How to measure the Sales Engineers
“Not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters.” Albert Einstein
However, it is also hard to manage what you don't measure : my 2015 article
For an SE, there are at least some things which are easy to measure :
Direct Revenue - supporting AE’s on deals for new business and growth:
- Secondary measures can include % win rates, deal cycle length
- more complex cases, including PoCs, Security Questionnaires, RFPs
- Secondary measures can include time to respond, effectiveness
- Recurring revenue - looking for better with an org’s needs to increase likelihood of renewal end of Year 1 (* this is my favourite measure of true business value for SaaS, and incorporates churn/ net retention rates)
Indirect Revenue
- Supporting Partnership development, and Biz Dev
- Supporting SDR team with their outreach stories
Additional contributions to the organisation capabilities
- Guiding Product alignment - on field alignment as Voice of Customer (ie feeding in to the Product team where gaps have impacted Sales)
- Feature Requests - open and tracking - data momentum, and curation
- Issue alerting -raising / submitting issue found with product or framework - ie early warning system
- Being customer zero is particularly valuable here - ie alpha, beta tester - and pseudo field-trials
- Content creation
- Demo’s
- Blogs/writing
- Broader social - ie side project which leverage our tech (Drew’s bootstrap 1000)
- Content Broadcast -
- Webinars - including with partners
- Lunch and Learns (in some cases jointly delivered with DevRel )
- Internal Support - answering questions in various thread (Slack )
- Event support - such as buddying with say DevRel who might be presenting at a conference.
Successful achievement of direct revenue support (preferably recurring), justifies and enables the continued support of, and investment in, the team by the larger organisation.
Achievement of succesful customer onboarding, and the realisation of expected benefits and value, is the start of the path to the true compound value accumulation in subscription based businesses (inc. SaaS) and that point where a customer signs up for a second year is where we get the true measure of the effectiveness of all of the teams across the organisation as a whole.
The broader indirect value enables us to contribute in ever more ways to the overall organisaitonal effectiveness, and also allows greater scope for the growth and development of the individual members of the SE team, such as writing blog posts, presenting webinars, submitting RFCs into codebases, open and explorative projects which may uncover valueable new demo potential.