Sales engineers spend about forty percent of their time on deals that genuinely close, and not one engineer measured has reported being above eighty percent.
Taking the midpoint of each band, the field average is just under forty percent. Fifty seven percent of engineers put themselves at forty percent or below. One in ten puts themselves at twenty percent or less.
The ceiling is the part leaders tend to sit with longest. Nobody measured has reported spending more than eighty percent of their time on deals that genuinely close. Not one person. Whatever the best case looks like in this profession, nobody has reached it yet.
A sixty percent misallocation across a team of forty engineers is roughly twenty four engineers' worth of effort going to deals that will not close. Priced at a loaded cost per engineer, that is a number a revenue leader can put in a plan. It is also the number nobody has, because no system in the stack records which deals an engineer worked and which of those were real.
This is the measure that turns a qualification problem into a capacity problem, and capacity is the version that gets funded.
The strongest organisation measured is more than double the weakest. All of them are selling technical products to enterprise buyers with broadly similar sales cycles.
Getting into deals early does not protect the week on its own. Nothing in the field so far shows allocation improving simply because access improved.
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.