engineers don’t
come cheap. Burning their time on unqualified deals not only tarnishes your bottom line, it
negatively affects morale. And it’s likely to indicate something is wrong with the qualification
process to begin with. If your outcome numbers perpetually indicate a significant or growing
percentage of “qualified out” deals, it’s urgent you address this issue. It will behoove you to
examine the following:

1 Is your marketing sending the wrong message?

2 Is your sales qualification process too broad?

3 Are you bogging down high-paid sales engineers with tasks to pursue
dead-end leads?

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 3

2 Time Spent on Sales Opportunities
A measure of how sales engineers spend their time

Every department in every company should want to know if its human resources are being
used judiciously. This metric drills-down on the negative outcomes, which indicate wasted
time. Sales engineers want to invest their time where it produces rewards, that is, closed
deals that win the company new clients and contribute to their paychecks.

Here, the metrics indicate time spent in three possible ways:

Opportunities
Win or lose, this is where sales engineer time
should be spent.
ES

AC
ITI

Account

CO
UN

UN
RT

This indicates time spent supporting accounts.

T
PO
OP

In productive software sales environments, the

sales engineers' time is generally not spent on
post-sale deployment and customer success
support.

Other
This is a catch-all for time spent on sales
TIME
enablement activities indirectly related to
outcomes.

To be clear, it’s not necessarily out-of-bounds for sales engineers to contribute to efforts
outside of converting prospects, such as post-sales support and sales enablement.
However, a high number of hours—or percentage of hours—spent outside of working on sales
opportunities indicates problems that must be analyzed and addressed.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 4

3 Attach Rate
Is the sales engineer attached to the deal?
Attach rate is the first of three metrics that fall under the umbrella of capacity metrics,
which help management understand the volume of deals its team can support.

The metric is the percentage of time a sales engineer is involved in a closed deal. Before we
expand, consider this interesting question: Does every opportunity require sales
engineers?

Most companies with complex SaaS products have a high attach rate. That is, sales
engineers are brought into all, or most, deals.

Generally speaking, sellers of lower-cost products aim for high-volume sales. Though sales
engineers may be needed in certain instances, the goal is to decrease the attach rate. If the
attach rate remains high, growth on the financial front will be a struggle because the sales
costs are unnecessarily high.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 5

4 Support Ratio
A key metric to address sales engineer headcount
allocation
On its face, this metric couldn’t be more basic. A universal metric, support ratio
simply indicates how many account executives each sales engineer supports. For
instance, the ratio may be:

1:1 1:2 2:1

While the ratio’s not difficult to ascertain, optimizing it is an important challenge for those
that manage technical sales teams. Sales engineering teams are sometimes given a
support ratio with little rationale, which might result in overworked sales engineers
lacking the time to produce effective outcomes, or overstaffing, which
might hinder optimum efficiency.

Another way to interpret the support ratio could be by individual. For instance:

Arnie Arnie
Arnie Brandy
Brandy
Brandy Carl Carl
Carl Danielle
Danielle
Danielle

AE AE
AE AE AE
AE AE AE
AE AE AE
AE

This is not to say any one ratio represents the superior approach. The superior approach
is the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency; therefore, the support ratio should be
evaluated along with closure rate (and possibly other measures).

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 6

5 Open Volume
Working toward optimizing sales engineers' workloads
Like support ratio, the purpose of the open volume metric is to deliver insights that will lead
to optimizing the allocation and workloads of sales engineers. However, rather than aiming to
identify a ratio based on headcount, it’s a ratio based on either:

1 Number of open deals per sales engineer

2 Dollar value of open deals per sales engineer

The term “open” simply means “deals not closed.” Open volume data may indicate:

Jessica has 10 deals open Aaron has 5 deals open

worth $1,000,000 worth $1,000,000

Again, in and of itself, the ratios alone are not tell-all numbers. While Jessica is handling more
opportunities, each is worth less than the opportunities Aaron is working on. Neither is a real
tell until you evaluate close rates.

However, over time, after crunching the numbers, management should be able to reach
conclusions regarding the burden each sales engineer can handle and distribute work
accordingly. Also, the ratio may be used to establish expectations with team members based
on the achievement levels deemed to be strong.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 7

6 Outcomes by Effort
A look at hours invested and the value of opportunities
This metric, and the three that follow, are used to understand how much effort (and what
type of effort) is required to close business.

First among these “efficiency metrics” is outcomes by effort. The data is best presented on
a scatter plot, which depicts dots on X and Y coordinates to display dollar value and hours.
Each dot represents an opportunity and is color-coded to represent the outcome.

All dots mean something. For example:

1 Number of open deals per sales engineer

2 Dollar value of open deals per sales engineer

However, the dots are less likely to be evaluated individually, although you can drill down into
each in an effort to glean more insights. The goal is to detect patterns.

Won opportunity dots in the upper left quadrant (high dollar, low hours) represent the
greatest efficiency, that is large deals requiring smaller effort. To positively impact growth,
you want to understand the patterns that led to these deals and replicate them. Outcomes
by effort can reveal numerous pros and cons. The essential thing to understand is that the
results depict how many hours were invested in each opportunity.
V A L U E
D O L L A R

H O U R S

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 8

7 Outcomes by Deliverables
A smart way to evaluate effort spent on specific
deliverables

Every software company has a list of deliverables in which sales

engineers are involved. They commonly include:
ƒ Value assessments ƒ Discovery calls
ƒ POCs ƒ RFPs
ƒ Demonstrations

This metric, outcomes by deliverables, reveals hours spent on each of

the above in various stages of the buying cycle:
ƒ Prospecting ƒ Value proposition
ƒ Qualification ƒ Proposal
ƒ Discovery ƒ Negotiation
T I M E

P ro s p e c t i n g Qualification D i s c ove r y Va l u e p ro p o s i t i o n P ro p o s a l Negotiation

• Va l u e a s s e s s m e n t s • POCs • D e m o n s t ra t i o n s • D i s c ove r y c a l l s • RFPs

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

With this data, you can examine the average hours invested to create specific deliverables
for each stage of the buying cycle. And you can do so for opportunities won and lost.
While this may sound complicated, the results should simply indicate:

1 How much total sales engineering time went into winning (or losing) a deal

2 How much sales engineering time was invested in each stage of the buying cycle

3 How the time invested in the buying cycle contributed to different deliverables

Technology companies seldom keep tabs on what the technical team does for each stage
of the buying cycle and how it might apply to positive and negative outcomes.

A close inspection of outcomes by deliverables should provide solid clues for modifying
selling tactics, improving processes, and possibly even improving product targeting to
increase your success.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 10

8 Deal Efficiency
A simple way to learn which sales engineers make it rain
Admittedly, not every metric presented in this eBook is simple. Deal efficiency is. It simply
reveals the average “booking amount” per deal by sales engineer. Let’s say:

1 JC’s deals average $200K

2 KC’s deals average $50K

That’s important to know. Does it mean JC is more valuable? Not necessarily. Different
segments and/or products may also come into play, muddying the waters.

However, if you’re able to compare apples to apples, your deal efficiency metric is certain to
help you understand who the high performers are. Then, armed with insights on how your top
money-makers operate, you can make hiring, training, and operational decisions to build a
team comprised of more like them.
V A L U E
B O O K I N G

S a l e s E n g i n e e r

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 11

9 Effort Efficiency
Dollars per hour
Effort efficiency reveals the average booking amount a sales engineer brings per hour over
a time period. It’s a simple monetary measure. For obvious reasons, it can expose who’s
weak and who’s strong. Say…

Gary books Harry books Larry books

$100K per hour $75K per hour $50K per hour
Gary Harry Larry

While it may not be the end-all revelation you need to hire, fire, and train, it should provide
evidence as to whose habits best help the cause. Understanding the work habits of
individual sales engineers with the highest effort efficiency should help you improve your:

Hiring

Training and coaching

Overall deal execution strategy

Of course, transparently providing a metric like effort efficiency to your team members could
also inspire some healthy competition amongst the team.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 12

10 Bonus: Proof of Concept (POC)
Metrics
POCs are surely one of the most critical steps in the sales cycle. Unfortunately, once a proof
of concept has been delivered to a prospect it becomes a black box. The sales team has
little insight into what is happening on the prospect side. POCs have been very hard to track
and measure—until now.

CloudShare analytics track the progress of POCs and present dashboards enabling
managers to track:

Total number of POCs
delivered and their status
(e.g. in progress, pending,
finished, expired) by sales
engineer
Total activity time for POC activity by blueprint
each POC (per day, per and virtual machine
organization, per blueprint)

In addition, for each POC, sales teams and sales engineers get data on:

1 When the POC has been accessed

2 How long it has been used

3 What modules have been used most

The data enables sales engineers to follow-up to resolve issues and further guide the
prospect. Timely information about a POC status provides the insight managers need to
assess sales engineers' productivity.

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 13

About CloudShare
The leading supplier of virtual IT environments in the cloud, CloudShare provides
specialized solutions designed to meet a wide variety of business needs including lab
environments for demos and POCs, virtual training, and development and testing. All
CloudShare environments are completely customizable and offer on-demand access
to infrastructure resources such as servers, storage, networking, and software.

CloudShare customers include many leading software and cybersecurity companies

such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, VMware, Atlassian, ForgeRock, Sophos, and
Check Point Software Technologies.

To learn more about how CloudShare's advanced lab solutions can benefit your
business, request a free demo at www.cloudshare.com.

About Vivun
Vivun’s Hero solution empowers technology sales teams to manage presales
with precision, ensuring resources are properly assigned and creating a seamless
interlock with product. The world’s only dedicated platform for presales, Hero is an
indispensable tool for closing more pipeline and shortening sales cycles.

Learn more about Vivun’s Hero solution at www.vivun.com.

PN: EB9METRICS241219

9 Metrics to Help You Build a More Effective Sales Engineering Team 14