How do you allocate sales engineering resources and expenses?

1 Assess your current situation

Assessing your current situation and identifying the key factors that influence your sales engineering resource and expense allocation is the first step. These factors may include the size, structure, and distribution of your sales engineering team, the types, stages, and volumes of sales opportunities and deals, the complexity, customization, and integration of your solutions, the expectations, requirements, and preferences of customers and prospects, the availability, cost, and quality of sales engineering tools and software, and the performance, productivity, and satisfaction of your sales engineers. Analyzing these factors can provide you with a comprehensive view of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to help you set realistic and measurable goals for improvement.

2 Define your allocation criteria

The next step is to define your allocation criteria and prioritize them according to your goals. These criteria should reflect the value and impact of your sales engineering resources and expenses on sales outcomes and customer satisfaction. Examples of possible allocation criteria include the revenue potential, technical fit, level of effort, skills, experience, benefits, features, and usability of each sales engineering tool and software. Additionally, you should consider the profitability, strategic importance, compatibility, differentiation, risk, urgency, and availability of each sales engineer. By defining these criteria, you can create a consistent and transparent framework for making data-driven and customer-centric decisions.

3 Optimize your allocation process

The third step is to optimize your allocation process and ensure that it is agile, scalable, and collaborative. Your allocation process should allow you to plan and forecast sales engineering resource and expense needs based on your sales pipeline and budget. Additionally, it should enable you to assign and distribute resources and expenses according to your criteria and goals. Furthermore, it should monitor and track utilization and performance, as well as evaluate and adjust allocation based on feedback and results. Optimizing your allocation process can help you improve operational efficiency, flexibility, and alignment.

4 Leverage your allocation tools

The fourth step is to leverage your allocation tools and software to automate, streamline, and enhance your allocation process. These tools can integrate with your CRM, ERP, and other systems to provide real-time and accurate data and insights. Additionally, they can apply algorithms, rules, and logic to optimize your allocation decisions and scenarios. Furthermore, they can generate reports, dashboards, and alerts to facilitate your allocation planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Moreover, they can enable collaboration, communication, and coordination among your sales engineering team and stakeholders. Ultimately, by leveraging your allocation tools you can reduce manual work, errors, and delays while increasing visibility, control, and accountability.

5 Train and empower your sales engineers

The fifth step is to train and empower your sales engineers to make the most of your sales engineering resources and expenses. Your sales engineers should be able to understand and apply your allocation criteria and goals, use your allocation tools and software effectively and efficiently, communicate and negotiate your allocation decisions and expectations with customers and prospects, deliver high-quality value-added services and solutions, and learn and improve from feedback and results. Through training and empowerment, you can boost their competence, confidence, and creativity while fostering a culture of excellence and innovation.

6 Review and improve your allocation strategy

The final step is to review and improve your allocation strategy to ensure it is aligned with your changing needs, goals, and environment. Your strategy should be measurable, with clear and relevant metrics and indicators to measure outcomes and impacts. Additionally, you should have reliable and valid methods and tools to analyze data and insights. Furthermore, your strategy should be actionable, providing practical and feasible recommendations and actions to improve decisions and scenarios. Finally, you should have flexible mechanisms to adapt your strategy to new opportunities and challenges. By reviewing and improving your allocation strategy, you can achieve continuous improvement, learning, and growth.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?