How do you ‘measure’ your Solution Engineers?

I get asked this question a lot.

The question usually comes with a follow up asking about revenue or profit numbers, the amount of projects or how many customers any given SE might interact with.

However, the short answer, from my perspective, is there isn’t any one measure by which the value or effectiveness of an SE can be measured. However, I would argue that the least effective measures on their own are purely financial.

The longer answer is that I use ‘contribution’ as my measure for SEs – and contribution is broken down into the following four categories:

1)????? Enabling the business – What product / feature gaps have they identified and flagged? What enablement for AEs have we identified and delivered? Which processes for workflow have we improved or streamlined? What partner enablement have we identified and delivered?

2)????? Enabling Customers – What customer challenges have we identified that we can demonstrate thought leadership on? What public speaking opportunities have we taken part in? How many conferences have we represented at and how many customers have we met? How many blog posts, industry articles, and podcasts have we contributed to?

3)????? Enabling Solution Engineering – Which knowledge gaps in the team have we identified and what enablement have we done to upskill? How much mentoring have we done? What contributions have been made to the shared knowledgebase or wiki? How many demo opportunities have been identified and created?

4)????? Financials – What is the financial impact they’ve had on the accounts they’ve worked on? (increase in product lines sold/ percentage of growth in revenue). ?

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Lenses

Before I dive through those four areas, it’s important that their viewed through two lenses – how SEs act as force multipliers, and how SEs are also a constrained resource.

What is a force multiplier? – a force multiplier is a factor or combination of factors that give something the ability to accomplish greater feats than without it.

SEs are force multipliers – in any technology sales organisation the SEs help provide the technical credibility that gives customers confidence the business can deliver a complex and critical project. In addition, SEs help enable many multiple AEs to be more productive (better enablement to qualify in/out, better understanding of the solutions and their capabilities/limitations etc). SEs self-reinforce – they constantly upskill and teach each other ensuring that the collective knowledge whole across the team is much greater than the sum of the parts and SEs help build better products/solutions – they’re the key technical conduit between the customer consuming and what the business is producing.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by half, but I want my SEs to be doing all the above in spades, every day.

SEs are also a constrained resource – I’ve yet to work in a business that didn’t want more SEs than they had but obviously resources are expensive and limited. How therefore do we absolutely streamline prioritize workflow into that constrained resource to ensure it’s working on the projects with the best chance of success and with the most value?

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Why these four?

Enabling the business is all about streamlining the workflow into the SEs by enabling others – ‘teach a man to fish’ etc. (AEs), adding value to products (more attractive proposition/better technology to solve problems with), adding value to partners to allow them to better qualify/better position your technology, and constantly trying to remove slow and inefficient workflow processes from the first customer interaction to successfully delivered solution.

Enabling customers is all about building the credibility that not only do we know what we’re talking about, but that the technology we have can absolutely help solve real world business problems. Having SEs talk at events, meet customers, publish their thoughts and working also really helps to raise the organisation’s credibility in the market as a whole, and establish the SE as a thought leader in a given segment/technology area.

Enabling Solution Engineering – this is all about helping make the team work as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. No SE can know everything, all complex solutions are, in my experience, always a team game. By giving the SEs time and making it an objective to share knowledge and content with each other, we end up with a more highly performing team that has greater potential than the sum of the parts.

Lastly, if we do all the above right we’ve got the time, credibility, and expertise to present the best possible solution to the client and give us the best chance of winning the business and growing business. That’s the financials bit. Alone however, you’re missing most of the game if you’re just focusing on profit.

It doesn’t have to be hard to measure the impact of some of these things either – all of these areas can be given SMART objectives, and you can tailor these depending on the experience and tenure of your SEs. As a less senior SE, I want to see more time learning from colleagues, more time honing demo skills or spending time in front of customers. As a more senior SE, I want to see more of them on a stage presenting, mentoring newer team members, or on a podcast giving thought leadership on their given area of expertise.

Conclusion

SEs have the somewhat unique position of being a fantastic marketing asset, your best closers, your most credible content creators, and best business enablers. They do however come with their own set of needs; SEs are not AEs, different things motivate and drive them. The ‘measures’ I’ve set out here I’ve been pondering about for years in order to foster the right kind of thinking in my SEs and give them the best possible focus to grow themselves and in turn help grow the business.

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That’s my 2c, how do you measure your SEs?