Hi everyone - I've always operated my teams under a direct alignment model with ratios varying by market segment, but due to ratios starting to become leaner as we add more on the account base/upsell team, I am considering moving to a pooled model either for that team, or across the board for the entire sales org.
I'm curious how other SE leaders have managed this -- gating criteria, making assignments (administrative overhead), best practices for load balancing, and anything else I might not be considering.
Thank you in advance!
Hey Chris!
At Outreach we operate in a pooled model within each segment.
We have an SC assignment process within Salesforce where an AE submits a request for an SC from the Opportunity. They choose from the following options:
In the request form, the AE provides context for where they need SC support (e.g. demo, POC, security review, etc.). Depending on which option they chose the AE may need to provide more detail (e.g. POC requires success criteria before we approve an environment to be provisioned). We have rules in Salesforce that enforce:
Opp value thresholds for SC requests
Prerequisites (e.g. success criteria, MNDA, etc.) for POC/Pilot requests
The request goes to the SC Manager based on segment, where the manager assigns an SC based on capacity, availability, specialization (if requested). For load balancing we look at a combination of reports, primarily hours (pulled from GCal) and pipeline (active opportunities SCs are engaged with).
Hours Report:
I've toyed with a direct alignment model, especially for our upper market segments, but for now a pooled model has worked well for us (although I'm sure it's far from perfect).
With pooled, we've increased the manager overhead and potentially lost some efficiency because AEs are working with multiple SCs. Though for us, the manager overhead is paid back by less headaches with unqualified engagements and managing load balance is much easier.
Hopefully this helps. Let me know where I can help clarify or provide more detail.
I'm also curious to hear if other PreSales leaders who have run both models have any thoughts to share.
Tagging a few folks who might be interested in sharing:
@John Care, @Don Carmichael, @Stephen Morse
@Yuji Higashi really awesome perspective, thank you for sharing! SC activity tracking has been an issue we've struggled with-- it is important data for many reasons, but its also difficult to do consistently (especially if it is manual entry). What tools/apps have you tried or evaluated? Do you find this type of information provides insights you would have otherwise not known?
@Yuji Higashi -- this is great information and definitely gives me some stuff to chew on. Really appreciate the insight and time you took to write this up!
@Yuji Higashi thank you so much for sharing this. This kind of information on how assignment and resource management can work is really difficult to find anywhere else. The key to getting basic control of any SC / PreSales team's workload is a PreSales resource / PreSales service request process matched to the opportunity stage with widely understood qualification criteria. If the AEs are taught the process and qualification criteria during onboarding then eventually you'll get better qualified requests, SCs / PreSales will feel more confident their time and skills are being best used and the AEs will understand which resources / content / videos they can use if, for instance, its really too early to be a Demo Qualified Lead.
@Don Carmichael -- great points around process and qualification criteria. Do you have any recommendations beyond onboarding/sales enablement to help drive the right AE behaviors? I've often found that results vary widely by sales region based on the level of importance RVPs place on strong process & qualification criteria.
@Chris Browne agree that results vary widely and I think it comes down to senior sales leadership (e.g. the CRO) focusing on process & qualification. If the CRO does not focus on these then the RVPs are left up to their own, with some focusing on process & qualification and others that do not.
Couple of thoughts on this.
1 The pooled model works well at the base of the client hierarchy. That is it’s most effective at the SMB and standard mid-market size clients. Once you move up into the Globals, Strategic and top-end Enterprise accounts, pools are less effective. The major reason being that you need (and the clients want) continuity on the presales side. In effect someone who has a corporate wide view of activity within that client and doesn’t have to start from ground zero (or even great CRM notes). SE’s are way better at that activity than most AEs. Add in the fact that the average tenure of an SE is 2-3x that of a rep and the institutional/memory lives in the SE heads, not the AE head.
2 As far as training AEs, the process actually lives and dies at first line management – both in sales and presales. A well structures sales process (in fact, any sales process) is the best friend of any SE, as then the process is to “blame” for getting in way rather than the SE team. I’d repeat, first-line management is the key for buy-in.
@John Care - appreciate the response! I couldn't agree more with point #2.
For the pooled model, what are your thoughts on a hybrid approach? i.e. - the Enterprise team is pooled in the sense they aren't directly aligned to individual AEs, but once an assignment is made on an individual deal after a request is made (with appropriate gating criteria), the assigned SE then lives with the deal through completion.
@Chris Browne Yes. That's the only way to do it. If you chop and change people it usually ends in tears.
@John Care completely agree - would be too messy/inefficient with way too much administrative overhead. Thanks again for the insight!
Sometimes first line SE management can be a really thankless task if you end up as just the resource referee. In the worst case scenario you've got AEs screaming at you that you're stopping them closing deals and making quota because you won't assign SE resource to their deal when your SEs are already running at 120% utilisation. You need Sales Leadership to back you up when you have to tell an AE that, yes, you could fit in that demo (by the SE working over the weekend) but there's no time to prep, the demo is going to be a shocker, everyone is going to be underwhelmed and upset (including the client) and you're going to lose the deal (with all the wasted cost of sale and opportunity cost). As John says, there has to be a process, an understanding that we only succeed as a whole sales team (including SEs) and an ultimate arbitration process that can review the current deals and impassionately prioritise your scarce SE resource to the deals that have the highest chance of closing (a proper qualification process).
And .. adding to Don .. Last small comment on that. Never, ever refer to your SE team (or allow reps or even VPs to do it) as resources. Resources are coal, iron, wool etc. Resources dehumanizes your people and makes it easier for others to think of them as "resources". Your SE team are people, engineers, architects, not resources. It may sound picky, yet it makes a major difference.
In my younger, more confrontational days, I once spent an entire QBR referring to reps as "sales resources" to make the point. 😉
Absolutely right @John Care I hang my head in shame.
One of my biggest pet peeves as well, and one that I am always quick to correct 😊
So well said John. It is a major difference and a key component on elevating our profession as true partners.
Fantastic thread and great discussion. I like the load balancing discussed above. I currently do this on open opportunity numbers and value which gives me a rough steer on how “busy” someone is. Are there tools out there to actually analyse a diary to give available hours? This would add a fantastic dimension to the data I already have.
We use Outreach internally that syncs to the SC's Google Calendars + Salesforce, which is how I get the hours data by Customer vs Internal. Outreach looks at the attendees on the invite and maps them to the Opportunity.
Vivun also provides this by having the SC map their calendar to Opps.
There are other point solutions that sync Calendars to SFDC, some requiring the SE/SC to map to the appropriate Opp/Account, and other by auto-mapping based on the attendee email and Contact record.
What a great thread and great insight!
Chris, one thing I'd add, from the high-growth SaaS community perspective, is that when you are dealing with smaller overall SE teams / geo theater or even segment (e.g. teams under 10 individuals per category) and/or you are in higher growth mode (recruiting >40% of entire team size/year), pooling can be more effective in both point of failure protection, 'shared destiny' knowledge sharing, and management discretion to ensure that SEs on ramp or with specialized knowledge/potential are given appropriate at bats (and creating equal opportunity).
Agree that when you get to a strategic account level where account value and continuity is key, it behooves you to retain SE as named on the account.
@Stephen Morse -- as always, thanks for the insight and perspective. I always appreciate your POV!
@Stephen Morse Great callouts on point of failure protection, 'shared destiny' knowledge sharing, and management discretion. These are certainly advantages we have experienced in our pool model as a high-growth SaaS company.
Hey all, this is my first contribution to this forum.
Really good topic! In my company we still have a direct alignment model between SE and AE.
The one thing we changed lately is the ratio between SE and AE. For Small Business, my SE ratio is much higher than for the Corporate segment.
Rather than changing the structure, I have worked a lot with the SEs in my team to ensure we support the right deals.
In SB, I am working closely with the sales Director and sales managers to get their buy in on the new approach we are having: limited support on deals below a specific threshold, office hours for small opportunities rather than "on call" support etc...
So far this has been working really well to support the growth of the sales team that is going faster than the growth of the SE org.
Thanks @Audrey Jaspart -- I like the office hours idea for smaller opportunities.
@Audrey Jaspart have you tried having reps run some of their own demos in the SB space, especially the smaller ones?
@Eric Rodwell I forgot to mention that AE are running their demo themselves. SE don't run generic/vanilla demos since a year ago now. We made this change due to the growth of the sales team. We moved from a ratio of 1SE: 7 reps to 1SE:20 reps in about less than 3 years.
SE intervene only in deep complex features conversation, technical calls.