If you have a direct sales force and a complex product, sales engineers are a critical role for most companies. Complex products require a strong technical presence on the sales team. Asking a sales person to sell and negotiate plus be a strong technician is usually asking too much. Although Pragmatic Marketing focuses on product management, the staffing of the sales engineer role affect product management as we’ll see in a moment.

Our annual survey on product management includes numbers and ratios for key roles in the organization including product management development, marketing, and sales roles. In 2008, we found 2.9 sales people per SE, (improved from 4:1 in 2007). In my interviews and discussions with vendors of complex products, I find some companies with SEs dedicated to each sales person and occasionally more sales engineers than sales people.

These numbers represent the common practice, not best practices.

What I’ve learned from my interviews is that the best practice is 2 sales people per SE. Companies with this 2:1 ratio do not rely on other departments to move each sale forward. For those companies with
4 sales people per SE, we find the product management staff filling in for the “missing” SE.

To have a ratio of less than 2:1 may be necessary if the product is extremely complex or if each sale requires a lot of hand-holding. I suggest that you look at the demands on sales engineering for a typical sale from demo to implementation assistance to determine the right ratio for you.

For more on the role of sales engineer, read "The Role of Sales Engineer in Technical Sales".

Answered by Steve Johnson