KPIs are never one size fits all. The maturity of your business, the number of SCs and AEs across your organization, how many product segments you serve, and other factors will influence your ideal dashboard. Still, there are general benchmarks that I believe every revenue team should use to improve their Sales-PreSales alignment.

1. Activity Volume

SCs get pulled into a wide range of sales activities. There are customer presentations, demos, workshops, on-site visits, even full-blown evaluation events and proofs of concept (POCs). Activity volume is the sum total of all SC team engagements — regardless of type. By tracking this work, you can understand how frequently SCs and AEs are working in tandem throughout the customer journey. You want to keep this number from getting too high, and generally try to lower it without sacrificing revenue.

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Sample Metrics

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• Monthly number of deal support requests
• Activity workload breakdown by SC
• Volume of requests by sales stage

2. Attachment Rate

Related to activity volume is the number of deals your team is actively covering. The percentage of opportunities that engage an SC is known as your attachment rate. And if you’re efficient in how you manage activities, you can increase attach rates with your existing capacity — helping to drive more high-value deals forward. You might look to prioritize attach rates for upmarket sales, while automating support for mid-market and smaller opportunities where you need to avoid breaking your margin.

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Sample Metrics

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• AE:SC ratio (global median is 4:1)
• Percentage of SC attachment rate on opportunities over $1M annual recurring revenue (ARR)
• Attachment on net-new sales vs. existing business

3. Revenue Impact

The holy grail of deal support reporting is tying work to closed ARR. This is your revenue impact, and while it’s a lagging indicator (especially in emerging markets), you want to track it as best as possible across every SC team deliverable, whether that’s a demo or multi-stage POC. These insights reveal which activities are actually driving results, versus demands on SCs that are ineffective or a waste of time. Most importantly, this data empowers sales leaders and chief revenue officers to double down on SC tactics that work, so you can drive even greater impact to your bottom line.

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Sample Metrics

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• Closed revenue by SC or activity type
• Average deal size with vs. without SC resource
• Technical sales quota filled by an individual or team

4. People Involved

As markets grow in technical complexity, enterprise selling becomes more of a team sport than ever. In six- and seven-figure deals, SCs and AEs often have to loop in product specialists, solutions architects, engineering, PreSales and Sales leadership, and more. Knowing the people involved, as well as the size and makeup of this deal team, helps you calculate your true cost of sale — in other words, how every resource is utilized throughout the sales cycle. 

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Pro Tips

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• B2B sales include an average of 10-20 stakeholders per deal
• Adding 3+ internal seller personas will 3X your win rate

5. Engagement Duration

When an AE contacts Solutions Consultants, how long does it take to receive an update and work through that request? Your engagement duration is a helpful gauge of how readily sales needs are being met. Internal teams often use service-level agreements (SLAs) to drive transparency around sales deliverables and expected turnaround times. Knowing the average duration of activities helps AEs, Sales leadership, and other internal stakeholders plan their engagements with confidence and predictably progress complex deals.

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Sample Metrics

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• Median duration of activities (in days)
• SLA hit rate for first response or completion
• Average number of hours before first response

6. Technical Milestones Hit

Within each high-level sales stage in your CRM are often dozens of technical reviews, actions, test plans, integrations, and other deliverables. Milestones are a helpful way to organize this flurry of activity, so you can progress complex deals in a predictable way and track where things are “hit” or “missed.” By surfacing live evaluation status and forecast risks in the CRM, SCs can help key stakeholders get clarity into the deal and become a trusted partner for Sales leadership. Teams can also spot moments across the sales cycle where deals tend to accelerate or slow down.

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Sample Metrics

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• Deal health score
• Current milestone within each deal
• Milestone duration

7. Technical Win

Is it fair to grade SCs solely on deal win rates and closed revenue? Whether a customer is evaluating your solution through a demo, workshop, or more in-depth POC, sometimes the SC delivers on all the technical success criteria, but the deal still fails to close due to commercial negotiation or political factors. The surgery is a success, but the patient succumbs from other causes. Tracking your technical wins empowers SCs to defend the value of their role in the sales cycle, while revealing broader insights around which activities and SC resources correlate with higher or lower conversion rates.

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Sample Metrics

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• POC success rate
• Number of test plans passed
• Average percentage of success criteria hit

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Pro Tips

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• Evaluations under 90 days win 3X more often
• Nearly half of POCs fail, despite hefty investments

8. Reasons for Outcomes

In addition to tracking technical wins and losses, you want to understand the leading causes behind those results. Perhaps it was a core integration, champion support, or a security protocol that helped you stand out (or exposed a weakness). These are all potential reasons for the outcomes of an evaluation. By tasking SCs to report on these results, you provide critical visibility to the broader revenue team — as well as product and engineering leadership — about what’s going right and wrong in your most complex deals. 

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Sample Metrics

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• Successes: integrations, champion support, product advantage
• Shortcomings: security gaps, key stakeholders left, product feature gaps

9. SC Capacity

With high demand from sales on SCs’ limited time, it’s easy for teams to get burnt out. To make the most of your technical sales experts, you need a live gauge of how intensely SC resources are being utilized. SC capacity tracks the volume of engagement compared to the maximum possible output, whether that’s defined by number of activities and deals, or overall time worked. It helps you see at a glance which SCs are over or underworked, as well as the product lines or geographical regions across your go-to-market program where additional headcount is needed.

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Sample Metrics

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• Activity quota by SC, team, or region
• Number of live opportunities being worked by sales stage
• Potential ARR pipeline per SC

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About Gabriella DeFlorio

Gabriella is the founder & CEO of Prelay, the world's first purpose-built team selling platform. With nearly a decade of experience in tech, Gabriella is a go-to-market and sales strategy leader with deep knowledge in early-stage team building and GTM, including tenures at Fountain and Truework. In a past life, she was an Olympic Trials hopeful and a competitive D1 cross country & track athlete at the University of Michigan.