Fifty nine percent of sales engineers enter a deal only after discovery is already finished, and under two percent say their team runs deals the same way.
Most of what the industry believes about sales engineering comes from opinion pieces and vendor surveys. The Deal Flow Benchmark measures behaviour instead. The same six questions, the same wording every time, put to a whole team inside a meeting they already have. Nobody signs in. Nobody sees who answered what, including the leader in the room and including me.
Roughly twenty organisations a quarter. Each team gets a written read on its own numbers and where those numbers sit against everyone measured so far. It is free, it stays free, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
When do you usually first hear about a deal you will work?
Of your last two weeks, roughly what share of your time went to deals that will genuinely close?
When you are fairly sure a deal is not real, what actually happens?
When you believe a deal is not real, who do you talk to first?
What is missing for you to be most effective?
Open text, one or two words, shown live as a word cloud. No options offered.
Do you and your peers run deals the same way?
Fifty nine percent of sales engineers enter a deal after discovery is already finished. They inherit a problem statement somebody else wrote, for a purpose that was not theirs. Read the full finding.
About forty percent of engineering time goes to deals that genuinely close. Not one engineer measured has reported being above eighty percent. Read the full finding.
Fewer than five percent keep working a deal they do not believe in and say nothing. They speak. It changes nothing sixty one percent of the time. Read the full finding.
Under two percent say their team has a shared method. Everyone else describes personal variation or does not know how colleagues work at all. Read the full finding.
Six questions with fixed wording and fixed answer options, unchanged between organisations so the comparison holds. Delivered live inside the team's own meeting, answered anonymously on a phone, typically in under fifteen minutes. Results are written up as an outside read for the team's leader and the raw counts are kept in a field ledger. The study is ongoing and the full field will be published on completion. No organisation is named publicly and no individual answer is ever attributable.
The benchmark is free and it stays free. Six questions, fifteen minutes, answered anonymously inside a meeting your team already has. You get a written read on your own numbers and where they sit against the field. There is nothing to install and nothing to buy.