Scaling Sales Engineering Org [0 - 1]

One of the most painful yet critical processes in building enterprises is scaling specific organisations/functions. Building and scaling a function that enables revenue will have a multiplier effect on how fast and well your organisation can grow.

Scaling the Sales Engineering (SE) organisation was one of the critical mandates I had signed up for when I started at Skit a year back. Our focus while scaling this function was not only to build a team that can enable the sales team from a technical solution standpoint but also a team that can help articulate our value proposition to our clients. I did some research but was unable to get any playbook that could help me in this process.?

This blog is an attempt to put my thoughts and the learning I had in this journey where we scaled the team to its current state in about 6 months.??

Before we get into the details of this, you should also understand the value the Sales Engineering team can bring to a startup

What can Sales Engineering do in a startup at a growth stage?

I have seen that in many early-stage startups, the role of a sales engineer/pre-sales consultant is fulfilled (sometimes temporarily) by either sales/delivery/product/tech teams or by a combination of these teams. While this may help close deals faster (which is critical for an early-stage startup), this is not scalable in the long term, especially when the startups want to press the pedal and grow faster.

As the startup grows and the product matures, there is also significant pressure to contract the committed quotas of the sales teams. The sales teams get under significant pressure to close deals and this leads to many deals getting over-committed / under-committed (in terms of value / RoI) due to a lack of due diligence or a discovery process typically done by Sales Engineering (SE) teams.?

This is where I feel that the Sales Engineering function can play a crucial role:

• bringing in a process/structure to creating value-driven solutions?
• articulating the right value proposition
• playing a sort of devil’s advocate to bring in a balance to the deals being committed in the pipeline?
• helping product teams understand what type of features can be prioritized and where the clients will get better value.

I am sure many of you folks at any early-stage / growth startup would have seen this or experienced some of these issues

Having understood the criticality of a Sales Engineering (SE) function in a startup, let’s now explore how can this function be built and scaled up.?

Challenges when setting up the SE function

• Typically by the time, a formal SE team is created the sales organization is already well established and there are deals either in the pipeline or already in delivery.
• The solution/value committed to the clients by the AE may have been done without much due diligence or a formal discovery session.
• When the SE team is onboarded they are expected to take over some of these deals and help the AE close these deals faster.

This becomes a huge challenge, hence hiring the right people, training them and having the right processes in place becomes very critical.

Key building blocks for Scaling the SE function

Based on my experience of scaling the SE function, let me put down some of the critical elements for it as per the classical PPT [People, Process, Tools] framework

People

One of the most important pillars without which the SE function will not exist is People. Some of the considerations we had while we looked at the People aspect were:

Hiring the right talent with the right skills including a mix of tech and business capabilities.

We looked at the product that we were building, this gave us an insight into what kind of tech capabilities was required by our SEs i.e., the "Hard" skills. In addition to this, since we were already involved in closing some of the deals, we knew exactly the type of interactions we will have and the type of stakeholders we will be talking to. This allowed us to arrive at the number of people required and the "Soft" skills as well. This helped us to clearly craft out the JD, hard & soft skills and the type of enterprises (tech, consulting etc.) from which we needed to hire. Once we arrived at this, we reached out to our hiring teams with the requirement in terms of skills, # of people and type of enterprises from which we could hire the talent.

Plan the entire hiring calendar including the size and the scaling timelines

We then worked very closely with our hiring team and created a clear hiring calendar in terms of the # of folks to hire by which month. This helped us to also work on many things in parallel like the SE process handbook, onboarding plan etc. which could help us scale the SE function. We had a weekly cadence with the hiring team and their leadership to ensure that we would be meeting the scaling timelines which were planned

Work with the L&D team, set up a clear learning calendar and onboarding process

While the hiring was going as per the plan, we worked with our L&D team to build an onboarding process, including the topics to be covered. We broke it down to the various tech skills that were required including the complexity levels like 101s and 201s. This plan was span over a period of a few weeks which the new person will get introduced to the team, go through the training process, and interact with the seniors to get their questions answered.

They will also be assigned a buddy, who will also take them along on the client calls so that the new hire can get a feel of how the interactions typically happen and what is expected of them

This planning really helped us to standardise and smoothen the hiring and onboarding process.

Process

Having a clear set of processes/guidelines helps teams to know what and how are they supposed to accomplish their tasks. But in early startups, most of the time since velocity is key either there is no process or the process takes a back seat. From a SE's standpoint, it is very critical, as they are expected to work across teams and in a way responsible for the growth of the organisation.

If it ain't broken don't fix it

While the recruitment plans are being laid out, it is essential as a SE leader that you dip your toes and get a full measure of the existing process followed in the Sales Organisation. This will give you a better understanding if there are any leakages in the process and see if the existing process can be re-utilised or if it needs to be re-done completely.

This SE process includes two parts

Part 1: Sales Process

Since the Sales Engineering process will be part of the overall Sales Process, it needs to be called out very clearly. To do that the following aspects need to be kept in mind:

• Work & collaborate with all your primary stakeholders like Sales, Delivery and product to define this process including the handing over across various teams, the expectations etc. need to clearly laid out.
• Define the part from which stage of the sales process the SE takes over as well as the activities done by them in these stages
• Have a very clear defined RACI matrix in these stages for other involved teams and the expectations from them
• Once created, all of this needs to be documented and then communicated as part of the AE & SE onboarding plan

Once this is laid out, try these in upcoming sales cycles and test them out for their robustness and completeness

Part 2: Internal Process

While the sales process takes care of the outcomes and expectations of the SE from a revenue organisation standpoint, I believe an internal process has been laid out very clearly. These include:

• Tracking & review of deals internally to ensure adherence to the overall process
• Establish the basic OKRs and measurement criteria along with performance parameters
• One-on-ones with the team to assess and provide feedback on their tasks as well as help them with their career progression & aspirations
• Storing all important and reusable content as well as the frequency of revising them often

While process improvement is a continuous process having the above bare minimum is critical while you set up the team

Tools

Tools are quintessential to improving productivity and also to ensure there is consistency in the outcomes. While there are a few tools that are available in the market that can help the SE teams, I believe unless your inner processes are reasonably mature bringing a tool may sometimes not add value.

To start with you will have to work with the Sales Ops and Sales leadership to do the necessary changes to the CRM in line with the new process. Once this is done, the necessary training modules for the team need to be created and put in as part of the onboarding plan.

In conclusion

We followed the above steps to help scale our SE function, which has helped us to build a very strong team of professionals who were able to be on the field within a few weeks of joining us. This also us to scale the team in line with our AEs over a period of time and were able to help shorten the sales cycle internally

Hope you found the above very useful and do let me know if I missed out on any critical elements as well