The Challenges

Overall: Pretty much no Solutions leader in our community today has data showing their exact impact on revenue.

Why? Their data is fragmented across many tools & not tracked accurately in Salesforce.

• Sr Director “We're getting asked to prove the value of the SE org, but the data just doesn't live in one place. You have to pick proxies and it's always a bit hand-wavy.”

• Sr Manager - “My issue right now is the metrics my leadership have given me don’t make sense - including tracking time spent on won/lost deals? It doesn’t make sense”

• Director - “I literally had two things I wanted to. One is how to measure success quantitatively as opposed to just qualitatively. I have no way to really do it. I haven’t figured it out.”

• Manager - “The easiest way to show impact is by looking at quota - but there’s so much out of their control as the AE is running the deal”

• Manager - “It’s hard because honestly I mostly use anecdotal evidence of SEs having to turn down meetings as they can’t be in two places at once. And it unfortunately has to be that level of stretch to the max, max, max. Which I think is hard.”

• Sr Manager - “What I’ve really struggled advocating for is having a bench. Like, it is so hard to hire and ramp someone in this role … it’s gonna take us so long to hire this role and this person’s not gonna be ramped up for six months. So we are like probably nine months away from being back to full capacity. I think that is really hard.”

Attach Rates Work Well For Companies With PLG Motion

I.e. they have some deals where SEs are not involved so they can compare

• Field CTO - “What worked for us was showing how many deals SEs are attached to, and those conversion rates vs. when they’re not.”

• Manager - “If an SE is involved in a deal, we could see the average sales price obviously is a lot higher.”

• Senior IC - “We looked at the data and could show deals where SE was involved… the tendency to discount is a lot less.”

• Sr Manager - “We’re trying to prove our value through attach rate… showing the delta between win rates with and without SE involvement.”

• Director - “I try to show the value of my team when a pre-sales person is assigned to a deal. We can now say these deals are far more likely to convert, which leadership care about”

Proving Impact Through Time Tracking Can Have Mixed Results

One of most common answers.

• Sr Manager - “proving impact for us through time tracking works very well. We measure their input into activities and shout about it when deals go well”

• Manager - “Our time tracking isn’t accurate and now affects our KPIs. Some of the team don’t fill out and then we found out it was recording wrong so our billable hours were way to low”

• Director “My issue is impact does not correlate to hours spent. So it feels like the wrong metric, but somehow seems to correlate sometimes. But I know I’ve spent fewer hours on a POC which was worth way more than longer I’ve spent on other deals”

• Manager - “We track workload and the team sort of on a subjective basis… SAs hand in a sheet every week with their subjective workload and I use that every year to ask for headcount.”

• Senior IC - “We tried effort scoring in CRM — every activity had a weight. But no one really followed it.”

• Sr Leader - ‘“We reverse engineered: what's the pipeline we need, which stages we're attached, how much we're going to win. According to the model we should 12 FTEs, but I just asked for six. Either way, in the end they made their decision off a simple AE: SE ratio.”

Advocacy From Sales Can Have A Big Impact

Where limited capacity is having an impact on sales (or even saying ‘no’ to supporting deals with capacity) has worked for other team members. But is a slightly more risky route.

• Director “We had Sales VPs saying: we can’t run this team anymore without more SE support. That got leadership’s attention.”

• Sr Manager - “When our deals started to stall because there’s no SE capacity, that’s what got the CFO to look up.”

Value of Sharing Feedback & Deal Stories

Harder to track the impact of but some leaders felt visibility and positive feedback helped them in asking for budget.

• Implementation Director - “We measure our impact also by doing customer satisfaction surveys. We then share those results and that is one of the more impactful things that have worked for me.”

• Manager - “We do a weekly newsletter to ELT covering our recent wins, but also all the other things outside of our core work (marketing, events..) that we’re helping with. Helps stop all this other work go unnoticed”

• Sr Director- “We started writing win stories on actually what was the customer's requirement and how did we solve for it. Helped highlight to leadership the value of work we’re doing (which can be missed)”

• Director - “We have a win channel with lots of leadership in. I make sure that when any win closes, the AE and others also call out the SE for their work. Sometimes I have to message the AE to do this if they forget”

Try to link quality of your work with $ impact

Takes work to setup & maintain, but these are the most powerful quantitative arguments.

• Director - ‘We’ve aligned across the company on what makes a very strong implementation that sees revenue and usage grow faster. We’ve then broken those down into points, and the team are incentivised to complete implementations to that higher bar. As this is tracked in salesforce, we can show how this impacts revenue & when we’re starting to drop due to being stretched”

• Manager - ‘We introduced a simple technical fit score in Salesforce. We’re then able to show how that correlates well to Wn rates, which helps me with my narrative on highlighting SE impact”

• Sr Director - “We anchored on uplift in usage of certain product features when SE led the sale & spent more time with the customer. We then turned around, we were able to reposition our pitch based on that data to leadership & it was a far easier discussion”.

And finally, the value of being persistent

• Director - ‘“I got my headcount more because I was getting on their nerves than by actually proving why it makes sense. The data didn’t work but whining did.”